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So it's a (unsurprisingly) hosting cost issue. Now we know what to do next time we discuss the need for privacy-friendly and user-focused social media platform

So it's a (unsurprisingly) hosting cost issue. Now we know what to do next time we discuss the need for privacy-friendly and user-focused social media platforms.

nolok 2y ago
Yes and no. They were not cancelled because they cost too much. The pilot experiment was one year. It was actually renewed a second year. Now they were at the end of the pilot, and thus a decision had to be made about making it a permanent/long term thing with its own resources and funding, or not. And it two years, barely 40 representatives migrated there. Therefore their resources to protect privacy are better spent improving the areas where 90+% of the representative actually are. Like I said in my other comment, ultimately I think this is the better move, because having a dedicated "clean" plateform would automatically lead to slighly less effort to try and make the "big ones for the public" clean.
mordae 2y ago
More like they couldn't be bothered to use anything else than a "free" service or something with a vendor to bribe them as usual. Public sector still hasn't realized most of it is actually an IT company providing judicial, law enforcement, healthcare, education and insurance services and still mistakenly believes that outsourcing their core information management to 3rd parties is a good move.
berkes 2y ago
I'm not sure what they ran, but if it's Mastodon: it scales in troublesome ways. For one, it uses Rails and is very big. Rails is known for being extremely slow¹. A difficulty with ActivityPub is that it scales rather weird. If your server has (accounts with) many followers, you're essentially DDOSsed through activity. So it scales weird in the sense that not activity on your server demands Resources, but that activity on the fediverse, which you don't control, does.² So it can get very expensive really fast. Maybe something like gotosocial could lower these costs. But that's not "stable" (as in: frequent, disruptive upgrades and missing features) enough for a govt, I'd say. Its software design, however is far better aligned with a server with relatively few (one, or a few dozen) accounts. Accounts that can have large following and activity. Whereas the Rails project is much better aligned with servers with (tens of) thousands of users. I.e. with mastodon.social. 1 I've been helping companies scale and tune Rails for over 12 years now. I know it can be done, but also what the limitations are. They are real. ² https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed-or-why-every-toot-is-also-a-potential-denial-of-service-attack/ https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed...

So it's a (unsurprisingly) hosting cost issue. Now we know what to do next time we discuss the need for privacy-friendly and user-focused social media platforms.

nolok 2y ago

Yes and no. They were not cancelled because they cost too much. The pilot experiment was one year. It was actually renewed a second year. Now they were at the end of the pilot, and thus a decision had to be made about making it a permanent/long term thing with its own resources and funding, or not. And it two years, barely 40 representatives migrated there. Therefore their resources to protect privacy are better spent improving the areas where 90+% of the representative actually are. Like I said in my other comment, ultimately I think this is the better move, because having a dedicated "clean" plateform would automatically lead to slighly less effort to try and make the "big ones for the public" clean.

mordae 2y ago

More like they couldn't be bothered to use anything else than a "free" service or something with a vendor to bribe them as usual. Public sector still hasn't realized most of it is actually an IT company providing judicial, law enforcement, healthcare, education and insurance services and still mistakenly believes that outsourcing their core information management to 3rd parties is a good move.

berkes 2y ago

I'm not sure what they ran, but if it's Mastodon: it scales in troublesome ways. For one, it uses Rails and is very big. Rails is known for being extremely slow¹. A difficulty with ActivityPub is that it scales rather weird. If your server has (accounts with) many followers, you're essentially DDOSsed through activity. So it scales weird in the sense that not activity on your server demands Resources, but that activity on the fediverse, which you don't control, does.² So it can get very expensive really fast. Maybe something like gotosocial could lower these costs. But that's not "stable" (as in: frequent, disruptive upgrades and missing features) enough for a govt, I'd say. Its software design, however is far better aligned with a server with relatively few (one, or a few dozen) accounts. Accounts that can have large following and activity. Whereas the Rails project is much better aligned with servers with (tens of) thousands of users. I.e. with mastodon.social. 1 I've been helping companies scale and tune Rails for over 12 years now. I know it can be done, but also what the limitations are. They are real. ² https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed-or-why-every-toot-is-also-a-potential-denial-of-service-attack/ https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed...