There are many amazing projects and alternative front-ends strewn about the gopherverse, some of which can completely eliminate the dependency on their plain-web versions.
There are also holes that provide tools unique to gopher.
Let’s make this thread an on the fly database of front-ends, services and useful tools.
I still don’t yet understand gopher or what the project is trying to accomplish, but I am interested. Are there any good quickstart guides that will ELI5 for me?
Gopher pre-dates the world wide web. In fact, gopher was used to distribute early web browsers like Netscape and Mosiac. Both the White House and MTV’s first presence on the internet was through their own gopher sites. Gopher was a somewhat stealth project at the University of MN, and never really got the care or support it deserved. It was really just supported by a band of crazy programmers working to keep it on the down-low at the U of MN. There’s a great article here on MinnPost about it.
Gopher is a text based way (but graphical clients exist too) of sharing information in a structured page layout. The source files, like HTML, are plain text that anyone can write. The gopher client/browser will render them into something usable. It is still used today because it is very fast, lightweight, and free of clutter.
Gemini is more of a spiritual successor to gopher that incorporates some basical colors and graphics but it still much more lightweight that a traditional web browser. It’s a nice balance between gopher and modern browsers.
If consuming text and doing retro stuff is your thing, it’s a fun time. Creating gopher spaces and gemini sites requires much less knowledge and training then HTML.