7 ms·

I've tried telling people before that the Fediverse doesn't scale, that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for anything only work for flashcrowds (i

I've tried telling people before that the Fediverse doesn't scale, that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear it. Everyone is sure that "torrents work, so this will work", neverminding the fact that the entire peer-to-peer ecosystem only works as long as there are people to seed, seeding costs money, and there's plenty of content out there with zero seeders. You'd think that would clue people in that this isn't going to work, but there it is. Hell, you'd think the history of Usenet and FidoNet would've given people a clue, but nobody wants to hear that either. If you're not willing to pay for the services you require... you're going to have a bad time. That is the ultimate lesson of the Fediverse.

jeffbee 4y ago
Twitter only works because it is centralized. The fediverse works less and less well as the number of federated instances increase. It has anti-scaling properties. And, on the non-technical side, it has a disorganized anonymous set of moderators you've never met or ever heard of, with no particular guiding philosophy or rules, and these guys have total access to your profile and they can do anything they want. On the technical side, the whole thing is lossy as hell. If I view a foreign profile on my instance it shows a handful of posts and then says that "older posts" aren't shown from other instances. Then if I go to the other instance there are hundreds of posts that aren't older, they were just missing on my instance. None of it really works or makes any sense.
- phoe-krk 4y ago
  > And, on the non-technical side, it has a disorganized anonymous set of moderators you've never met or ever heard of, with no particular guiding philosophy or rules, and these guys have total access to your profile and they can do anything they want. Didn't you just describe Twitter?
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    Nobody knows what the hell is going on with MuskBird, but when it was still Twitter there was a two-sided terms of service, under which Twitter offered its users concrete, enumerated benefits. Mastodon instances do not have "terms of service" they have "rules". The "rules" are unilateral in that they bind the user and not the service provider. The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was.
    - phoe-krk 4y ago
      > Mastodon instances do not have "terms of service" they have "rules". The "rules" are unilateral in that they bind the user and not the service provider. Of course they do. If the instance administrators do not abide by the rules they set, every user has the possibility to jump ship to an instance whose team actually does its job properly. This is undoable on Twitter, which makes me doubt that the overly general statement of > The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was. holds any actual merit.
    - rsynnott 4y ago
      > The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was. The model does make it difficult for an idiot to take over _the whole thing_ and ruin it, though. Your position as a user on any given Mastodon instance is worse than it was on pre-Musk Twitter, undoubtedly (post-Musk it just has a CEO ruling by fiat, which I would argue is a worse situation than you have on most Mastodon instances), but it's unclear that your position as a user of Mastodon writ large is.
    - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago
      This is probably the right post to refer everyone to the Mastodon Server Covenant, which does bind the service provider to some level of consistency: https://joinmastodon.org/covenant https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
- Zak 4y ago
  It's a push-based protocol. If somebody on your server follows the account, its posts will be on your server, but they can also be there through boosts, which leads to a seemingly random handful being populated. A mechanism to backfill posts would definitely be a good addition. Edit: for clarity, ActivityPub provides an outbox from which another server (or anything else that speaks HTTP) can pull posts. Adding a backfill feature to Mastodon would not require any changes to the protocol.
- Groxx 4y ago
  >The fediverse works less and less well as the number of federated instances increase. It has anti-scaling properties. In some ways, and for some purposes, this is very likely a feature. A good amount of the fediverse wants small healthy communities, not Twitter but federated (i.e. everything going everywhere all the time). I will absolutely agree that it's sub-par for almost anything happening now, which is a problem. But it's experiencing unprecedented growth - there will be growing pains, just like non-federated things do when they have unprecedented growth.
- drewzero1 4y ago
  Every instance has its own moderation policies, and the user has the option of moving to another instance (and keep being able to interact with the fediverse at large) if they clash with the mods or don't think they're doing enough. Instance maintainers are named and contactable if you have issues with them or other users. If you don't trust them with your account, move to an instance that you can. What can you do if you have issues with the moderation team at Twitter? Honest question-- I've been off Twitter for over a decade and hear about everything there second-hand. This sword cuts both ways for the fediverse (allowing bad actors to just move to another instance, for example) but on the whole I find it allows for a more people-centric approach to online community.
