Network Getting Faster
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The Tux Machines site news aside (crossposted here), there's shared news for both sites. Next week and the week after that we have "Network Maintenance", according to the webhost. Downtime is possible, but maybe none will be experienced. This can impact everything (Git, IRC, Gemini, Web).
This work is peripheral to the webhost ("one of our circuit suppliers providing connectivity between our London and Dublin data centres is conducting maintenance to their service") and it is expected to have minimal impact ("as we have diverse circuits between these locations we do not expect any disruption and traffic will fail over to other routes, but those routes will be at-risk during the maintenance window"). If the site or the capsule isn't reachable, be patient. It's likely scheduled maintenance, not a DDoS attack. We very seldom suffer DDoS attacks since going 100% static. Simple sites are harder to attack.
Speaking of simple sites, LXer has had issues since moving to HTTPS. It seems like they're spending a month already trying to ameliorate things. It seems like they lose half their readers. It all started when they moved to a CA "trust" system (the Certificate Authority Let's Encrypt). In Gemini, Let's Encrypt continues to decline further each week. Right now it is said by Lupa that "2585 (89.8 %) capsules are self-signed, 25 (0.9 %) use the Certificate Authority Let's Encrypt, 270 (9.4 %) are signed by another CA (may be not a trusted one)."
Earlier today a prolific GNU/Linux site was not accessible to me due to a certificate issue. Curiously enough, Mozilla Firefox absolutely denied access to it (there was no way to suppress or bypass the warning), whereas Falkon just displayed a warning and let me "OK" my way through to it. Firefox is becoming a very user-hostile browser that reinforces monopolies, even at the expense of users' interest (it's not really protecting users' security and privacy). â–ˆ