Totally agree with vain here ! The text file approach is the key feature here, as it's fairly easy to enter the party, even when starting from scratch.

I setup myself a file over gopher, and I made some tools available on the community gopher hole for other people to join the party ! You can read about it on the gopher news (HTTP proxy).

My own journal is available here: gopher://g.nixers.net/0/~z3bra/twtxt.txt. I hope most people using it have clients supporting gopher ! Otherwise, that would be the occasion to "upgrade" all these clients ;)