Bonum Certa Men Certa

The Web is Large, But It Stopped Growing, It's Just Consolidating (Few Giant Companies Control the Chessboard)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 29, 2024

Curbside game of Chinese chess

Total number of websites (logarithmic scale)

The September 2024 Web Server Survey from Netcraft was released 12 days ago (it's the source of the screenshot above). It showed Microsoft down again (as usual) in all measured categories and it showed that a lack of growth had persisted for over a decade already.

Looking at the exact same data with a linear scale (not the default):

Total number of websites (linear scale)

Without dwelling too much on the finer details or resorting to any speculations, let's just say that it doesn't look like the Web is "booming" anymore; more people might be doing "apps" or whatever... who knows?

An associate of ours suggested examining "Hobbes' Internet Timeline". It's about the Net, not just the Web, and it stops in 2017, i.e. 7 years ago. It also has the following graphs:

Hobbes' Internet Timeline 25

In the one before last one can see similar stuff to what's Netcraft has shown, except it stops in 2017.

It therefore seems safe to say that something went "wrong" or something "peaked" or the Web plateaued (or jumped the shark). Maybe it's a slow-motion train wreck. Maybe not.

"30 years ago the WWW (and the Internet underneath it) was growing exponentially month over month," our associate said. "That was only possible because it was simple, platform independent, and above all an open standard! which anyone could adopt and thus join in."

"Kind of the opposite of today's replacement with its webapps running the browsers as unsafe and energy wasteful VMs locked into one of five walled gardens."

Gemini Protocol turned 5 this year and several records got broken. Maybe it'll never be even remotely as big as the Web, but to many of us that does not matter because provided some people use it, there's still value in it. On the Web, many people (or "users") exist, but they're herded into a very small number of very large sites/networks such as AWS, Facebook, Google.com and so on. On today's Web you're merely a guest, whereas in Geminispace you are a node/host.

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