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Would you say the same if this was a blogpost? If the blog software cannot handle the HN hug of death, the person should use Blogspot / WordPress / whatever ins

Would you say the same if this was a blogpost? If the blog software cannot handle the HN hug of death, the person should use Blogspot / WordPress / whatever instead? Centralized solutions cannot be the answer to every server going to its knees.

moffkalast 3y ago
Can't Mastodon get itself a Cloudflare setup or something? They'll literally serve terabytes of cached data for free.
- TonyTrapp 3y ago
  There is no "can Mastodon...", only "can this specific Mastodon instance...". Not everyone wants to run their traffic through a third party, especially if they usually do not expect such an influx of requests.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    To be fair, you could probably run a local cache. There's no point in re-rendering a page that is expected to change at most once every minute at every single request during a hug of death type scenario.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    Well from what I understand there's some kind of interoperable network that everything works through though? There ought to be some general caching there at least. Right now every time there's something hosted on Mastodon posted anywhere it's not accessible because apparently the architecture is so bad that the average instance can't even handle a few hundred visitors without completely freezing.
    - aprilnya 3y ago
      If you’re on an instance that got the post (by someone following them, someone following someone who boosted it, through a relay, by someone having visited it before, etc…), then yes, it’s cached and you can see it through your instance, usually by pasting the link in the search bar
Hamuko 3y ago
>If the blog software cannot handle the HN hug of death, the person should use Blogspot / WordPress / whatever instead? They should probably use a CDN, and I imagine putting a blog behind a CDN is easier than putting your Mastodon instance behind one.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  Yes and no. Behind a CDN is good, but people commonly use Cloudflare which has built-in bot protection, and the federation between fediverse nodes looks a lot like bots, and Mastodon isn't going to fill out a captcha, it'll just de-federate and break the network. Configuring a CDN correctly of course will work, but I've done some basic analysis of the network and that is not happening, looks like a lot of first-time sysadmins running Mastodon without knowing about these sorts of things.
engineer_22 3y ago
It's 5:30 est, there is no hug of death. That's starts later this morning
raesene9 3y ago
lol, I didn't say centralised services were always the answer, I said this was a downside of distributed social media because this was a link to a social media post and, if it had been on $centralised_social_of_choice, it would likely have handled the traffic better.

moffkalast 3y ago

Can't Mastodon get itself a Cloudflare setup or something? They'll literally serve terabytes of cached data for free.

TonyTrapp 3y ago
There is no "can Mastodon...", only "can this specific Mastodon instance...". Not everyone wants to run their traffic through a third party, especially if they usually do not expect such an influx of requests.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  To be fair, you could probably run a local cache. There's no point in re-rendering a page that is expected to change at most once every minute at every single request during a hug of death type scenario.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Well from what I understand there's some kind of interoperable network that everything works through though? There ought to be some general caching there at least. Right now every time there's something hosted on Mastodon posted anywhere it's not accessible because apparently the architecture is so bad that the average instance can't even handle a few hundred visitors without completely freezing.
  - aprilnya 3y ago
    If you’re on an instance that got the post (by someone following them, someone following someone who boosted it, through a relay, by someone having visited it before, etc…), then yes, it’s cached and you can see it through your instance, usually by pasting the link in the search bar

Hamuko 3y ago

>If the blog software cannot handle the HN hug of death, the person should use Blogspot / WordPress / whatever instead? They should probably use a CDN, and I imagine putting a blog behind a CDN is easier than putting your Mastodon instance behind one.

danpalmer 3y ago
Yes and no. Behind a CDN is good, but people commonly use Cloudflare which has built-in bot protection, and the federation between fediverse nodes looks a lot like bots, and Mastodon isn't going to fill out a captcha, it'll just de-federate and break the network. Configuring a CDN correctly of course will work, but I've done some basic analysis of the network and that is not happening, looks like a lot of first-time sysadmins running Mastodon without knowing about these sorts of things.

engineer_22 3y ago

It's 5:30 est, there is no hug of death. That's starts later this morning

raesene9 3y ago

lol, I didn't say centralised services were always the answer, I said this was a downside of distributed social media because this was a link to a social media post and, if it had been on $centralised_social_of_choice, it would likely have handled the traffic better.