alt Hacker NewsIt's an alternative to HTTP and HTML (primarily). With the protocol sitting, in terms of complexity, somewhere around the early HTTP/1 protocol and gopher, and the geminitext format being suited for a variety of displays and more text oriented rather than for interactive or multimedia use.
And its simple implementation (client and server) comes from the simple protocol that doesn't seem to need much code to implement. The content seems to be in something similar to Markdown but fewer features. So if one wanted one could achieve the same with simple HTML over HTTP. My guess this is also a community thing.