Zak 4y ago
It will be interesting to see what happens when larger commercial services like Tumblr and Flickr enter this space. There's a good opportunity for startups to experiment with social apps and sites that would have previously struggled to build a large enough network to be useful; support ActivityPub and you have a network.
jacquesm 4y ago
Two observations: (1) maybe it doesn't need to scale for people to ultimately have a much better experience and (2) bottlenecks tend to be identified and resolved up to the limit of the scaling laws and hardware improvements, bandwidth cost reduction and storage cost reduction tend to over time make the impossible thing from yesterday feasible today. Keep in mind that Torrents tend to be much larger than your average Tweet/Toot/Whatever and that the interconnects between the servers need to transport only those messages for which there are subscribers, something that could be optimized for (you really only need to transport each message once per sender if there are subscribers, not once per subscriber).
- Zak 4y ago
  Being based around a protocol rather than a single piece of software, it will likely end up that servers intended to grow large will run different software than servers intended to stay small.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    That could well happen, a bit like the difference between say 'gmail' and your own private mail server. The big trick will then be to stop it from becoming siloed again.
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    I suspect that key to the future of the fediverse is likely to be a more efficient piece of software than mastodon.
    - Zak 4y ago
      I expect very large servers will be commercially operated and running bespoke software. When Tumblr adds ActivityPub support, it will be the largest Fediverse instance by far.
      - factormeta 4y ago
        hmmm didn't know Tumblr was planning on doing that. Any more info on this?
jshen 4y ago
Federated systems are more resilient, which is the half of the trade-off you leave out. Also, “scale” is too vague a term in this context. It could mean efficiency or it could mean uptime. These are very different, and federated systems will have higher “uptime” in the sense that one instance crashing won’t cause all to crash. However, it will be less efficient, but there are huge efficiency gains to be had with the current design.
unshavedyak 4y ago
> that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear it. Fwiw, speak for.. yourself? /shrug I pay for my instance. So do many. Because it's on Patreon and fully funded right now. Yea it's small, around 16k users, but we pay because we enjoy it. Also it's ridiculously cheap to contribute, which helps.
KoftaBob 4y ago
Agreed. However, if Mastodon instances hosted attached media/images over IPFS, in theory it would lead to a significant decrease in bandwidth that those instances need to transfer themselves, as that media could be distributed p2p between users who have loaded it already. Thankfully, there already is work being done to implement this kind of functionality, giving instances the option to serve images over IPFS gateways. Further decentralizing Mastodon needs to be a very high priority for it to be sustainable longer term.
fleddr 4y ago
I will join you in your unpopular opinion. People have become so entitled that they can't appreciate the value they have in their hands today. Services like Twitter, Insta, FB, the like are in many ways incredible. We've forgotten all about that, but let's explore... They're pretty much always available. They scale endlessly without you noticing. They are fast. They have apps on every touch point. They preserve your content pretty much forever, and this content exponentially grows. They have armies of people as well as advanced AI to filter out the most horrible of human depravities, so that you don't get to see it. And for all of this, you don't pay a single penny. Yes, you'll get a few ads. You can even block those. An incredible amount of value offered, for near-zero costs.
- vlunkr 4y ago
  They also have obvious downsides, so I don't think there's any harm in attempting to create alternatives.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    They do, but that's kind of my point. Libraries full of articles have been written about the negative aspects of these services. Many perfectly accurate, no disagreement here. But think about it. We have networks in which we can connect to any other connected human being. Post near-unlimited amounts of content which is reliably preserved. We have well functioning-apps and reliable services, and relatively clean content. For the price of: 0$, and ads. What I'm getting at is that all this stuff that we take for granted, isn't a given or free when you scale Mastodon. It costs real money to run instances which hampers growth and sustainability. There's a steep human costs to moderation.
    - vlunkr 4y ago
      Ah, yeah I see what you're saying. Twitter may not be the best example though. Users don't pay anything, but they've also failed to turn a profit.
- DJBunnies 4y ago
  Terrible take, sacrificing integrity for uptime.
Octokiddie 4y ago
Maybe side effects of scaling are what Mastodon users are trying to leave behind.
pwinnski 4y ago
