It's a subculture. I think the key is in the definition of 'everyone'; I doubt anybody imagines everybody in the world switching to Gemini from the web. So 'everyone' in this context means all the people who have collectively agreed to stick to minimal text format.

You could try the same thing with a community dedicated to minimal HTML--heck, you could say that's what HN itself is, almost--but it would have no effective border. You'd keep falling back into the bad old web. This makes the border explicit, instead.

Good point, but I doubt there will be any kind of meaningful adoption, I think the effort would be better spent modding chromium or such like to strip out crap from existing websites rather than creating a new client-server protocol.

As I understand it they are not aiming for bringing in the masses, so an additional barrier is fine, or even a feature.

That's the point. A web browser is a behemoth—the extreme opposite of minimalism and efficiency—and can only grow.

Creating an entirely parallel stack is the only way to obtain minimalism at this point.

Appealing to those liking web technologies would be counter productive, as they're part of the problem being mitigated.