Mostly because corpos and web dev tantrums: planned obsolescence and corpo/web dev locking via non-pertinent technical complexity and size of the web engines. This is a scam or toxic dellusions.

Those "open source" web engines have grotesque and absurd complexity and size, are written with a computer language (c++) which has a syntax complexity morbidely accute that it requires compilers (even naive ones) not better than the web engines themselves.

Hard truth: bazillions of services provided over the net can be provided as noscript/basic (x)html, aka basic html forms.

Hard truth: asking nicely usually does not fix that (I tried).

Hard truth: the real work in not the web "code", it is protecting it against hackers, like DDOS attacks.

Hard truth: Don't fool youself, hackers will be "paid" to push hard those sites on big tech network infrastructure (or are idiots). "Ppl coding computer viruses are probably those who sell anti-virus software".

Gemini and Gopher seem to be quite different from the intention of the small web. One is a retro-computing thing, the other is a mission to focus on people rather than organizations

In practice they're not so different . There are plenty of people regularly publishing stuff over gopher that has nothing to do with retro-computing. Gemini also grew out of a gopher community.

I wanted to mention offpunk but I forgot! (edit: done)

(I read your posts on your gemlog as well as the french ones on your blog, thank you very much for writing all of these posts)