"With the right proxy or browser one could emulate Gemini experience with the regular www, similar to using the old Opera Mini or force Reader View, block all images, javascript and ads on all sites. Wouldn't that be 'better'?"

One of the neat things about Gemini is how quickly and easily people started writing clients for it. Perhaps this illustrates how we can influence client design, e.g., limit complexity (and perhaps decrease insecurity), through protocol design.

I use a text-only browser to read HTML. I often make HTTP requests from the commmand-line using a variety of different TCP clients in order to utilise a feature of HTTP/1.1 called pipelining. I have been using the web this way for decades.
Needless to say, "new" protocols like HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 come across as being 100% commercial in their vision of what the web is; they are designed to acommodate a web full of advertising. Their sponsors justify them based on problems that one might encounter when trying to use the web for commerce. However, they fail to account for non-commercial uses. For example, there's no "HOL blocking" problem when all the resoources are coming from the same server and the site operator is not trying to "build complex, interactive [graphical] web pages." There is an underlying bias with these protocols for enabling a commercial, advertising-filled web. As one would expect considering who is paying the salaries of their implementors.

Then we have something like QUIC whose sponsors similarly make justifcation arguments that assume every site's goals are "complex [graphical] web pages", likely to be supported through advertising. I have read articles arguing in favour of QUIC that suggest TCP never achieves its true potential for speed because we are only ever making large numbers of small TCP "connections". That usage pattern is indeed something we see with "complex, interactive [graphical] webpages".FN1 The kind that serve advertising. However, with HTTP/1.1 pipelining, as I use it, I have different goals. I make a single, longer-lived TCP connection and make 10s to 100s of HTTP requests to the same server. I am not using the web as an interactive, graphical interface. I am doing [text] records retrieval. I am using the web as an information source. Again, what I am seeing with these "next gen" protocols are an underlying bias and assumptions in favour of a commercial web filled with ads.

As such, I agree the "limitations" of Gemini which make it cool to some of us, i.e., it is inherently not advertising-friendly, could be achieved using HTTP either by

1. users choice of client, i.e., stop using graphical browsers that run Javascript, written by companies that rely on "surveillance capitalism" or

2. a new standard that websites could adopt whereby they (also) served content in non-advertising-friendly way.

#2 is outside the control of the user. It is squarely under the control of website operators and those with the power ($$) to influence website operators. Indeed, it can also be brought about through use of a proxy. I have also become a die-hard localhost-bound proxy user. It is seemingly limitless what a one can do with a good proxy, however it can quickly lead to some rather complex configurations and much of the results can alternatively be achieved by #1, simply using the "right" client. I use both #1 and #2 together.

1. Not sure that Gemini supports pipelining. If not, how does it allow for efficient, bulk text retrieval. Does it encourage short, successive TCP connections.

The mistake that the original lobster.rs "Gemini is useless" commenter made is that he assumed Gemini is meant to "replace" the web. Yet no one, certainly not the creator of the protocol, ever claimed anything of the sort. In fact, Gemini documentation explicitly disclaims this as a goal. The commenter has constructed a strawman. He also assumed the only worthwhile use for an internet is a web, and the only worthwhile use for a web is to engage in commerce. To me, that looks like myopia. The internet has historically been multi-use, as the parent comment describes. The "www" is but one use. Alas, it has been co-opted by those seeking to use it as an advertising vector.