Why We Still Love Gemini Protocol
JUST over 4 years ago we embraced Gemini Protocol, which had begun in 2019. We estimate that we have since then served about 100 million requests over Gemini, about half of these from my own home (where the capsule was hosted on a Raspberry Pi 4; I had to rebuild it about twice due to hardware failure at the storage level). By 2023 the capsule had already outgrown (in demand) the network and hardware capacity required, so we moved to the server room. This instantaneous tackled the "bottlenecks" we experienced and pages could be served with minimal latency, almost always less than a tenth of a second from the UK or even from the EU (the hosting is in London, not many hops away from the EU).
Many of the requests come from bots, but we no longer mind because we can cope with such loads. Yesterday we served 121,113 Gemini requests, the day before that 42,360, and 2 days ago it was 144,252. Our highest ever was about half a million in one day.
Gemini Protocol may seem like something "old" (it's actually very new) and something "nobody would use", but many people use it, not just bots, and more people adopt it as the Web deteriorates, not just in terms of bloat but also in terms of quality (LLM slop contributes to that). █