Time Capsule used space hasn't budged for 4+ weeks

I started backing up my MacBook Pro onto a 500-GB Time Capsule on April 22 of this year. I have only about 65 GB on the MBP so I figured 500 GB would go back for many months before the disk was filled and old material started dropping off.
For the first two months I watched the space available on the TC (as reported in the TC system preference panel) drop steadily, from an initial 457 GB to 289.1 GB. Then, a bit over 4 weeks ago, it stopped dropping.
Backups still happen hourly; Time Machine seems to be working perfectly as designed. The amount backed up will be 12 MB, 63 MB, 110 MB, sometimes more if I have downloaded a lot of stuff in a day. But the TC sticks resolutely at 289.1 GB available no matter how much new data I throw at it day by day.
I have investigated using Unix commands in Terminal. The command "df -h" says that the backup volume has 289.1 GB available, day in and day out.
Several times I have used the Time Machine functionality to reach back into the past and restore a file or a folder. Everything works as expected.
What does it mean that I seem to have stopped consuming new space on the TC?

*Time Machine Keeps*
*Hourly backups for the past 24 hours*
*Daily backups for the past month*
*Weekly backups until your disk is full*
What this means is that after 24 hours, only one version off all the changes that have occured will be stored for that day.
After a month, only weekly versions will be stored. If you have changed files more than once during these periods, all but one version is being purged. You may have reached a point where more information has been purged than there is new information being stored.
The next question that has to occur to you now is why you are not reclaiming space as this happens. Why would the storage space remain constant? The reason for this is that your backup is being stored in a sparsebundle file. This is a disk image file that grows as more space is required however does not decrease in size as files are deleted.
There is a terminal command that can cause the file to be compressed, however it's not necessary to do this. Eventually your backups will again grow before being purged to a week and will cause the sparse bundle to grow again.

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