I have a certain fondness for the Gemini space ever since its initiation. I like the main idea and am continuesly glad to see it growing in size and usefulness. I imagine that this is similar to how the web looked like at some point. Although I'm not about to make a Gemini site, I sometimes end up browsing other's sites. And it's a better experience every time. New search engines and other services, new blogs, geeky, topical sites and collections. It's such a great space for consuming interesting information when you're not exclusively looking for one specific piece of information.
Recently I was reading some personal Gemini sites and regretting not having more time before initiating a long duration of sleep is inevitable, when I suddenly noticed that I wasn't connected to the WiFi I thought I was getting my internet through. I was getting my internet through an EDGE connection with one bar on my Unighertz. That is generally not enough to do anything on the web noawadays. I wouldn't even deem it enough for today's emails. Mastodon works with that kind of connection. But you have to wait a very long time for thumbnails. Twitter didn't work at that speed when it still existed. But browsing Gemini capsules it hardly makes a difference. Not different from what I expected. But having had this experience I'm even more confident now in saying that most web sites are shit. Even a page from this site with relatively few data to load besides the actual content often consists of more than 50% of things that are not the blog article (CSS, menu, markup).
I've often thought about different ways how the Web could be used in a way that provides a better experience by making sure that bloated, malicious and faux sites aren't even linked to, without impairing the usability too much. People had so many ideas. Some of them more viable than others. But neither those I've read or heard about nor those that I could come up with fundamentally solve the problem (if you want to see it as one) that the web technologies are extremely flexible and powerful to the extend that they might as well be seen as infinitely capable of any function (and resource usage) imaginable only restricted by the client and server hardware in combination with the fact (and I think it has been sufficiently proven as such by reality) that people will create web sites that make use of the possibilities simplified by the accumulation of abstraction layers built on the core web technologies. Bad web sites will be built and linked to. Avoiding them will always be a hassle and can probably only be reliable if huge cutbacks are made by excluding the majority of web sites completely. An improved web experience in the form I imagine it would likely be easiest to achieve by starting from the ground up and creating a new web, possibly by restricting to a set of older technologies. Often suggested are CSS2, (X)HTML4 and a very limited set of JS instructions, although any set of technologies in various versions, no JavaScript, a new set of HTML tags, etc. has been suggested by now. Trying to find a way to technologically realise such a new, independent web might be a moot task.
A web built exclusively on older versions of the technologies that make up the World Wide Web seems desirable. It's what I and many others are used to already. It's very easy to make sure existing web sites work as expected on that new web: If they worked in Firefox 2, they're good. But taking this idea of a new web further, one might want to modify the feature set to prevent the same development happen to parts of the new web that happened to parts of the current web. And that's exactly the path of thoughts that Solderpunk seems to have followed and that might have lead them to the feature set of Gemini. (I'm sepculating here.) I don't agree with every single design decision. But almost all have a very good reason that adresses something that went wrong with the Web.
I've com to believe that this is the way to go if you want to escape the bloated web.