I don't get the appeal of using gopher. Is it just a nostalgic way of looking at the early days of the web or do you really think gopher was better than web? Might wanna read this if it's the latter: https://ils.unc.edu/callee/gopherpaper.htm
Once you head these services (and more) under an atom n270 netbook or a lesser machine, you'll understand why you would love Gopher, Usenet, IRC (and bridges like Bitlbee) and Email.
Tons of JS made lots of serviceable machines obsolete. Even an i3 -and i5- is not enough today to browse the web with 2GB of RAM without a heavy ad blocker like UBlock.
Old machines should not be used for anything serious anyway. It will lack firmware and OS updates, modern exploit mitigations and probably has a high power usage. The main reason gopher died was due to lack of openness in the protocol development. They corrected it in the early 2000's but it was too late by then
Good luck with modern intel exploits there, and I'm running OpenBSD 7.6 on an Atom n270 nebook like a champion. Power? Maybe a bit high for a machine from late 2000's, but is not so bad compared to a current powerhouse as a desktop.
I can play 720p video with no JS needed at all (mpv+yt-dlp), chat with Jabber/IRC/telegram, some of them over Bitlbee. I have locally curated playlists and music from both Jamendo and Internet Archive.
I can program in AWK, C and Go. I can plot stuff faster with AWK+GNUplot than most people battling with CUDA, Python and months of GPU usage drawing more power
for a mundane task than a quality beef restaurant in a month.
I have several services routed from the web to Gopher, even Internet Archive.
I can read the news using a laugable bandwidth and CPU on the remote servers.
The average desktop today uses far more power with local and remote services in a month than my machine and the Gopher servers over a year.
