regarding low bandwidth, I think part of the problem is the mandatory encryption, both for legal reasons because encryption is dissallowed on amateur bands in many (most?) countries, and because encryption adds overhead.

Gopher predates the WWW (at least to market) but ended up losing out to it.

Gemini is a spiritual successor to Gopher born out of dissatisfaction with the state of the modern web. Everything about it is deliberately, almost aggressively minimalist, to a degree that will likely put off many. But it’s meant to be human-scale, the technical details are something a technically inclined person can wrap their head around in its entirety.

I was running a mediawiki instance for a while, and despite the very low human traffic and arguably useless nature of the site to anyone but me and a few online friends I was getting hammered by Amazon. I don’t think it got to the point of a denial of service but the traffic was excessive.

This was a problem before AI but has only gotten worse now that AI companies are scraping sites for training data.

CAPTCHAs and the like are often inaccessible to screen reader users, so the proliferation of CAPTCHAs has affected me greatly.

It is what it is I suppose.

Honestly if there’s one service you should be able to self host effortlessly it’s email. Email is basically your identity on the internet, but it’s so, so hard. Yes yes you can spin up an SMTP server pretty simply, but good luck getting anything past your ISP and into literally anyone else’s inbox.

I’m happy with Proton for the sole reason they aren’t Google. I don’t trust them completely, but I trust them more than I trust Google, and that’s all that matters. This doesn’t answer your question, but I thought I’d throw my opinion out there.

It’s pretty seamless, honestly. You make an account and enter any details for the various networks (Echolink/D-star stuff etc)