I think there are some differences that are key. 1. The fediverse doesn't necessarily need to scale to 100 million or more people, and if it were to hypothetically hit a hard limit at 10 million, that would still be fine. Anecdotally, many people are reporting similar levels of engagement--and more positive engagement--with even a small percentage of their twitter audience. 2. Usenet failed largely because it was overrun with spam. While Fediverse moderation is distributed and therefore inefficient, it's still done, so spam doesn't seem likely to overrun anything. In theory, each server moderator moderates their own server, and any servers that don't end up blocked. 3. At least at this point in time, people seem to be willing to pay for their own servers. Many servers are running patreon accounts or similar, and most I'm aware of are running a surplus of funds. Of course, that might not always be true. Smaller server are very cheap to run. 4. I wouldn't think of torrents as an example, but rather the web itself. So so so many individual websites are out there being paid for out of pocket, and nobody seems to be worried about them all failing at once.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- crazygringo 4y ago
  Regarding 1), I'm sorry but that makes no sense. Barack Obama has more than 100 million followers on Twitter. So no, a hard limit of 10 million users makes no sense for any messaging service that intends to connect people across the world. That would be a showstopper if there ever were one. Would you say the same thing about e-mail, that it "would still be fine" if it only ever scaled to 10 million people?
  - pwinnski 4y ago
    The world, it turns out, contains more than just hammers. The fediverse, it turns out, isn't primarily a messaging service. So yes, if you define X as "a messaging service that intends to connect people across the world," then X must support as many people as possible. But if you don't define X that way, then not supporting 100 million people isn't such a big deal. Millions of people are already happily on fediverse servers despite the lack of any current or former presidents there. People who want to follow whatever Obama wants to say can do so in any number of ways. The Fediverse might be one of those ways, or not, and it wouldn't really detract from the Fediverse if it weren't. I mean, I see stuff from the most recent former president all the time, and he's on neither twitter nor the fediverse.
kitsune_ 4y ago
But people do pay for it and set up their own instances, or pool their resources and support larger instances - and maybe that's better than having our attention monetized by opaque algorithms 'for free'.
nathias 4y ago
why would they listen if you don't even differentiate between federated and peer to peer solutions? The costs could be made thrivial by sharing in a p2p network.
yakak 4y ago
Keybase and IPFS seem to show that a P2P fediverse scales, I don't understand why people are trying to make a fidonet/BBS style fediverse where 10s of thousands rely on one person' altruism instead of every peer caching some encrypted data and responding to some queries a few minutes or hours a day.
- colinsane 4y ago
  > I don't understand why people are trying to make a fidonet/BBS style fediverse where 10s of thousands rely on one person' altruism instead of every peer caching [...] people are doing things like this too. you hear about Mastodon and ActivityPub because it's the easiest to setup, has the widest network, and works "well enough" for the userbase that's grown on it organically over the last decade. if you're passionate about a particular experimental/p2p design, go seek it out. Secure Scuttlebutt might be up your alley.
- numpad0 4y ago
  I don’t know how those protocols work but it seems a major problem is no one skillful enough is planning for a constant high-pressure streams of data. Devs always assume that posting is event based ordeal that happens in probability over time rather than as a constant flow.
vohzd 4y ago
When we talk about scale, are we really talking about bottlenecks? What fascinates me, is that LetsEncrypt has 2 beefy servers and that's it. Surely, a few million packets of highly compressible text over the pipe isn't that much of an issue? Is it? I've never done it so interested in hearing thoughts.
TheHappyOddish 4y ago
> If you're not willing to pay for the services you require... you're going to have a bad time. Agree. I've been using Kagi for a few months now and have been pleasantly surprised I haven't had to revert back to Google once. I resisted for a long time, but Googles results have been going downhill for a whle, and I realised that if I want to use something, somebody has to pay for it, and that somebody should probably be me, the user. "Unicorn" companies like social media live off investment dollars then usually ads. The former has dried up, only leaving the latter. I'd never pay $8 a month for Twitter, but I also don't care about it. I'd imagine many daily users would. I've been a part of many communities where the owners have to beg for money for running costs monthly. It's always a struggle, and I don't see Mastodon being any different without compromising their principles.
factormeta 4y ago
We ought to distinguish between Mastodon not scaling with Fediverse doesn't scale. I mean Email seems to be working relatively fine. It seems to all comes down to implementation of the protocol. While I love writing Ruby (what Mastodon seems to be mostly is build with) it's syntax and cleanliness, it always had an issue with scaling.

