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> The kind of person who's attracted to the idea of federation is going to be disproportionately likely to want to self-host That's not my experience on Mastod

> The kind of person who's attracted to the idea of federation is going to be disproportionately likely to want to self-host That's not my experience on Mastodon. Most people seem to be on shared instances. Very few people self host. It's mostly tech affine organisations who self host.

lolinder 3y ago
I didn't say most people would want to self-host, I said they would be disproportionately likely to want to. To make up some numbers: if 0.001% of the general population wants to self-host, maybe 0.1% of fediverse users would if it were easier. Even with tiny percentages, there are still a lot of small instances and the protocol should have been designed for that.
- shagie 3y ago
  The protocol is fine for federation without any sort of centralization - though this causes some problems to be noted. The servers... less so. The servers have difficulty when something goes viral (and the content that it links to may also have trouble as noted in https://mastodon.social/@jwz/109411593248255294 https://mastodon.social/@jwz/109411593248255294 (even though this is jwz, this link is safe)) If you have a small mastodon instance that has a member that has a post that goes viral, instead of trying to handle a handful of federation threads that your users are doing to pull content in you've now got hundreds of other sites trying to pull content from your site to theirs. For a small site, this can completely consume all the treads. A user on your site going viral can inadvertently DDOS the site. A widely followed user posting a link to some content can DDOS that content as every instance of mastodon wants a preview thumbnail of it now. This is known as a stampede. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3682129/surviving-a-mastodon-stampede.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3682129/surviving-a-mas... https://www.netscout.com/blog/mastodon-stampede https://www.netscout.com/blog/mastodon-stampede > The problem arises when a federated user with a high number of followers shares a post, or boosts (Mastodon’s term for sharing another user’s post) on their timeline. The core protocol for coordinating and sharing information among Mastodon instances is ActivityPub. When a user shares a post, it is published via ActivityPub to the Mastodon instances of all of that user’s followers. When an instance gets a new post that contains a link, it makes a request to that link to generate a preview. The process happens automatically. > This creates the fan-in problem. A user with 100,000 followers posting a link to coolthing.example.com has effectively acted as a command-and-control for 100,000 processes to hit coolthing.example.com.
- newaccount74 3y ago
  You are right, I misunderstood your comment. Maybe it is still possible to fix the protocol. I think it's pretty impressive that it does work so well in practice (from a non-self-hosting users perspective)

lolinder 3y ago

I didn't say most people would want to self-host, I said they would be disproportionately likely to want to. To make up some numbers: if 0.001% of the general population wants to self-host, maybe 0.1% of fediverse users would if it were easier. Even with tiny percentages, there are still a lot of small instances and the protocol should have been designed for that.

shagie 3y ago
The protocol is fine for federation without any sort of centralization - though this causes some problems to be noted. The servers... less so. The servers have difficulty when something goes viral (and the content that it links to may also have trouble as noted in https://mastodon.social/@jwz/109411593248255294 https://mastodon.social/@jwz/109411593248255294 (even though this is jwz, this link is safe)) If you have a small mastodon instance that has a member that has a post that goes viral, instead of trying to handle a handful of federation threads that your users are doing to pull content in you've now got hundreds of other sites trying to pull content from your site to theirs. For a small site, this can completely consume all the treads. A user on your site going viral can inadvertently DDOS the site. A widely followed user posting a link to some content can DDOS that content as every instance of mastodon wants a preview thumbnail of it now. This is known as a stampede. https://www.networkworld.com/article/3682129/surviving-a-mastodon-stampede.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/3682129/surviving-a-mas... https://www.netscout.com/blog/mastodon-stampede https://www.netscout.com/blog/mastodon-stampede > The problem arises when a federated user with a high number of followers shares a post, or boosts (Mastodon’s term for sharing another user’s post) on their timeline. The core protocol for coordinating and sharing information among Mastodon instances is ActivityPub. When a user shares a post, it is published via ActivityPub to the Mastodon instances of all of that user’s followers. When an instance gets a new post that contains a link, it makes a request to that link to generate a preview. The process happens automatically. > This creates the fan-in problem. A user with 100,000 followers posting a link to coolthing.example.com has effectively acted as a command-and-control for 100,000 processes to hit coolthing.example.com.
newaccount74 3y ago
You are right, I misunderstood your comment. Maybe it is still possible to fix the protocol. I think it's pretty impressive that it does work so well in practice (from a non-self-hosting users perspective)