Beyond using TLS for the connections, I struggle to understand what Gemini offers over Gopher. Gopher's document type is bare bones text also. Gopher is an open standard also. There's many clients and servers for many platforms, and it's easy to implement.

I've been subscribed to the Gemini mailing list for a while now, and browse the conversations on it (it's very active), and I'm still yet to be convinced it's a viable alternative to the web that will gain any traction outside of it's core hobbyist user base.