Gemini Protocol Isn't Even Remotely "Dead"
NINE days ago Gemini Protocol turned 5. Some people spread "rumours" (or belittling statements) to the effect of Gemini "dying". As Solderpunk put it the other day: "Traditionally I have included an assessment of the growth of Geminispace over the past year with these anniversary announcements. I'll do so again here, but I think I'll make it the last time. Not because the news is bad, it's not (it's interesting), but because constant growth is not and never was what Gemini was about. It made some sense in earlier years when we were growing unexpectedly quickly and there was a sense of excitement and potential and unpredictability in the air, but things are a bit more settled now. The current situation is less exciting, perhaps (I sure don't mind!), but it's also, I think, a lot more certain. Geminispace feels solidly established now. Whether it grows or contracts or remains the same size from any given year to any other, I think it is clearly here to stay for the long haul, just like Gopher is. This is a fantastic achievement.
"Lupa knows of 505,000 (half a million!) working Gemini URLs at present, up from about 425,000 this time last year, an increase of almost 20%. They are spread across roughly 2,750 capsules, up from about 2,500 last year, a 10% increase. Those capsules live at 1,800 domains, up from 1,700 last year (about a 6% increase), and those domains resolve to about 1,200 IP addresses, which is actually just the same as last year."
Lupa limits itself to only some capsules and has an upper bound of 10,000 pages for each. Techrights and Tux Machines combined have close to 100,000 pages in Gemini, but Lupa does not exhaustively traverse/index these. It only counts 20,000 in total (for both).
In terms of human visitors, over the past 4 days the Techrights Gemini capsule served 8818 (since midnight today), 9385, 5418, and 7754 requests. The last one means 3 days ago.
Since we've just mentioned Web traffic too, over the Web it is 213908 (since midnight today), 314620, 358234, and 347954, respectively. That's just for Techrights; the numbers for Tux Machines are similar and a lot higher if one also counts redirections. It should be noted that we block some rogue bots, like all that LLM nonsense, so we avoid some unwanted traffic already. Sadly, a lot of what's left of the Web is bots.
Anyway, if Techrights can serve around 10,000 requests each day in Gemini, how can one argue that Gemini Protocol is "dying"? It became prevalent in 2020 or in 2021. Many still use it. There is just less "hype" around it because at age 5 there is no "novelty" factor (old news)... █