You can run TLS 1.2 and 1.3 on plenty of 90s-era setups. A typical Gemini page is small, so you might have to blink twice while ChaCha-POLY1305 does its thing. TLS might exclude retro servers, but not clients.
If Gemini had these changes, I’d be happy:
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Use something better than TOFU-based TLS for transit encryption (Tor, Yggdrasil, DANE-based-TLS, etc.)
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If using TLS: use a small subset of TLS 1.3. Maybe just stick to ECDSA + ChaCha-POLY1305.
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Drop ASCII art: overloading programming-language indicators and ASCII-art alt-text is an accessibility hazard
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Add some sort of “download finished without aborting early” indicator (e.g. something like Content-Length)
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Add some way to reliably work with a larger page, e.g. using compression or range-requests with pagination. My full-text Atom feed is almost 1 mb uncompressed, but under 200 kb with Brotli compression. Downloading a full-text export of my Gemini capsule without a content-length header or compression sounds bad.
The main thing I like about Gemtext is links on their own lines. This gets people to use longer/descriptive link text and also makes them serve as navigational aids better than their HTML counterparts.
Honestly, I’m less interested in the technology than the community. Gemini Space is a comfy change of pace.