jeffbee 4y ago

Twitter only works because it is centralized. The fediverse works less and less well as the number of federated instances increase. It has anti-scaling properties. And, on the non-technical side, it has a disorganized anonymous set of moderators you've never met or ever heard of, with no particular guiding philosophy or rules, and these guys have total access to your profile and they can do anything they want. On the technical side, the whole thing is lossy as hell. If I view a foreign profile on my instance it shows a handful of posts and then says that "older posts" aren't shown from other instances. Then if I go to the other instance there are hundreds of posts that aren't older, they were just missing on my instance. None of it really works or makes any sense.

phoe-krk 4y ago
> And, on the non-technical side, it has a disorganized anonymous set of moderators you've never met or ever heard of, with no particular guiding philosophy or rules, and these guys have total access to your profile and they can do anything they want. Didn't you just describe Twitter?
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Nobody knows what the hell is going on with MuskBird, but when it was still Twitter there was a two-sided terms of service, under which Twitter offered its users concrete, enumerated benefits. Mastodon instances do not have "terms of service" they have "rules". The "rules" are unilateral in that they bind the user and not the service provider. The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was.
  - phoe-krk 4y ago
    > Mastodon instances do not have "terms of service" they have "rules". The "rules" are unilateral in that they bind the user and not the service provider. Of course they do. If the instance administrators do not abide by the rules they set, every user has the possibility to jump ship to an instance whose team actually does its job properly. This is undoable on Twitter, which makes me doubt that the overly general statement of > The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was. holds any actual merit.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    > The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was. The model does make it difficult for an idiot to take over _the whole thing_ and ruin it, though. Your position as a user on any given Mastodon instance is worse than it was on pre-Musk Twitter, undoubtedly (post-Musk it just has a CEO ruling by fiat, which I would argue is a worse situation than you have on most Mastodon instances), but it's unclear that your position as a user of Mastodon writ large is.
  - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 4y ago
    This is probably the right post to refer everyone to the Mastodon Server Covenant, which does bind the service provider to some level of consistency: https://joinmastodon.org/covenant https://joinmastodon.org/covenant
Zak 4y ago
It's a push-based protocol. If somebody on your server follows the account, its posts will be on your server, but they can also be there through boosts, which leads to a seemingly random handful being populated. A mechanism to backfill posts would definitely be a good addition. Edit: for clarity, ActivityPub provides an outbox from which another server (or anything else that speaks HTTP) can pull posts. Adding a backfill feature to Mastodon would not require any changes to the protocol.
Groxx 4y ago
>The fediverse works less and less well as the number of federated instances increase. It has anti-scaling properties. In some ways, and for some purposes, this is very likely a feature. A good amount of the fediverse wants small healthy communities, not Twitter but federated (i.e. everything going everywhere all the time). I will absolutely agree that it's sub-par for almost anything happening now, which is a problem. But it's experiencing unprecedented growth - there will be growing pains, just like non-federated things do when they have unprecedented growth.
drewzero1 4y ago
Every instance has its own moderation policies, and the user has the option of moving to another instance (and keep being able to interact with the fediverse at large) if they clash with the mods or don't think they're doing enough. Instance maintainers are named and contactable if you have issues with them or other users. If you don't trust them with your account, move to an instance that you can. What can you do if you have issues with the moderation team at Twitter? Honest question-- I've been off Twitter for over a decade and hear about everything there second-hand. This sword cuts both ways for the fediverse (allowing bad actors to just move to another instance, for example) but on the whole I find it allows for a more people-centric approach to online community.

