Iβve thought about this when @ar.alπ» shared their massive #Mastodon worker activity increase related to the #TwitterMigration. This migration barely started, relative to the total number of Twitter accounts, and the #Fediverse wasnβt particularly under-provisioned.
Itβs just that activity increase isnβt linear with the total number of users/instances. And as long as we were a marginal item, existing hosting solutions could stay ahead of the curve.
The Twitter migration isnβt the real deal, itβs a relatively small stress test, but its effects already are hard to handle for most existing servers.
I believe we may be at a turning point where no #Fediverse project will be able to claim to be βlightβ or βfastβ anymore, just by virtue of the compounded network load.
It will be interesting to watch live how Fediverse scales up in reality.Thing is: Fediverseβs communication between instances is roughly quadratic in the number of instances, and itβs getting closer to quadratic as the instances are becoming more interconnected due to increased user numbers.
An additional issue: the effort of running an instance (e.g. storage space) isnβt linear in the number of instance users but rather roughly linear in the number of total Fediverse users across all instances.
In other words: if at some point the majority of Twitter users migrates to Mastodon or other Fediverse software, spreading the load across a huge number of instances wonβt make it all too much easier to handle. On the other hand, the traffic required to keep all these instances in sync might become completely unrealistic.
Interesting timesβ¦
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Ed Chivers
•But, as I said, total newbie, just thinking out loud.
Hypolite Petovan
•It is many to many, even accounting for the server blocks, and I'm not sure how a hub-and-spoke model would work given the underlying protocol design decisions.
Ed Chivers
•Hypolite Petovan
•Darnell Clayton :verified:
•Many are nervous about hosting social networks due to copyright issues, but the appeal of new customers might make it reasonable for them to consider.
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Becky
•Hypolite Petovan
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Becky
•I hope we can figure it out
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Hypolite Petovan
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Yellow Flag
•@hypolite
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clacke: exhausted pixie dream boy πΈπͺππ°ππ
•If I'm a single-user instance and follow 1000 people, it doesn't matter to me if the rest of fedi is 100 k people or 1 M people, I'll have the same traffic ... unless they all start following me.
I guess a bigger network means followers, but I don't see how it's superlinear. Especially my load doesn't change if 1 person or 1000 people follow me from mastodon.online. And certainly not my storage space.
@Hypolite Petovan@ar.alπ»@Yellow Flag
Hypolite Petovan
•Hypolite Petovan
•Most of these contacts would be shared in larger instances, but single-user instances need to keep tabs of remote contacts independently, increasing the network traffic.
Hypolite Petovan
•Hypolite Petovan
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