I was perusing gopherspace and came across one of Matto's posts from
last year "The World Wide Web kept gopher pure" [0]. Here is a
quote:

    So, let's be grateful for the Word Wide Web. It has sucked up
    all those marvelous inventions, and by doing this, it kept
    Gopher pure.

    Because of this, we can enjoy our dull pages, filled with only
    text, and without the glamour of auto playing videos, or
    bandwidth sucking ads.

I agree, I'm quite happy with gopher's status as a boring relic of
the ancient internet. Is there room for gopher to grow? Sure, but
not at the expense of including such features. Not that anyone is
clamoring to do that nowadays, save maybe TLS. And gemini has filled
that niche anyway.

A related thought I had was that one way to keep gopher less like
the web is to avoid linking to the web, or, where you must - scrape
the web content and archive it as text on gopher (lynx -dump works
well for this). You can include the original source URL somewhere in
the text content itself. That way you only need to provide gopher
links. I've done this with my hosting of web articles on gopher
history [1]. Even using 90s-html-on-gopher for content can work well
in some cases [2].

Not as good, but still workable - you can link to web.archive.org
snapshots of the content in question. The nice thing about
archive.org links is that they work via unencrypted http, supporting
older clients.

[0]: gopher://box.matto.nl/0/the-world-wide-web-kept-gopher-pure.txt
[1]: gopher://gopher.unixlore.net/1/articles/general-gopher-history
[2]: gopher://gopher.unixlore.net/0/glog/gopher-html-90s-aesthetic.md