@thor
i don't really like gemini, it's a solution waiting for a problem. the only thing you can do with it is blogging. gopher on the other hand is just different enough to be interesting (selectors vs. links etc.). i kind of like gopher but don't have a gopher hole myself.

what i _can_ see are the problems modern web has. i don't like it either. some ideas are pretty good (CSS is a good idea, not particularly well implemented, but it's still sane), some are outright idiotic (all the single page app react JS DOM fuckery nobody understands).

the web is foremost a platform to distribute documents with hyperlinks. it's so deeply embedded in it's legacy that this document serving part isn't going away.

i think for applications it would be more sensible to design a good VM and minimum feature set for rendering from the ground up. the idea of portable application is decades old (p-code), only the implementations all suck. java was/is a dumpster fire of bureaucracy, inferno never took off, ... so we are stuck with the worst possible thing, the jenga game of abstractions which browsers are.

i don't really know about the the exclusionary part. running/using gemini isn't especially hard and it seems to attract the kind of people who i don't particularly like (contrary to gopher). it feels like a variant of "do this cool hacker thing with arduino and these prefab modules!!1". looks and virtue signalling over merit, which regrettably got increasingly common in hacker culture in the last decade.