[2025-01-26] Trampled By the Elephants

__________________________________________________________________


Where do the mice find shelter when the elephants trample every
square inch of the forest?

Last week, while making some changes to my capsule, I discovered
that it was loading extremely slowly. Often I would time out just
trying to request the homepage. An examination of access logs re-
vealed the capsule was being flooded with requests from a well-
known Gemini proxy on the Web.

Fortunately, the operator of the proxy was quite responsive and
helpful. I e-mailed him about the issue, and he quickly identified
and banned the IPs in question. Unsurprisingly, they all origi-
nated from Alibaba Cloud.

I'm not the only one dealing with this issue. I've recently seen
many posts on Antenna of site operators, both Gemini and other-
wise, dealing with extremely aggressive crawlers and bots. Several
originate from Chinese cloud hosting providers, but they come from
all over the world, AWS also being a common culprit. Of course,
the mainline Internet has dealt with flooding issues from cloud
providers for years, and the problem shows no signs of getting
better. But I haven't seen the problem this pervasive in the small
Web before.

Gemini occupies a much smaller, quieter and friendlier part of the
Internet than does HTTP and Javascript. But fundamentally, it
still occupies the same Internet. The backbone links, the giant
cloud services, the regulatory bodies, the ISPs, and the govern-
ment surveillance agencies still call the shots in how the Inter-
net evolves. They are the elephants stopping around the forest,
knocking down trees at will and planting more by the seeds in
their dung. It's still their forest.

Gophers once ruled the forest, at least for a little while. The
forest was soon stolen from them by what would later become the
elephants. But Gemini, the mice, come into a forest already ruled
by pachyderms. They rampage every minute of every day, crushing
smaller mammals underfoot, creating an extremely hostile environ-
ment to all but the forest's biggest inhabitants. This is a pro-
blem inherent to Gemini's choice of TCP/IP.

I'm not saying Gemini should abandon the protocol and move off the
traditional Internet completely. But as long as we live in the
same forest as the elephants, we can guarantee we'll get crushed
underfoot from time to time. We can, however, provide some resil-
ience for the protocol by serving Gemini capsules over other forms
of communication.

Recently I've begun diving into Reticulum, a networking tool that
can route over TCP/IP but does not use it in its core stack. In
the future, tools like Yggdrasil also aim to be able to route
without using current Internet infrastructure. NNCP enables reli-
able and secure routing over sneakernets. There's even been talk
of alternative forms of routing in projects like Urbit.

It may help the resilience of Gemini to consider serving Gemini
capsule over other forms of networking. Gemini servers could be
modified to listen over alternate interfaces perhaps using their
public keys instead of certificates for authentication. This could
even enable archival and decentralized hosting of capsules, like
git or ZeroNet does.

Some of these ideas have been discussed before. If the mainline
Internet keeps evolving the way it is, we may need to look at them
more urgently. In the meantime, it would be fun just to see how
adaptable the Gemini protocol and Gemtext format can really be.


__________________________________________________________________


[Last updated: 2025-07-26]