The people who designed Gemini (and those who designed Gopher, and who did IRC, and...) have already gone to vast lengths explaining why it has to be redesigned from scratch, including new language and protocol. tl;dr: if you keep using current HTML, you have no way of preventing people from using eg.: or , or anything beyond such as ads and malware. No amount of "pinky fingy we promise" can allow you to assure to your clients that the sites you link to are safe, which kills the idea of a webring.

I'm all for the return of webrings, but if what you want to offer is something that is 1.- safe and 2.- as protected as possible from the evil incentives that drive corps, then at the current development stage it just can't be HTML.