Zak 4y ago

It will be interesting to see what happens when larger commercial services like Tumblr and Flickr enter this space. There's a good opportunity for startups to experiment with social apps and sites that would have previously struggled to build a large enough network to be useful; support ActivityPub and you have a network.

jacquesm 4y ago

Two observations: (1) maybe it doesn't need to scale for people to ultimately have a much better experience and (2) bottlenecks tend to be identified and resolved up to the limit of the scaling laws and hardware improvements, bandwidth cost reduction and storage cost reduction tend to over time make the impossible thing from yesterday feasible today. Keep in mind that Torrents tend to be much larger than your average Tweet/Toot/Whatever and that the interconnects between the servers need to transport only those messages for which there are subscribers, something that could be optimized for (you really only need to transport each message once per sender if there are subscribers, not once per subscriber).

Zak 4y ago
Being based around a protocol rather than a single piece of software, it will likely end up that servers intended to grow large will run different software than servers intended to stay small.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  That could well happen, a bit like the difference between say 'gmail' and your own private mail server. The big trick will then be to stop it from becoming siloed again.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  I suspect that key to the future of the fediverse is likely to be a more efficient piece of software than mastodon.
  - Zak 4y ago
    I expect very large servers will be commercially operated and running bespoke software. When Tumblr adds ActivityPub support, it will be the largest Fediverse instance by far.
    - factormeta 4y ago
      hmmm didn't know Tumblr was planning on doing that. Any more info on this?

jshen 4y ago

Federated systems are more resilient, which is the half of the trade-off you leave out. Also, “scale” is too vague a term in this context. It could mean efficiency or it could mean uptime. These are very different, and federated systems will have higher “uptime” in the sense that one instance crashing won’t cause all to crash. However, it will be less efficient, but there are huge efficiency gains to be had with the current design.

unshavedyak 4y ago

> that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear it. Fwiw, speak for.. yourself? /shrug I pay for my instance. So do many. Because it's on Patreon and fully funded right now. Yea it's small, around 16k users, but we pay because we enjoy it. Also it's ridiculously cheap to contribute, which helps.

KoftaBob 4y ago

Agreed. However, if Mastodon instances hosted attached media/images over IPFS, in theory it would lead to a significant decrease in bandwidth that those instances need to transfer themselves, as that media could be distributed p2p between users who have loaded it already. Thankfully, there already is work being done to implement this kind of functionality, giving instances the option to serve images over IPFS gateways. Further decentralizing Mastodon needs to be a very high priority for it to be sustainable longer term.

fleddr 4y ago

I will join you in your unpopular opinion. People have become so entitled that they can't appreciate the value they have in their hands today. Services like Twitter, Insta, FB, the like are in many ways incredible. We've forgotten all about that, but let's explore... They're pretty much always available. They scale endlessly without you noticing. They are fast. They have apps on every touch point. They preserve your content pretty much forever, and this content exponentially grows. They have armies of people as well as advanced AI to filter out the most horrible of human depravities, so that you don't get to see it. And for all of this, you don't pay a single penny. Yes, you'll get a few ads. You can even block those. An incredible amount of value offered, for near-zero costs.

vlunkr 4y ago
They also have obvious downsides, so I don't think there's any harm in attempting to create alternatives.
- fleddr 4y ago
  They do, but that's kind of my point. Libraries full of articles have been written about the negative aspects of these services. Many perfectly accurate, no disagreement here. But think about it. We have networks in which we can connect to any other connected human being. Post near-unlimited amounts of content which is reliably preserved. We have well functioning-apps and reliable services, and relatively clean content. For the price of: 0$, and ads. What I'm getting at is that all this stuff that we take for granted, isn't a given or free when you scale Mastodon. It costs real money to run instances which hampers growth and sustainability. There's a steep human costs to moderation.
  - vlunkr 4y ago
    Ah, yeah I see what you're saying. Twitter may not be the best example though. Users don't pay anything, but they've also failed to turn a profit.
DJBunnies 4y ago
Terrible take, sacrificing integrity for uptime.

