One of the things I am really liking about Fastly, other than that it makes the instance incredibly fast from almost everywhere, is the observability. I was poking around and found this graph that shows the origin of traffic to the instance at a given point of time, with the size of the bubble representing how much traffic that pop is getting.

Note the two big circles. One over Germany, and one over Finland. Coincidentally, the location of Hetzner’s two main sites.

Much of that traffic is inter-instance communications. And the reason is that, I strongly suspect, much of the fediverse infrastructure exists in those two Hetzner datacenters.

NB: Hetzner is critical infrastructure for the fediverse.

@jerry
That seems concerning... Similar to the concern there was about so many services being hosted in AWS and an availability region going down taking out many services. I worry that the goal of decentralized communication and social media is inadvertently circumvented by centralizing infrastructure to specific, lower-cost providers.
@seantpayne I think the issue is that Hetzner is not just a low cost provider, but indeed the lowest cost provider. And since nearly all mastodon instances operate on a shoestring budget, we all end up there. It’s not the best situation for sure.

@jerry
I agree. Your analytics does sort of bring concrete evidence of the problem that the low-cost infrastructure market is lacking competitive diversity for non-profits and low-budget online communities.

πŸ€” This gives me a business idea...

@seantpayne I don’t know why that model works in Germany and Finland and nowhere else…

@jerry @seantpayne

Last I checked they are still working on upgrading the bunny 🐰 to be S3-something-like-🐰-email?

#decentralized πŸ“₯πŸ“€πŸ“¨πŸ“¬πŸ’Œ--->πŸŒπŸ•ΈοΈπŸ•·οΈ?

@jerry @seantpayne I think there is decently good tax incentives here in Finland for data centers, and quite a bit of easy to access cooling. (A lot of closed down paper Mills with good energy infra + access to fresh water.)
@jerry to the best of my knowledge Hetzner is not VC backed. So they operated on sustainable growth and don’t have to flip from being (almost) free to huge profits $over_night.

@gtz42 @jerry This ^^.

Also just knowing which corners to cut and which not.