MC read
Bob MottramThe fact that mastodon apparently doesn't scale well could be a feature rather than a bug. You probably don't want thousands of users on a single server, since that brings with it all sorts of problems - social, technical, economic.
Black Cat ^^ (inactive)@bob good thing that it scales better than Friendica, though ;)
Hattie Cat@bob "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." I'd be inclined to attribute it more to lack of experience on the part of the developer.
Constance Variable
manicphase@bob I think it's interesting that it can sort of bring the social contract back into social media to have a federation.
I'm planning on starting my own instance when I have some money, then I can host friends and family on it. Spam and vitriol won't even be a concern.
My worry about technical issues is what happens to the horizontal scalability when there's hundreds of thousands of instances all trying to keep up with eachother?
@manicphase and that's something like the FreedomBox idea. You host yourself or a small number of friends and family, and then federate with the rest. It doesn't need to be a massive and expensive server.
I've been in the fediverse for a long time and while vitriol is sometimes a problem spam hasn't been much of a problem so far. Intrinsically there's nothing to stop people from posting ads, it's just that in the fediverse they would be easier to block and there are no algorithmic timelines and bribed posts so far (though that might be coming).
I've been in the fediverse for a long time and while vitriol is sometimes a problem spam hasn't been much of a problem so far. Intrinsically there's nothing to stop people from posting ads, it's just that in the fediverse they would be easier to block and there are no algorithmic timelines and bribed posts so far (though that might be coming).
Aral Balkan@bob Exactly. Ideally, Iād like to see a proliferation of instances of one. A truly decentralised network where every person is responsible for their own output and moderation.
@aral it's a sliding scale, since an instance with one user is quite similar to a P2P system. In that case the admin issues go away and it becomes more a question of having good controls over what you see or who you interact with. I think for the foreseeable future client/server will continue to be the main architecture though and there will be varying levels of admin responsibilities.
@bob Indeed, it will take time. We can incentivise by making it seamless to set up and run hosted instances of one.
@aral and as skeptical of docker as I am in the recent Mastodon case it does look like the availability of a docker container has significantly helped quite a number of instances get up and running within a few days.
@bob @aral I wonder how suited the current code base is to being removed from dedicated servers altogether.
I mean right now this message is on your server and will remain there even if my server goes offline. What if the validation was a signature from my server?
That way a third server could pull this message and validate where it originally came from.
@manicphase @bob Interesting. I haven't looked into how deletes are/can be handled. It would be trivial to add a signature that could be verified via pinging a well-known URL scheme on the originating instance, thereby leading to federated deletes.
CC @Gargron
Kurtis Rainbolt-Greene@bob What ways have you experienced Mastodon not scaling well?
@krainboltgreene someone was saying that it doesn't scale very well on a single server due to the slow ruby implementation
jddj@bob I've thought about this as well: might be an excellent way to stop the global echo-chamber: If ideas propagate first in communities of interest, then go broad perhaps thought-bubbles turn into foam of thought. More individual bubbles means more different ideas.
Rey Bango@bob yep that's the philosophy behind it if I recall. Not everyone should live on one server.
scottbw š§ š¬š§š©šŖ@bob at a social level, large instances make the stream unusable; it blurs by too quickly and has too great a variety to make sense of.
Right now, 3-4000 users is a nice size for a local community with a reasonable number of connections.
As the federation grows, and therefore also the number of potential connections, we may see the optimum instance size go down rather than up, until we reach "Dunbar's number" of 150 members in a community.