What's up on the smolweb? October 2026 roundup

2026-11-07 13:00

November has arrived, the leaves are turning, and the smolnet is doing what it always does: quietly growing, debating, and building. Here is what happened in October 2026 on the small web, the smolnet, and around the Gemini protocol.

Geminispace in late October: 5,128 known capsules, 3,033 recently connected

The Lupa crawler (Stephane Bortzmeyer's Geminispace survey) was last updated on November 7, 2026. It currently lists 5,128 known capsules, of which 3,033 were successfully connected recently (within the last 31 days). The database holds 1,128,886 URIs, and 436,567 of them serve Gemtext content.

The character of the space is unchanged: 90.4% of capsules use self-signed certificates, only 4 use Let's Encrypt, and 99% run TLS 1.3. 363 capsules publish a robots.txt.

The slight drop in active capsules compared with the 3,567 reported in early October is most likely Lupa's routine pruning of capsules that have been dead for 46 days, rather than mass exodus. The total known count moves with how many new capsules are announced through Cosmos and similar feeds.

Source: Lupa statistics

QUIC for Gemini: a November-ready debate (Oct 29)

On October 29, user manat opened a thread in s/Gemini on the Gemini BBS asking whether Gemini should adopt QUIC: "Should gemini adopt QUIC?" The premise is that QUIC (RFC 9000) reduces the overhead of using TLS, which is mandatory for Gemini, and that OpenSSL already supports it. The thread collected 18 comments.

The discussion mirrors an older tension: the protocol's "frozen spec" philosophy versus pragmatic improvements that would make Gemini work better on lossy or slow networks. No decision was taken, but the thread is one of the more substantive protocol conversations of the autumn.

Source: QUIC thread on Gemini BBS

A crawler flood on community capsules

In early November, two Gemini capsule operators, Haze and jsreed5, reported the same thing independently: an IP in the 188.172.228.0/23 range has been hammering their search endpoints with repeated queries, exponentially so in recent days. On Jetforce, per-IP rate limiting at the TLS handshake level only partly helped, and the service started thrashing.

The reports are a reminder that the smolnet is not immune to the crawler pressure that has been plaguing the big web. Neither capsule had names or IDs for the offending tool at the time of the posts. Both threads gathered about a dozen comments.

Source: Haze's post on Gemini BBS, jsreed5's post

Peplum 1.1.0: davep ships a terminal PEP reader

davep released v1.1.0 of Peplum, his terminal-based Python PEP (Python Enhancement Proposals) search and reading tool, on October 29. Peplum gives you a fast way to look up and read PEPs without leaving the terminal. It sits alongside davep's other command-line Gemini/Gopher tooling, which has been getting attention all autumn.

Source: davep on Gemini BBS

Profectus gets inline Markdown-style rendering

clseibold shared screenshots of a new version of Profectus (the gemini browser/client project, hosted at auragem.ddns.net) that adds better rendering of Markdown files and inline bold, italics and code blocks. The update was posted on November 4 and followed an earlier pass on the rendering pipeline in October (vertical tabs and other features, posted November 1).

Sources: Profectus feature post, Profectus Markdown rendering post

Alhena 5.7.0

bluesman announced Alhena 5.7.0 on the BBS. The Electron-based Gemini browser/server frontend shipped updates to BouncyCastle, vert.x and netty, jsoup, and H2, plus fixes for mailto links and image-only anchor handling in the HTML-to-Gemtext converter: the Astronomy Picture of the Day changed its underlying HTML, and the converted image links had stopped working.

Source: Alhena 5.7.0 thread on Gemini BBS

Gemlogs and phlogs worth a click

October was a lively month for personal writing in the smolnet. A few gems from the Techrights curation:

• yunzi at yunzi.co.uk wrote "Rambling on self-hosting" (Oct 31): now self-hosting, he is learning to love his own logs and is aggressively blocking AI bots from his capsule. Source: gemini://gemini.yunzi.co.uk/gemlog/2026-10-31-rambling-on-selfhosting.gmi
• eve.smol.pub argued about digital preservation on October 18 ("Vaults and locks that fence them from the public eye and use"), and reported on being on the BBC News business section. Source: gemini://eve.smol.pub/vaults-and-locks-that-fence-them-from-the-public-eye-and-use
• carcosa.net posted "Gamers are the problem" (Oct 18) on the RAM price spikes driven by GPUs for LLMs.
• sava.rocks wished everyone a "Happy 2026 Halloween".
• idiomdrottning.org posted "The Ad Video Screens Don't Make Money", a short piece against the idea that public-space ad screens fund transit.
• An aussies.space phlog ("HOBBIES, AGAIN", Oct 18) reflected on hobbies that never fully relax.

Reddit goes "primarily logged-in"

Outside the Gemini space but discussed inside it: Reddit announced plans to become "a primarily logged-in experience" in late October. A thread in s/WWW of the Gemini BBS collected 10 comments, comparing it with the smolnet ethos of serving static, readable pages to anyone. The contrast was the point.

Source: Reddit thread on Gemini BBS

Ploum: "The AI Pascal's Wager" (Oct 1)

On October 1, Ploum published "The AI Pascal's Wager", his latest in a series of long-form essays on AI and the small web. The post pairs well with his September pieces on refusing to interact with stochastic parrots.

Source: ploum.net

IndieWeb: a busy October of Homebrew Website Clubs

The IndieWeb calendar for October 2026 was packed. Over two dozen Homebrew Website Club and Front End Study Hall events ran across the month, including an HWC in Curitiba, Brazil (Oct 17), Nuremberg (Oct 14), Edinburgh (Oct 27), Asia Pacific on three separate dates (Oct 14, 21, 28), Bengaluru's IndieWebClub (Oct 17), and the regular Europe/London, US Pacific and Eastern online calls. Front End Study Hall held sessions #059 (Oct 1), #060 (Oct 15) and #061 (Oct 29).

A nice detail: the Framework Community thread about Gemini and the smolweb first opened back in 2024 is still active, with over 10,000 views to date.

Source: IndieWeb events for October 2026

Short picks

• Farkle October winner: jecxjo took the October round of the Gemini BBS's monthly Farkle tournament with 54 points (posted Nov 1).
• New arrivals: Lipgloss joined the Gemini BBS on Nov 3 with a one-line post.
• Converters beware: if your capsule parses Astronomy Picture of the Day's HTML, expect breakage when they change it. Alhena learned the hard way (see above).

Takeaway

October 2026 was not a month of giant announcements on the smolweb. It was a month of working tools: a QUIC thread that will probably run for another three years, a crawler flood that needs rate-limiting, a handful of client releases, and a steady stream of personal writing. The capsule count holds near 3,000 active, the cert profile is unchanged, and the IndieWeb HWC schedule has never been busier.

If you run a Gemini capsule, two action items from this month: keep an eye on your logs for the 188.172.228.0/23 range, and add any new user-agent that is hammering your search endpoints to robots.txt. The whole smolnet thanks you.