Because advertising broke http.

You need more power in your computer to read a recipe for Yorkshire Puddings than you do to run a spaceship to Mars.

Taking out a lot of tracking and malware, just serving content, goes back to the 90's Interwebs.

Some of us would very much appreciate that.

I would really appreciate that, but I wonder if the right incentives are there to support its broad adoption.

Also wonder if the easiest way to fix online advertising is indeed to replace HTTP altogether.

I suppose it doesn't, but some people want it to exist, and so it does.

Thanks. I was really asking an honest question, so appreciate you replying.

I do think ideas need a compelling reason to exist in order to be successful, but then again the people behind Gemini may not have my definition of "success" as one of their stated goals.

It's perfectly valid to just want to serve a limited niche, rather than take over the whole world.

OpenBSD might be another example of such a project.

It doesn't. It literally provides no value over Gopher.

And it is broken by design; By not providing a length field in the response, it does force complexity into clients.

Of course, for political reasons[0], protocol can't be extended (refer to 2.12), and while it's still new and could be made sane, it won't; The authors do not want outside input.

[0]: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html