Gemini Protocol Has Growing Appeal (the Web Got Too Bloated and Full of LLM Slop)
"While my initial goal was to browse the Geminisphere offline, the mission has slowly morphed into cleaning and unenshitiffying the modern web, offering users a minimalistic way of browsing any website with interesting content. From the start, it was clear that Offpunk would focus on essentials. If a website needs JavaScript to be read, it is considered as non-essential. It worked surprisingly well. In fact, in multiple occurrence, I’ve discovered that some websites work better in Offpunk than in Firefox. I can comfortably read their content in the former, not in the latter. By default, Offpunk blocks domains deemed as nonessentials or too enshittified like twitter, X, facebook, linkedin, tiktok. (those are configurable, of course. Defaults are in offblocklist.py). Cleaning websites, blocking worst offenders. That’s good. But it is only a start. It’s time to go further, to really cut out all the crap from the web." -Lionel Dricot, yesterday
When we wrote about Gemini Protocol last week we estimated that our Gemini usage was growing to the point where, even if we had no Web version/s, it would still be worth running Techrights for its Gemini Edition (it's still all about community, not ads or corporations). A couple of months ago Lupa knew of 2,924 active capsules and today it's nearly 3,000.
Windows usage on the Web fell to about a quarter not because fewer people use the Web (or "webapps", typically proprietary software running in a bloated "Web browser"). It's because more people explore alternatives, including Android. I know many households here that no longer have any laptop/desktop or, if they do have one (or several; some are old and seldom used), those are rarely turned on because it's "faster" to just "do it on the phone" than to power up a large machine to do some task. A lot of households here only ever use their Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection from a "phone" or "tablet". Some of them use their "data plan" instead, i.e. cellular antennas.
There's a lot of mobile software for Gemini (this page lists 4 clients for Android, then Xenia, a "Gemini web proxy for Android"). For any "data plan" with bandwidth limits or "tiers" it would be cheaper to use/browse Geminispace, not the "modern" Web, wherein loading some front page of a news site can eat up as much as 10 megabytes in bandwidth and moreover cost a lot in battery life, time, privacy and so on. █