There Are Days or Occasions Where gemini:// Requests Almost Exceed http(s):// and Gemini Protocol Isn't Even 6 Yet
Gemini Protocol turns 6 one month from now
This past week we saw or clocked hundreds of thousands of gemini:// requests - that's even more than the total number of pages in the capsule. There are people who regularly read Techrights over gemini:// and that's a very good thing because we don't want to depend on the sad fate of the Web, which some Establishment media (some days ago The New York Times) already admits is doomed due to LLM slop and the effect of slop on search engines, online media, and so on.
There are several people in our IRC network (regulars) who found out about us through gemini:// and some have their own capsules.
We'd like to think that after 10 years of Gemini (2029) there will already be tens of thousands of active capsules online, maybe even hundreds of thousands.
When people "visit" the platform they get small pages with only text, not hundreds (or thousands) of thousands of bytes they don't need. This makes Techrights easier and cheaper to run. Our annual bills are modest and our uptime is very close to 100% (probably around 99.999% this year).
Had we not discovered Gemini back in 2020 (and adopted it for Techrights in 2021), we'd be too dependent on the Web. You definitely don't want to 'gamble' on the Web these days because the Web is besieged by "webapps" (bloat, more so at the client side), DRM, and worse things to come, maybe even attestation.
An associate wanted to also mention the reasons why readers should prioritise gemini:// (this platform has feature parity, even for blind readers); a lot could be said about the focus on content over formatting and the high signal-to-noise (s/n) ratio both in regards to relevant content and the packaging of that content with low overhead, unlike Web pages. As noted the other day in Daily Links, based on study from the other year, a superficial study about Web pages showed them being > 99% filler (JavaScript etc) and it impacts not only speed. █