Here's funny thing for you:
When gopher protocol was new, early 1990's, it was arranged as a way for individual human users to see other individual human users' home directories, utterly counter to the web today.
By mid/late 90s, the "customary" way was for a website to be arranged as a way for some sort of entity -- often a business -- to present it's made-up, non-personal self to the web.
These are two entirely different paradigms, one personal, one not.
(Of course there were, and still are, websites that say "Mary's website", but they are a minority; and you'll possibly recall that when you look at web geezers' personal sites they are often of the personal style.)
How easily we absorbed corporate thinking.
I did this too. A way to make up an entity that was fun (my old WPS.COM claimed physical presence in McMurdo Station, secret nuclear sites, etc).
I realize now (years later, I'm slow) that what bugs me, what seems lacking to me, in talking about protocols (http, gopher, gemini, ...) is that we're mssing this layet -- who is it, exactly, that is doing the communicating? Why?
WHAT IF we had a "web" that was only the equiv. of 1992 "home directories"? OK (1) that's 30 years ago's model, and (2) none but us idiot nerds have "home directories".
But the essence here was that people then were aware of themselves as a person, or many, at a machine, and I have this folder of stuff. And now you can see it (finger, gopher). And I can see yours! The relationship is there, vastly simpler, because, again we didn't know any better.
I'm certainly not suggesting a return to naivete (aka innocence) or barbaric tools. But a rethink of what personal means when there's a billion fucking users.
Do I really care if "anyone" to be able to see my stuff, even?
#retrocomputing #permacomputing
