10 ms·

And who will pay for that openness and decentralization? Let’s hypothetically say that Twitter is closed, millions of users discover Mastodon and move. Mastodon

• elikoga 4y ago
  > Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds what, why? The load is hardly that high.
  • madmoose 4y ago
    When the Musk takeover was first announced it was practically impossible to register on many of the most popular Mastodon instances. An actual takeover will almost certainly be a virtual DDoS on Mastodon.
  • naavis 4y ago
    For reference, based on quick Googling, Twitter publishes around 10 000 tweets per second on average.
    • 83457 4y ago
      On average I guess that makes sense. The peaks must be ridiculously high though.
      • woevdbz 4y ago
        I'd assume it's not so much the peaks that are a challenge - most of these 10k tweets/second aren't critical to serve to anyone fast, and that scales horizontally- it's the hot spots, that one tweet thread in the spotlight right now that everybody wants to read and jump on - that doesn't scale by just adding more servers
    • ndriscoll 4y ago
      i.e. my laptop could handle the write load. A retired nerd with a real server they put in a data center for bandwidth could easily run that level of traffic on 2022 hardware. For reference my work laptop (8 logical cores, so 4+HT? 32GB RAM) can handle 100k rows/second sustained inserts into postgres 14 with some batch jobs I'm working on. You can buffer http requests into batches and easily handle way more than 10k/s on a server while still providing synchronous semantics and reasonable latency to the client (e.g. flush batches every 10-100 ms). I doubt Mastodon is designed for that kind of scalability, but most techies could probably afford to run Twitter as a hobby if they knew what they're doing and they weren't trying to do all the analytics and advertising stuff to monetize it/just wanted to provide the service.
      • brazzy 4y ago
        Yeah, you have not the faintest clue what you're talking about.
      • 0x457 4y ago
        I think you don't understand that 10,000 tweets isn't 10,000 inserts. It's not enough to just write tweet, you need to fan-out writes to every user's feed. It's also not batched into neat transactions like your batch jobs. You have no idea what are you talking about.
        • ndriscoll 4y ago
          You don't need to fan out writes to feeds. Users subscribe to other users, not tweets. You can attempt to send out the notification to subscribed users, and if it fails, that's fine. You don't need to record notification status. Have a worker that records (in the db) the last tweet id it's processed, and just regularly joins N new tweets to authors to subscribers and attempts to send. You can play with how that query works to limit total work done in a chunk rather than N new tweets (in case of someone with many subscribers), but the idea is straightforward. You can easily batch writes into neat transactions: make a queue, have your POST handler write (row, callback) onto the queue and await the callback. Have the queue reader grab a chunk, push it to the db in batch, and execute all of the callbacks on commit. The callbacks return a 200 to the client, or 500 if the commit failed. This can all happen fast enough to be done in "real time" (however fast you want your queue worker to flush batches). You can do all of this in a couple dozen lines of code with something like Scala/ZIO. Computationally, it is totally doable. The biggest constraint is the cost of storage.
• proactivesvcs 4y ago
  Pay for what? It's not about making money. > By volunteers adding more instances(that they can close anytime)? "That they can close anytime", just like twitter in this example. Partly, yes. But that sort of total exodus would mean a lot of additional people contributing ideas and code to the Fediverse, not just servers, but by making it easier to run your own instance. Who's to say it couldn't be run just like an email client with the right ideas and effort? It's such an extreme example that I'm not even sure it's useful to discuss. What traffic is it prepared for? It would be interesting for you to provide the numbers and the evidence which backs this up. As for real life scenarios...there are upwards of a million people using it right now. I've made friends, networked professionally and found several homes there. I am literally a real life scenario and so are the people behind most of the posts there. And today you are right about "anyone can start their own instance", but it's a darn sight easier than running your own twitter.com, and it'll get easier every year.
  • monkin 4y ago
    > Pay for what? It's not about making money. For servers that run Mastodon. > But that sort of total exodus would mean a lot of additional people contributing ideas and code to the Fediverse, not just servers, but by making it easier to run your own instance. Most users aren’t interested in contributing anything to the platform. Social media platforms popularity lays in simplicity. No one wants to run anything, just use service without any hassle. > there are upwards of a million people using it right now. Compare that to 200m+ users of Twitter sending 500m+ messages daily. I bet Mastdon can handle this without a sweat.
    • rvz 4y ago
      This right here. He's right you know. Everyone knows that Mastodon can't handle this amount of users and after 6 years, it's enough to see that by itself it has failed, (unless you count Truth Social as a great example of a Mastodon usage that has more users than Mastodon itself in less than a year) It is not early days anymore and no non-technical user is interested in hosting their own servers for chatting with another person. They don't care about decentralization as even if they tried they will recentralize to the main Mastodon instance.