Octokiddie 4y ago

Maybe side effects of scaling are what Mastodon users are trying to leave behind.

pwinnski 4y ago

I think there are some differences that are key. 1. The fediverse doesn't necessarily need to scale to 100 million or more people, and if it were to hypothetically hit a hard limit at 10 million, that would still be fine. Anecdotally, many people are reporting similar levels of engagement--and more positive engagement--with even a small percentage of their twitter audience. 2. Usenet failed largely because it was overrun with spam. While Fediverse moderation is distributed and therefore inefficient, it's still done, so spam doesn't seem likely to overrun anything. In theory, each server moderator moderates their own server, and any servers that don't end up blocked. 3. At least at this point in time, people seem to be willing to pay for their own servers. Many servers are running patreon accounts or similar, and most I'm aware of are running a surplus of funds. Of course, that might not always be true. Smaller server are very cheap to run. 4. I wouldn't think of torrents as an example, but rather the web itself. So so so many individual websites are out there being paid for out of pocket, and nobody seems to be worried about them all failing at once.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
crazygringo 4y ago
Regarding 1), I'm sorry but that makes no sense. Barack Obama has more than 100 million followers on Twitter. So no, a hard limit of 10 million users makes no sense for any messaging service that intends to connect people across the world. That would be a showstopper if there ever were one. Would you say the same thing about e-mail, that it "would still be fine" if it only ever scaled to 10 million people?
- pwinnski 4y ago
  The world, it turns out, contains more than just hammers. The fediverse, it turns out, isn't primarily a messaging service. So yes, if you define X as "a messaging service that intends to connect people across the world," then X must support as many people as possible. But if you don't define X that way, then not supporting 100 million people isn't such a big deal. Millions of people are already happily on fediverse servers despite the lack of any current or former presidents there. People who want to follow whatever Obama wants to say can do so in any number of ways. The Fediverse might be one of those ways, or not, and it wouldn't really detract from the Fediverse if it weren't. I mean, I see stuff from the most recent former president all the time, and he's on neither twitter nor the fediverse.

kitsune_ 4y ago

But people do pay for it and set up their own instances, or pool their resources and support larger instances - and maybe that's better than having our attention monetized by opaque algorithms 'for free'.

nathias 4y ago

why would they listen if you don't even differentiate between federated and peer to peer solutions? The costs could be made thrivial by sharing in a p2p network.

yakak 4y ago

Keybase and IPFS seem to show that a P2P fediverse scales, I don't understand why people are trying to make a fidonet/BBS style fediverse where 10s of thousands rely on one person' altruism instead of every peer caching some encrypted data and responding to some queries a few minutes or hours a day.

colinsane 4y ago
> I don't understand why people are trying to make a fidonet/BBS style fediverse where 10s of thousands rely on one person' altruism instead of every peer caching [...] people are doing things like this too. you hear about Mastodon and ActivityPub because it's the easiest to setup, has the widest network, and works "well enough" for the userbase that's grown on it organically over the last decade. if you're passionate about a particular experimental/p2p design, go seek it out. Secure Scuttlebutt might be up your alley.
numpad0 4y ago
I don’t know how those protocols work but it seems a major problem is no one skillful enough is planning for a constant high-pressure streams of data. Devs always assume that posting is event based ordeal that happens in probability over time rather than as a constant flow.

vohzd 4y ago

When we talk about scale, are we really talking about bottlenecks? What fascinates me, is that LetsEncrypt has 2 beefy servers and that's it. Surely, a few million packets of highly compressible text over the pipe isn't that much of an issue? Is it? I've never done it so interested in hearing thoughts.

TheHappyOddish 4y ago

> If you're not willing to pay for the services you require... you're going to have a bad time. Agree. I've been using Kagi for a few months now and have been pleasantly surprised I haven't had to revert back to Google once. I resisted for a long time, but Googles results have been going downhill for a whle, and I realised that if I want to use something, somebody has to pay for it, and that somebody should probably be me, the user. "Unicorn" companies like social media live off investment dollars then usually ads. The former has dried up, only leaving the latter. I'd never pay $8 a month for Twitter, but I also don't care about it. I'd imagine many daily users would. I've been a part of many communities where the owners have to beg for money for running costs monthly. It's always a struggle, and I don't see Mastodon being any different without compromising their principles.

factormeta 4y ago

We ought to distinguish between Mastodon not scaling with Fediverse doesn't scale. I mean Email seems to be working relatively fine. It seems to all comes down to implementation of the protocol. While I love writing Ruby (what Mastodon seems to be mostly is build with) it's syntax and cleanliness, it always had an issue with scaling.