Gemini basically grew out of pubnixes.
Pubnixes are "public access UNIX" systems, basically a shared Linux box. Some of them still survive from the 1980s and 1990s, and new ones are occasionally being founded. A well-known example is "SDF", which also concerns itself with the preservation of old computing hardware.
Consistent with its preservation of old computer systems, SDF afforded a hosting platform for gopher holes, and it became a key node in the network of interlinked gopher content. But SDF also alienated some of its user base, and some of its members left and set up their own hosting systems, either individually, or in collectivities organised around new pubnixes, and even in confederation of pubnixes.
This entailed a diaspora, propagating outwards from SDF, and I think the "cosmic voyage" stuff carries on this theme a little. In any event, the SDF diaspora brought Gopher and pubnixes with them on their journeys, and as I understand it, the initial discussions about Gemini arose among this community, once they had settled new pubnixes.
On SDF, and the future of Public Access UNIX
We could also look at this part of the smolnet, or smolnet denizens more generally, as representing some kind of "secession", "reformation", "rebellion" or exilic community.
No-one is actually nailing NNCP's 95 manual pages to the door of the church in Wittenberg. But there is a sense that for all the protestations, these new systems do constitute a case for fundamental reform of the Internet.
It might also be seen as a secession. Those who left SDF seceded, in a sense, but maybe more in the sense of the Vienna Secession: a breakaway movement.
Pubnixes tend to foster a community among their users/members. There is often a norm of leaving some or all of people's home directories world readable by default, and sharing and co-developing local software for the pubnix or a wider community. Some attract very loyal followings.
They are the "Third Places" of the Internet. Of course people are going to be protective of them. And their governance matters, and will often be contested precisely because of that protectiveness. Hirschman's Exit Voice and Loyalty spells out the options for those who want the administration of their pubnix to be different: you can leave, you can speak up, or you can shut up. Governance arrangements will determine whether Voice ("speaking up") will make a difference.
There are two points here: Gemini came from people who wanted a better pubnix, and were prepared to put themselves to the hassle of leaving their original tight-knit online community, and if that community had had better governance arrangements, the SDF diaspora might not have taken flight in the first place.
Pubnixes gather together close-knit communities of people who care about communal digital life. They have all sorts of positive spillover effects on the Internet and smolnet in particular.
It would be weird for me not to mention the SRCF. Apparently it hosts a Gemini capsule too.
The SRCF is a pubnix at Cambridge University, founded in 1999 and on the more democratic end of the governance spectrum. At the time of its creation, it stood alongside several other pubnixes in low university orbit (cus, chiark, zeus, etc). Many of those are no more, and one of them is "The Pubnix That Went To War", but that five-sided internecine conflict is a different story ...
انا على أخي أنا وأخي على ابن عمي وأنا وابن عمي على الغريب
I was surprised to find someone from the early SRCF days here on Gemini. Silas Brown had written his own terrifyingly well-informed account of the foundation. Some day I shall have to publish my own ... but for now ... Age and Treachery Will Always Triumph Over Youth and Skill.
Silas Brown's SRCF foundation article
(the quirky hotel wifi blocks gopher(!) but not Gemini; I have had to use Tor(!) to access the gopher links)
Five years a sundog - Happy birthday, circumlunar space!
Happy Birfday, Zaibatsu-kun! Or, Wages of the Smolnet