• rvz 4y ago
  Yes, hosting is a cost and it is not 'free', hence the frequent downtime with Mastodon instances, even when they had traffic during Elon's takeover of Twitter many of then could not even handle the new users. Also, these users don't even know which instance to go to, since there is little to no-one to talk on there. If there are 'hundreds of thousands' of users then that means they have just recentralized on Mastodon.social, the "main" instance, defeating the point of it all. > PS. Please do not say anything about “anyone can start his own instance”. No, average Twitter/Facebook consumer can’t start his own instance. This is why Mastodon has failed in the first place after almost 6 years with this system.
  • arcatech 4y ago
    Weren’t you complaining about mastodon having “no users” in the last big discussion about it here? Do you have some kind of personal issue with the protocol? There are plenty of people using it. It has not “failed”.
    • rvz 4y ago
      > Weren’t you complaining about mastodon having “no users” in the last big discussion about it here? Yes, I said: 'Little to no users'. After looking at it for a couple of years, it is not the typical twitter user that is self hosting their own Mastodon instance and just the same tech-folks that are doing that (unreliably) and sitting on Mastodon. The level of social interaction on Mastodon is so low and limited, that they still use their Twitter accounts more than their Mastodon accounts. So yes, it is not early days anymore and we have given it enough time and it has already failed.
      • proactivesvcs 4y ago
        I'm following so many accounts that if I don't sign in for three or four days I can barely keep up with my home feed. Almost all of it is interesting, funny, insightful or simply chill discussion. They almost exclusively use the Fediverse, none of them use the Fedi as a second-class citizen. Your insistence that something that is alive, growing and healthy has "failed" is simply proof that you have failed to bother with it because of your preconceptions.
• oogali 4y ago
  Did Web 2.0 make us all forget how open IRC networks were run? Resources donated by an organization in the form of a server linked into a larger network, a committee that vetted new server applications to the network, volunteer administrators for the network and the individual servers, coordinated regional and global upgrades. And as network users increased, reforming under a hub and spoke models to improve scale and capacity. And when a single IRC server went away after some time operating for its various reasons, the network kept going. Could the average IRC user start/host their own instance *and* link it to the larger network? No. But they didn't need to.
  • lapcat 4y ago
    > Did Web 2.0 make us all forget how open IRC networks were run? I haven't forgotten about the Freenode hostile takeover.
    • Doxin 4y ago
      Except that the freenode takeover didn't really have much to do with IRC as such. It had to do with a domain name theft.
    • importgravity 4y ago
      And yet a large number of channels and a large number of communities migrated seamlessly to Libera and survived.
      • lapcat 4y ago
        > migrated seamlessly I disagree with that characterization. > and survived Survival is not the issue. Mastodon will survive. Tumblr survives. Even MySpace survives. But major disruptions tend to lose users. (And yes it's true that the potential Twitter acquisition is a potential major disruption. But it's not going to be shut down after a $44 billion investment.)
        • importgravity 4y ago
• guerrilla 4y ago
  > Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds. How do you approach this? The same people who pay for everything right now will pay for it: us. Some instances will have patreon, others will be voluntary donation, others will use some craptocurrency, others will have contractual subscriptions, some will have ads... And whatever models are best will win out. Quit with the FUD. Just sit, back, relax and watch it happen.
• _hcuq 4y ago
  Mastodon.Social has a Patreon page. Quite a few supporters. Obviously Wikipedia, NPR etc are a model.
• Kye 4y ago
  Simple: It collapses and the millions move on to the next one, leaving the collapsed server to catch up and come back online. Like a scared but surviving turtle. Most servers are crowdfunded. Even the project's instances get funding through Patreon. The official instance finding site seems to be good about spreading the load out every time Twitter burps. You have to meet certain reliability requirements to even be listed.
• toss1 4y ago
  Is there anything to prevent a person/group from setting up a Mastadon instance with a charge to cover hosting, admin, & support costs (something like businesses charging for service on Open Source software support)? This could both make it more stable and sustainable and be a barrier to bots/trolls.
  • proactivesvcs 4y ago
    Nope - Mastodon supports invite-only which can aid in this sort of set-up; I'm sure other platforms do as well. And if one runs a close-knit community (which takes more than expertise and infrastructure), donations or something like a Patreon scheme can work.
  • numpad0 4y ago
    Musk suggested that for Twitter and responses were not positive at all.
• imhoguy 4y ago
  I am not participant but I have seen some invite only fediverse instances. Can't there be paid instances too, even pay by (please don't hate me here) watching ads ? Does actually anyone need to cater to millions of users?
  • proactivesvcs 4y ago
    Absolutely. In Mastodon it's a pretty simply setting IIRC and I expect it's commonplace across other microblogging platforms that use ActivityPub. I certainly wouldn't be against the principle of joining an instance that was paid for. The whole "millions of users" fallacy is the result of people not being able to grasp what federation is about. The network can easily accommodate millions of users. Individual instances don't need to be able to.
