[ANN] A Gemini crawler, for statistics about the geminispace

[Solderpunk]

On Wed Dec 16, 2020 at 4:05 PM CET, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
> I'm running a Gemini crawler, which gathers metadata about the
> geminispace. The goal is not to make a search engine but to survey the
> geminispace.

This is very cool, thanks for your work!

I would be curious to see more thorough statistics on TLS certificates
in Geminispace.  It's nice that you have the Let's Encrypt percentage on
there, but I'd also like to know about self-signed certificates, what
the distribution of sizes, key types, lifepans etc. is.  But I know this
information is *not* easy to get at in Python without external
dependencies, so don't feel obligated to bang your head against it.

I have plans to write a certificate observatory daemon in 2021, with a
simple Gemini interface so that TOFU clients can query it regarding new
certs.  It should be straightforward to generate this kind of
information as a side-effect, so my curiosity on this front will be
satisfied one way or another sooner or later.

Cheers,
Solderpunk