The problem with gopher, Gemini, etc is a lack of people using the service. The point of a browser is to browse. What are you going to browse if there is nobody creating content? And vice versa, most people won’t put large amounts of time and effort into creating content nobody will see.
Gopher appears to have declined some 20% in content between 2021 and 2022.
I believe I’ve taken a peek at Gemini and there wasn’t much to do either.
The same problem exists for zeronet, i2p, and freenet, which is now apparently two or three separate projects?
Mastodon had a big jump in users when musk bought twitter, which tapered off significantly. They had another, smaller, jump with the Reddit fiasco. Which also tapered off.
But I guess that’s just me rehashing what you said about reaching critical mass.
> But I guess that’s just me rehashing what you said about reaching critical mass.
Yes. But one should remember that some services that are popular today started with a very small user base. Programming languages have to start from one user (starting from zero is orders of magnitude harder - if you are not the first regular user, your project will most likely fail).
One way to achieve that is to have a "killer feature" or maybe a unique combination of existing features. For instance, a subject related to browsers is discoverability and search. If you are going to compete with the WWW without funding or support from companies/institutions, there's little hope that someone will provide a search engine. This means that users will have to pay for that service with their time (that's how Wikipedia emerged). One could think, for instance, about a content tagging system that users could share, to solve this problem.
Gopher appears to have declined some 20% in content between 2021 and 2022.
I believe I’ve taken a peek at Gemini and there wasn’t much to do either.
The same problem exists for zeronet, i2p, and freenet, which is now apparently two or three separate projects?
Mastodon had a big jump in users when musk bought twitter, which tapered off significantly. They had another, smaller, jump with the Reddit fiasco. Which also tapered off.
But I guess that’s just me rehashing what you said about reaching critical mass.