• derekzhouzhen 4y ago
  As a counter example, email is a federated system too. I don't think a federated network should, or can for that matter, mimic the user friendliness of a closed system; so there won't be massive exodus of users from Twitter to the federverse, no matter how screwed Twitter became.
• eliaspro 4y ago
  Admins of existing instances can configure user limits, close registration, etc., so new user will move to other instances or create demand for commercial instances.
• ekianjo 4y ago
  > Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds. Of course not. Mastodon instances can be capped in the first place, and anybody with a rudimentary server management knowledge can start their own instances on a cheap server. Mastodon has current hundreds of instances, let's not pretend it can't go to thousands if the user base increases.
• ineptech 4y ago
  > PS. Please do not say anything about “anyone can start his own instance”. No, average Twitter/Facebook consumer can’t start his own instance. This isn't a law of the universe, it's just software people haven't written yet. Installing new client-side apps was hard, until it wasn't. "Anyone can start their own instance" will be easy once someone writes the software to make it so. (Presumably a cloud provider like AWS, since that's who stands to profit from lots of people wanting to run server-side apps)
  • Kye 4y ago
    Anyone can just pay $6/month to the good folks at masto.host to manage one for them. It's enough for them and possibly a few friends. I don't know if there are any other managed Mastodon companies, but this one has been around for years and has a good reputation. Their managed instances also meet the joinmastodon.org listing requirements by default.
• rakoo 4y ago
  Who pays for Twitter ? Who said anything about the Fediverse having to be free ? There is absolutely no doubt that should Twitter die, if no single actor can emerge quickly enough, for-profit actors will emerge and they will have all good reasons to be compatible with something that already exists. There will be mega large instances paid by siphoning data and with ads, there will be large instances paid by users/funds/donations, there will be small, community instances. Maybe HN will have its own instance; how much do you pay for HN today ?
• andreyk 4y ago
  I think the problem is exactly that the average consumer can't start their own instance. What if there was a front-end service that made creating a fediverse instance as easy as creating a discord or Slack, and handled all the messy technical stuff with setting up an instance for the average user, while at the same time allowing said user to have full control of the cloud files? The front end would be incredibly light weight (just API calls, no data storage), so even if it shut down, as long as it is open source someone else could run their own instance of it on a different URL and the user could keep admin of their instance through that.
• KoftaBob 4y ago
  This is why I view the "federated" form of decentralization to be more of an intermediate stop-gap between fully centralized and fully decentralized in the form of true P2P. For a decentralized social network to be viable/sustainable (especially on the scale of something like Twitter), it has to be truly P2P, not federated on volunteer-run servers paid for through donations. That volunteer-run federated model is really only sustainable for smaller niche communities, not a global social network. As of right now, the closest framework I can think of to handle something like this is a social network built on OrbitDB: https://github.com/orbitdb https://github.com/orbitdb
  • 0x457 4y ago
    Fully p2p doesn't really work well either. For a fully p2p network, nodes will have to hold the entire data. Now first storage space taken will be ridiculous, and then you will be hosting content you don't want to host because it could be straight up illegal in your country. Look at any crypto-blockchain and count how many full-nodes vs thin-nodes are running in networks. Then there is the whole tragedy of commons: average seed ratios and streaming video players for torrent content shows that are not willing to contribute to the greater good.
    • xani_ 4y ago
      Yeah, and there will be people that will just throw their porn collection there, hogging space on other people's drives for no good reason. There is an option of dividing it between "publisher" (source) and "cachers" (caching whatever is recent and popular) but that only helps a little bit. > Then there is the whole tragedy of commons: average seed ratios and streaming video players for torrent content shows that are not willing to contribute to the greater good. Over 2 decades of pirating that has only been a problem for obscure and old stuff. I don't see it being a problem in social network sense; you publish your stuff, if there is nobody wanting to look at it, seeds 1, leeches 0. Moment there is interest it propagates. It is of course problem if you want to see something archival that author is no longer in the network tho.
      • 4y ago
• SyndicWill 4y ago
  Our pay-what-you-can cooperative Mastodon instance at social.coop, running strong for over 5 years, is currently debating what to do with our 10,000€ budget surplus. The idea that social media costs more to operate than people would be willing to pay is false. It's propaganda from the people who profit from keeping you trapped in their closed networks to monetize your attention.
  • xani_ 4y ago
    Well, it was true decade, maybe two ago. Stuff got faster and therefore cheaper too. Server written in reasonably fast software on $10 (well, probably some extra bux in storage if community is image-heavy) VPS can reasonably serve tens of thousands of users in typical forum/blog/hn-esque format. Mastodon isn't but I don't doubt someone would rewrite it in something faster if there was a need for it.