Having a new protocol has value for the same reason HAM does. You hope that the character of the content itself will be interesting enough to be it's own subculture.

Unfortunately it looks somewhat nontrivial to use and unnecessarily different from everything else without offering any true new features. All it has is the content and culture.

It's also yet another privacy at all costs project. Which is fine, but I feel like that's all anyone does anymore and they've forgotten all other innovations.

Still, the long form Web1 content and old forums were wonderful. Is there anything I should be looking at? What's the coolest Gemini content? How do gemini users like to communicate?

I'd start by checking out Antenna:

https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/warmedal.se/~antenna/

It's an aggregator of sorts, but with a bit of a twist.

Clients, for the terminal I recommend Amfora

https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/amfora

and Lagrange is a great GUI client

https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange

Communication, there's an informal way of addressing other gemlogs using 'RE:

'. It's fraught with issues, as I have discussed. There's IRC (#gemini on tilde.chat) and Usenet (comp.infosystems.gemini) now that the mailing list (itself a potent source of drama) has gone to the great bitbucket in the sky.

https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gerikson.com/gemlog/gemini-sux...