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I blurted out, a few days ago, "what about plain HTML on port 80?" instead of 443 and security etc.

WHAT I MEANT WAS, what if we were to stick to 80, for social, not technical reasons?

Comparing 80 and 443, utterly ignoring for a moment how and why they are different --

Port 443 is fraught with security problems, most of the internet seems to be (...) 443, its where big assholes like amazon reside, logins and encryption, complexity and overhead.

Port 80 is... boring as shit. Most of the vintage computing resources are located on it. They're super low overhead, text, images, files just available for use. They (are, can be) easily indexed. Read by anyone.

No one will do ecommerce on port 80. This is a good thing, but also a different discussion.

Gopher... the presentation is simplistic, but with a bit of artistry that arises natually when you work in it. That there's no tools could be just temporary.

But other than contrariness, its mostly security through obscurity. (Lots of obscurity.) But it does seem very unlikely that the creeps will start crawling port 70 any time soon, so that obscurity may be significant.

I'm not convinced that port 443 provides usable protection from personal tracking and characterization. Maybe it did once; I don't think it does not now. The Fediverse protocols have come to a similar conclusion.

I wish I could serve the same content on 80 and 70.

I wish I could translate gopher to html.

I wish I could have one "secure" page for ecommerce, or maybe not, and just farm that out at the tiny scale.