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.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Linus Torvalds Blasts Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) for Attempting to 'Protect' Linux
Like it 'protects' women
New Record for GNU/Linux in Australia (at Microsoft's Expense)
Windows is at an all-time low, GNU/Linux... all-time high
Fighting Over Whose Pockets Are Deeper (or Who Borrows More Money)
When processes favour those who are more wealthy (or more willing to go into infinite debt or steal money of other people) those processes match the attributes of lawfare rather than law
Starting a Book With a Flawed Premise or Weak Hypothesis
To me, Schneier is a sort of "RMS of sec"
Microsoft's Mass Layoffs (30,000+ in 2025) Not About "AI", Just Business Failure
"AI" is replacing... the old excuses for mass layoffs
EPO People Power - Part XVI - Berenguer Does Not Speak German, So What Did He Tell German Police That Busted Him?
based in Germany and does not speak the language
Challenges for EPO Insiders to Try to Tackle in 2026
Nothing will get solved as long as the circus that runs this show tries to keep the circus going
 
Gemini Links 28/12/2025: Health Ordeals and Discontinued Pedals
Links for the day
Slop About "Linux" Came Only From One Slopfarm This Weekend
Another day has passed with no LLM slop found in our RSS feeds
Links 28/12/2025: 'Digital Detox' and Slop "Backlash Grew Massively in 2025"
Links for the day
Links 28/12/2025: "Mass Quitting Apple" and "Generative AI Industry is Fraudulent, Immoral and Dangerous"
Links for the day
Links 28/12/2025: Fascination, Holidays, and Mormonism
Links for the day
Microsoft's Weapon Against the Reality of XBox (the Console) Dying Seems to be LLM Slop
XBox is dead/dying
Raffles for the Immaterial: Unauthorised Bingo for Red Hat "Vouchers"
This is IBM and some slop images
Andy Farnell on Standing Up Against Technological Oppression
some portions from it
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, December 27, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, December 27, 2025
Once Again, GAFAM Deletes All Your Data, Only Corrects This After Millions of People Lead an Uproar Online ("Richard Stallman Warned Us About This")
No lessons learned, eh?
You Know Your Critics Are Jealous and Have Inferiority Complex When...
One day we'll write about all this in great depth
"But Corruption is Everywhere"
"We'll always have Polio..."
Days Without Slop About "Linux"
It's time to move on
Links 27/12/2025: Canada Post Strike Called Off, Debate About Europeans "Working Over Christmas"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/12/2025: Household Appliances and Flight Fright
Links for the day
Links 27/12/2025: US Cracking Down on Whistleblowers, Expanding Bombardment Campaigns Worldwide
Links for the day
Resuming EPO Coverage Today, Can António Campinos 'Survive' Cocainegate?
We said we'd continue in the weekend
Links 27/12/2025: More Attacks on Media (Meduza Co-founder Sentenced to Prison in Absentia), "What Owning Music Means To Me"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/12/2025: geminiprotocol.net Downtime and Capsular Gemlog Manager
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, December 26, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, December 26, 2025
Tossing Embarrassing News Under the Christmastime Bus
This isn't just some coincidence; those are conscious choices
Victim-Blaming in Debian
Verhelst previously did blame-shifting when Debian suicide clusters happened
IBM Cuts in Japan, Red Hat is Attached to a Sinking Ship
IBM, which controls Red Hat, is a rapidly shrinking company
Manchester United Dumped Microsoft Because Qualcomm Sort of Did
The Windows PCs were an utter failure
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Supported by Unconventional Digital Bartering Communities
But no strings attached
Geminispace: 5,000 Capsules in 2026
There are 4.8k now
Gemini Links 26/12/2025: Careful What You Eat and "My Secret Santa"
Links for the day
The Indigenous Community Versus Corporate AstroTurt and 'Cancel Culture'
Good people will recognise exactly what's happening here and respond to it tactfully
Richard Stallman: Epstein is a Serial Rapist. Bill Epsteingate: Epstein is a Friend.
Supporting the FSF (or Richard Stallman) is supporting those who asserted Epstein had serially raped women
The Paradox of GAFAM: Saying You Protect Women, Appointing Abusers of Women to Run the Company
older articles
Censored by FreeBSD Core Team Secretary, Reinstated After Talking About it in Public
FreeBSD misfiring a CoC?
Links 26/12/2025: Chatbot Toys Terrorising Children, US Undeclared "War on Terror" Unilaterally Extends to Nigeria During Holidays
Links for the day
Links 26/12/2025: French Postal Services Under Russian Attack, U.S. Cheetos Accuse People Who Obstruct Information Warfare by Russia of "Censorship"
Links for the day
Debian's Daniel Kahn Gillmor is Wrong, Signal is No "Gold Standard" (It's Also Promoted by Proponents of Back Doors)
I'm not too sure why Debian or the ACLU would wish to associate with this
Next Year Will be the Year of Quantum, Just Like 2020, 2015, 2010, 2005 and So On
"Quantum" is the future
The Silent Power of Coercion Over Speech
The important thing is optics
Kazakhstan Doesn't Need GAFAM Datacentres (Spy Hubs)
Suffice to say, as far as we can gather nothing came out from the empty (false) promises of GAFAM's "data centers in Kazakhstan"
So Simple That You Can Touch and Feel It
In light of recent experiences
Christmas Music Project: Back to When Music Was Music
now Canonical (or Ubuntu) says we should make available tens of gigabytes of disk space
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Under Attack by Cross-Network Spam Floods
So far we've been spared (our network has not been targeted at all) [...] Let's hope the spam won't discourage the hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who still use IRC
An "AI-Infused" Windows
Microsoft Windows isn't becoming a worthless pile of garbage by accident
Microsoft Laid Off Over 30,000 People This Year, Coders Are "Too Expensive"
Go get some popcorn. Microsoft "slopware" is about to get real!
Critics Have Long Said Microsoft Produces "Slopware", Microsoft Wants to Prove Them Right
Slop instead of code is a step in the right direction?
The Top 8 Innovations of IBM in 2025
What innovations will come out from IBM in 2026?
And as the Year Turns...
The significance of new years isn't based on geology or astronomy or anything like that
Appliances Versus Computers
Replacing a computer inside an object of some kind or inside an appliance (which nowadays includes "modern" cars) isn't simple and isn't cheap
A Dark Side of Europe
They try hard to silence people who speak about these issues
Why People Love Techrights (and Also Loved "Boycott Novell")
I will continue to publish for many decades to come
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 25, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, December 25, 2025
Browsing Techrights With a GUI and 10 Megabytes of RAM Per Tab
Some people say it's not possible in 2025, maybe in part because they depend on very bloated software
A Tribute to Richard Stallman
It's about knowledge and sharing
Links 26/12/2025: Impermanence, Salt and Thermometer, Freetube
Links for the day