07.30.21
Gemini version available ♊︎Freenode Shrinks by Another Quarter and Gemini Continues to Grow (For Techrights at Least)
IRC is still around, but Freenode/IRC.com won’t be an important part of that
Gemini Turntable
Summary: Freenode continues to perish faster than we’ve imagined; it’s a good thing that we’ve had contingencies set up; regarding the monopolised and increasingly centralised Web, we’re still making baby steps towards weaning ourselves off it
THIS is a “bad news, good news” type of post.
Freenode commits to yet another self-harming move, maybe committing suicide by imposing registration on people who wish to enter Freenode (SSO/SASL). Moving people over to our self-hosted IRC network has therefore been a priority.
As someone said in our IRC channel some minutrs ago, “chat.freenode.net sum of channel populations declined from 86k to 64k after the sasl requirement.”
Compare to Libera.Chat:
$ <$z.sorted awk '{a+=$2;} END {print a;}'
173198
“No need for a Web browser (or HTML) to follow Techrights.”To quote the explation: “I just ran it on libera, libera sum of channel populations is now 173k (sum the output of /list -YES)”
The -YES is essential for bypassing warnings.
Sum of Channel Populations /list -YES -> awk add up date freenode irc.fn libera.chat 2020-03-29 311686 2021-05-19 27890 2021-05-20 279551 26736 2021-05-21 269785 36115 2021-05-21 48433 2021-05-23 247790 62421 2021-05-26 221557 25474 2021-06-01 154266 66038 2021-06-06 147001 76833 2021-06-12 128716 74654 2021-06-14 119065 77381 2021-06-15 57192 50806 80256 2021-07-15 87484 2021-07-18 86244 167157 2021-07-30 63968 63648 173198
Things aren’t even fully settled yet.
We are not in Libera.Chat because we try to self-host everything, even Git. It’s the way to go and people everywhere should advocate it. The Internet was originally created to distribute things around, not centralise everything the way Facebook, AWS, ClownFlare, GitHub etc. increasingly do.
When it comes to Gemini, which is self-hosted from home, we’ve convinced a number of people to rely less on the World Wide Web and use gemini:// when possible. Page requests in the past 30 days show growth:
Page requests (gemini://) |
Date |
| 2358 | 2021/07/01 |
| 2960 | 2021/07/02 |
| 1641 | 2021/07/03 |
| 1755 | 2021/07/04 |
| 2187 | 2021/07/05 |
| 2194 | 2021/07/06 |
| 2122 | 2021/07/07 |
| 8128 | 2021/07/08 |
| 11197 | 2021/07/09 |
| 2243 | 2021/07/10 |
| 2333 | 2021/07/11 |
| 3344 | 2021/07/12 |
| 3808 | 2021/07/13 |
| 3870 | 2021/07/14 |
| 4503 | 2021/07/15 |
| 5183 | 2021/07/16 |
| 3586 | 2021/07/17 |
| 3489 | 2021/07/18 |
| 11802 | 2021/07/19 |
| 14019 | 2021/07/20 |
| 5274 | 2021/07/21 |
| 5463 | 2021/07/22 |
| 3288 | 2021/07/23 |
| 3971 | 2021/07/24 |
| 3897 | 2021/07/25 |
| 3614 | 2021/07/26 |
| 5746 | 2021/07/27 |
| 6072 | 2021/07/28 |
| 3081 | 2021/07/29 |
| 12146 | 2021/07/30 |
Total 145,554 (the above combined) with another day to go (2021/07/31). Over time more people adopt and at least partly embrace Gemini space as an alternative to the Web (over 1,500 unique IP addresses above). It sure gives us hope. It’s a drop in the ocean compared to the Web (5 hits/second on average), but any progress counts. More importantly, the option (or alternative) does exist and it is viable. No need for a Web browser (or HTML) to follow Techrights. █
ᶃ Gemini Space
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