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.
Aral Balkan@bob Exactly. Ideally, I’d 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.
manicphase@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