As someone who doesn’t fit into that pigeon hole, and whose friends mostly don’t either, it’s so disheartening to read essentialist assumptions like these. We liked the Internet better back then too!
You’re taking something that’s objectively good, and saying it’s associated with white people, and implying that’s bad. So not only do we collectively lose the objectively good thing (because it’s now guilty by association of racism - the greatest social crime of our day), but you’re also erasing non-white contributions to that good thing. It’s an own goal all round.
Moreover I don't see what's "objectively good" here, is it the gatekeeping of Gemini or is it the fact that Gemini is mostly just people writing about Gemini and digital minimalism?
If anything, the objective good is that rather than a toy for people mostly at universities, we now have an internet that's a communications medium for most of the people on the planet.
But they sure try. Latest iteration of coercion is called Google AMP.
Images, videos and other embeds are fine, because they're clear siloes; it's easy to make sure the website degrades gracefully.
JS is not, and fonts are not. These do not degrade gracefully. Neither do complex styles in CSS. Canvas does not degrade either.
Gemini is a bit too simple to be really useful. What is needed is something closer to old HTML 2 before all the browser warfare, with a few small extras tossed in from later versions. Maybe with bit more of semantic format than representational.
I changed my default search engine from GSearch to DDG a couple years ago because of AMP, but it's now thankfully dead in the water, e.g.
https://searchengineland.com/google-news-app-will-display-no...
https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/366242/amp-de...
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-remove-amp-no-search-ran...
I think of it as more of a "childhood memories" type thing rather than a bias thing - just like for a child everything they see is novel and new and interesting to them because they've not encountered it before. The internet was the same for a lot of us in the early days because it was novel and new and interesting because we'd never seen or used anything like it before.
Now people take it for granted and we're totally 100% used to it (and it has been commercialised sure), so it is not novel or new or exciting for many of us any more, and we wistfully look back on "the good old days" like we might do the same when we spent hours playing with lego or on an old 8-bit micro etc as a kid.
You can keep the whole spec in your head. You can develop both clients and servers from scratch just by leveraging some network and TLS libraries. It is friendly to retrocomputers that are able to do TLS but not beefy enough to run the Web.
If I am visiting a site I've never visited before, I have no guarantee what it will do or try to do until I load it/use it. Yes there are ways to control what sites do but the ways to block or manage them always seem to be changing and require keeping up on plugins, whitelists, extensions, which browser is better this week, which NewFeatureKit or TurningWebBrowserInToOSKit needs to be disabled or settings adjusted this time, etc. It's tiring.
We can have an inclusive Internet without this bullshit.
With Gemini, there's pretty much never going to be ads or trackers, because it's as physically impossible as it can be from a protocol standpoint. I can also tell people "install this Gemini browser and you're good" instead of having to explain how modern Internet properties seek to pervasively surveil everything and what needs to be done to prevent it.
We can but it won't be Gemini. Gemini has fought _tooth and nail_ against accessibility and accessibility metadata. And Geminauts still mostly produce GMI files even though Gemini says nothing about distributing only GMI files. The early Gemini days had optimism about using screen readers to view pages, but that went nowhere. The mailing list has consistently chosen a desire for ascetic, technical minimalism over accessibility. If those are the preferences, then it sounds a lot less like "inclusive Internet without this bullshit" and more like "our cool club where only the plain text kids hang out".
So educate me: since Gemini has limited formatting and is text-only, why can't a screen reader just read you the text? I'm admittedly ignorant here because I don't have vision-related needs, but to me the fact that you can depend on a .GMI document to be text only would make it seem like screen or text reader software could easily handle it.
In practice there's a lot of stuff that isn't just plain text. Things like embedded Figlet images for one. And languages for the other; UTF-8 makes it trivial to switch languages, but how do you get the screen reader to change which language it's reading? That's usually the problem. Plain-text fans, like CLI fans, often claim it's easy to wrap things or display things in other formats, but in practice, only other techie workflows actually become well supported. That's also why most Geminauts are techies.
(Really, they're nostalgic for an era when almost everybody else they ran into on the internet shared the background of being a white, male American geek, very few people were online, and nobody cared about anything said online. Not anything technical.)
You don't want JavaScript, videos, images, styles, or fonts? Don't use them. Nobody is going to come and force your site to have them. On the other hand, your site will load so fast that it won't feel remotely retro. ;)
You can use a static builder (or slap one together that fits your needs) if you don't like hand-coding HTML. Though, really, basic HTML is dead simple for pages of text. If you want to go full 1994, set your robots.txt to block all search engines. Make it so people can only find your site by following links from the sites of the like-minded. Don't link out to anything that isn't a similar site. Boom, you've done everything Gemini does with off-the-shelf software, leaving you with more time to read and write.
(I've seen the counter-arguments from Gemini boosters, but none are very convincing. A Dogme 95-esque approach to the web accomplishes everything interesting about Gemini.)