We do live in that world. Encryption is not at all necessary for the majority of web sites out there. The practice you speak of is not commonplace and does not need active defending against.

ICE is tracking people on social media, and the only sign it's happening to you is when they show up to your door with guns and handcuffs. If they could track who was reading subversive content, they would. It's better we don't give away more information than necessary.

You could do signatures/MAC without encryption to guarantee that the message was not modified

Okay! Cool! Let’s just (nonsensically) develop a new protocol for this small group of nerds’ fetish for ‘retro tech’. A protocol that nobody will use.

You do realise that “is it technically possible?” Is like 1% of the question in computing, at most, yes? HTTP and HTTPS are what we’ve got.

This whole post is about Gemini the protocol, a new protocol for a small group of nerds' fetish for retro tech (it's basically modern gopher).