The different experience is largely thanks to different content, not different protocol. The protocol just serves a gatekeeping role to keep the community small enough.

That's true to some extent, but it's also true that the side-effect of the protocol is that it results in a very different community.

It's a bit like saying that the camping experience has nothing to do with not having access to electricity. Well, true but also not true.

I think that the specifics of the protocol don't actually matter all that much. What matters is that it's sufficiently unappealing to filter out most potential users; you genuinely have to feel strongly about the state of the web etc to spend a lot of time on Gemini.

In that sense, I suspect that OP is right and they could have achieved the same on top of, say, HTML 2 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1866).

> download Lagrange, go to gemini://bleyble.com/cgi-bin/random, and see for yourself.

Well, I did, and I see "Expired Certificate - ... TLS certificate has expired" :(

For others: link for desktop downloads of Lagrange - https://git.skyjake.fi/gemini/lagrange/releases

Yes that's a site that I like because of the random site function, not geminispace as a whole. But just click past that.

That was a terrible experience. For a start that site has an expired certificate, as do many of the pages it suggested, and of the pages that worked it was mostly people that dipped a toe in a few years ago and never came back or other broken function.

You're welcome, I guess? xD