This is (or was) common practice on filesharing networks - not the p2p kind, but the kinds where you use a client to log onto a network of servers, some of which will let you in for free, others which only let you in if you type in the fifth word of the twentieth line of a website you only get to after viewing a long ad for porn, some which will let you in but won't let you download any warez unless you upload some first, and yet others which only let members or perhaps even friends log
sounds to me like you're talking about a melange of IRC DCC Fserves and 0-day warez FTP sites. which, or both, did you intend?
Though I think the clients often permit chat, there's not much opportunity for chatting - so communication between users and administrative information is all given through the file system.
in the case of IRC-driven Fserves, sure, you can chat. In the case of FTP, not.
I assume gopher used to work like this before the web, though I never tried it?
As a pre-web gopher user, I never had the sense that gopher was tremendously different than the web. That might just be a symptom of the way that I used gopher, though. Gopher was (typically) pretty directory- and hierarchy-oriented. I think there are some reasonable analogies to be drawn, here, yes. Gopher, Veronica, and Archie were all good, useful tools. --elijah