>I yearn for a future where knowledge is distributed in a practical, organizied way such as via Gopher or similar, along with tapping the full potential of email as a one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one communications medium where data is distributed and address ownership is maintained.

We already have that, it's called the World Wide Web.

You seem to be under the impression that the popularity of the web is due to centralization by and commercialization by corporate interests, but that isn't the case. It's still entirely feasible to distribute knowledge in a "practical, organized way" using HTML and HTTP, and people do use it for things besides the three social media sites people now mistakenly believe comprise the entire web.

I started using the Internet at a time when HTTP traffic already exceeded Gopher+FTP traffic, but not by orders of magnitude.

I'd start nearly any session with Gopher, and it would end in either some web pages or an FTP server. Gopher was the go-to because it was organised unlike the rat's nest of links you had to deal with on the web.

This wasn't really fixed until the advent of big centralised search engines (and even then, the early ones weren't worth damn).