[trashb]

Seems like the whole "no tracking, no targeted advertisements" is a great feature of Gopher & Gemini. BBSes do tracking but it seems rarely used for advertisement its more distributed anyway so if you don't like a BBS you can move to the next one connected to the same messaging networks.

Then there is also the communities, increased accessibility (it's just text) and the more structured nature of the "sites" which may be a feature.

So I would argue that there is definitely some benefits (for the user) to those alternative protocols.