#coffeethoughts If mastodon takes over from facebook
Companies will start setting up their own servers. Creating their own communities dedicated to the companies. Terms of services include dedicated tracking questions. Soon evangelical people are hired to the companies not by resume but by their social life. Live the companies way of life. Influencers migrate servers and followers weekly, moving to the highest bidder. Choosing a server is based on vanity domains, and where your family "lives"
#coffeethoughts If mastodon takes over from facebook
#realtalk mastodon will have scaling issues with millions of servers with 100/1000 accounts per server.
It will get to a point where blacklisting becomes so cumbersome that its easier for moderators and server admins to start whitelisting.
Thus comes the decentralized silos of communities. Instead of a single server, each community will be a set of federated servers. (Hopefully not) only talking to each other.
#coffeethoughts If mastodon takes over from facebook
#Mastodon internals do not scale (unless I'm wrong). There is SO much federation related toots, metadata, account syncing data you /need/ to know about just to function.
The ideas are the same as #email but the overhead is huge
How activity pub and mastodon are implemented federation require memory & cpu that is *proportional* to the amount of activity happening through your instance. Low activity/low federation = less cpu/mem used
#coffeethoughts If mastodon takes over from facebook
@ticoombs Context for these numbers is still required.
"The database is 60GiB!!!" doesn't say *why*. Is there just that much data to track? Do they store data beyond when they need to, because they can afford to?
Numbers without context and reason are just as useless as no numbers.
#coffeethoughts If mastodon takes over from facebook
@pixelherodev https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2017/04/scaling-mastodon/ shows how one person is attempting to scale and the amount of resources needed at only 43k users back in 2017 They have 500k+ users now (With 20k active)
You don't have to listen to me, but you could take a friendlier tone when asking a question.
I dont expect anyone to have answers to questions. But if there were 1 million servers (based on a few server apis its about <10k) thats a 100x increase
#coffeethoughts If mastodon takes over from facebook
@ticoombs As an anecdote, I've setup side by side instances of Mastodon and Pleroma on two DigitalOcean droplets (just to compare them) and whatever voodoo Pleroma is doing with Erlang/Elixir it's definitely worth considering as a performant way of interacting with the Fediverse at scale.
#coffeethoughts If mastodon takes over from facebook
I should also point out that a huge, HUGE issue is the database for federation. The bigger you federate, the bigger your database gets.
Currently on the two mastodon servers that are easily searchable with munin graphs available.
One server has 7 users. And has a database of 60GB.
The other server has a database of 22GB at the start of the year, and 32GB now.
Scaling is just /the/ serious issue. It comes with lots of associated problems.