Bonum Certa Men Certa

2021: The Year of Gemini on the Internet (From Around 500 Known Capsules to 2,000 or More, With Over 3 Months Left)

Along with or along the lines of "Linux on the desktop" (PC Magazine claims 2021 Is the Year of Linux on the Desktop)

Gemini Lupa
Gemini Lupa stats as OpenDocument Format (ODF)



Summary: We've decided to chart or produce a graph with some of the publicly-available numbers from Lupa, the Gemini protocol spider of Stéphane Bortzmeyer (bortzmeyer.org)

THE investment we've put into Gemini paid off; more so than IPFS for reasons that we explained yesterday.



The numbers shown in the graph (and spreadsheet) above are not complete, but they're the closest approximation we currently have because Geminispace (or Gemini space) is not centralised. The raw data comes from past stats and present stats. These do stress upfront: “There are several reasons why many URIs are not in the database: * the capsule may forbid retrieval, through robots.txt, * we do not know all the URIs and some cannot be found from the ones we know [...] 1186 (87.1 %) capsules are self-signed, 139 (10.2 %) use the Certificate Authority Let’s Encrypt, 37 (2.7 %) are signed by another CA (may be not a trusted one).”

CAs are part of the centralisation trap we've often spoken about. Web browsers actively encourage this centralisation if not monopolisation by issuing exceptionally nasty warnings to people (if not outright blocking access).

Here is what the monthly reports say or said.

Today (29th of September): "There are 1679 capsules. We successfully connected recently to 1362 of them."

Start of September: "There are 1538 capsules. We successfully connected recently to 1289 of them."

Start of August: "There are 1503 capsules. We successfully connected recently to 1210 of them."

Start of July: "There are 1342 capsules. We successfully connected recently to 1149 of them."

Start of June: "There are 1263 capsules. We successfully connected recently to 1062 of them."

Start of May: "There are 1093 capsules. We successfully connected recently to 926 of them."

Start of April: "There are 1028 capsules. We successfully connected recently to 850 of them."

Start of March: "There are 825 capsules. We successfully connected recently to 712 of them."

Start of February: "There are 606 capsules. We successfully connected recently to 519 of them."

Start of January: "There are 531 capsules. We successfully connected to 441 of them."

December 22nd: "There are 506 capsules. We successfully connected to 415 of them."

We've been feeling this phenomenal growth ourselves, as traffic doubles every 2 months or so. In the month of September: (so far)

        
  21236 requests on September 1                  
  20951 requests on September 2                  
   8955 requests on September 3                  
   8087 requests on September 4                  
   7986 requests on September 5                  
   8876 requests on September 6                  
  29780 requests on September 7                  
  41844 requests on September 8                  
   8853 requests on September 9                  
   9048 requests on September 10                  
   9206 requests on September 11
  10052 requests on September 12                  
  13739 requests on September 13                  
   9981 requests on September 14 
  12974 requests on September 15                  
  10816 requests on September 16                  
  10497 requests on September 17 
  10056 requests on September 18                  
  12172 requests on September 19                  
  11829 requests on September 20                  
   8993 requests on September 21                  
  20090 requests on September 22                  
  11978 requests on September 23                  
  10986 requests on September 24 
  10649 requests on September 25                  
  15293 requests on September 26                  
  14994 requests on September 27                  
  13672 requests on September 28   
  


That's about 13.8k page requests per day (0.16 per second) or more than double what we got last month. Most accessed URLs for the given day (or a prior day) can be seen here. Over the Web we average about 4.7 per second, i.e. 34 times higher than the above rate. But currently a lot more people use the Web than Gemini; that can change in the more distant future.

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Updated 8 hours ago
 
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what we said about it was correct
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Over at Tux Machines...
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Links for the day
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The Register MS/The Register US
On Saturday I contacted them for a comment (before issuing criticism)
Hacking revelations at Vatican Jubilee of Digital Missionaries
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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IRC Proceedings: Sunday, July 27, 2025
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The Week to Come
Planning ahead
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When They Tell You It's Free, Does That Mean No Charges (If So, Who's Paying and Why)?
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The Register in Trouble
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Something isn't right at The Register
Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC Proceedings: Saturday, July 26, 2025
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