Such a great take:)

There have been many systems developed over the years for handling decentralized data storage, decentralized user identities, and decentralized decision-making. There are excellent options out there for all this stuff.

IMO the problem is that there’s a huge “not invented here” problem, combined with a popular “ew, I don’t want to be associated with that technology (or more accurately with the group behind that technology)” reflex that has nothing to do with the technology itself. So projects like the Fediverse keep reinventing the wheel over and over, and whenever a project manages to do something right it’s rare for the other projects to abandon their own implementations to borrow from the best.

Eh, I’d make the argument the fediverse is overly inefficient, way more than it has to be. (But that doesn’t seem to be the actual point of the post, instead rehashing the same “distribution = good” thing without bringing anything new to the table)

Here are just a few things that could be fixed without needing to centralize fedi:

• A vast majority of instance software will store all old remote non-media data (that could easily be re-fetched when needed) permanently, even if nobody has seen it in years.
• If you’re lucky enough to be on instance software that backfills replies (GoToSocial, the Iceshrimp rewrite as of a few days ago, Mastodon in an extremely limited capacity), it will be done slowly and recursively, when much better alternatives that don’t need to deal with easy-to-get-wrong recursion handing are possible. (There is work going on to improve this, but it may take a while for it to land on enough instance software to make a difference)
• The obvious thing everyone harps on: Abysmal media caching defaults.
• No batching of activities. And relatedly, all sent activities are individually re-signed for each instance on each delivery (to be fair, handling this in a privacy preserving way is hard)
• No batching of fetches.
• RSA, just to make the above signature situation even worse
• Mastodon. Just in general. It’s by far the most heavyweight fedi software I know of, running on a synchronous and poorly threaded tech stack that’s is not very adequate to the fairly IO bound (when not using authorized fetch) and very concurrent AP use case. Running Mastodon for any instance less than ~500 active users is extremely overkill and you’d likely be suited with other, lighter, instance software if you don’t need any of the features that are Mastodon exclusive (which there aren’t that much of).
• Pleroma database rot, an exemplar of why the C2S advocates’ model of “store the raw JSON for everything” is a terrible idea (thankfully the C2S model hasn’t taken off enough to be important)

Mmhm, I’m not sure if I’m entirely on the same page. Admins have complained. Users would like to run their own instances, but they can’t as the media cache is quite demanding and requires a bigger and costly virtual server. And we’re at the brink of DDoSing ourselves with the way ActivityPub syncs (popular) new posts throughout the network. We still have some room to grow, but it’s limited due to the protocol design choices. And it’s chatty as pointed out. Additionally we’ve already had legal concerns, due to media caching…

Up until now everything turned out mostly alright in the end. But I’m not sure if it’s good as is. We could just have been lucky. And we’re forced to implement some minimum standards of handling harassment, online law, copyright and illegal content. Just saying we’re amateurs doesn’t really help. And it shifts burden towards instance admins. Same for protocol inefficiencies.

I agree - however - with the general promise. We’re not a big company. And that’s a good thing. We’re not doing business and not doing economy of scale here. And it’s our garden which we foster and have fun at.

The post is from 2 years ago but it does pose an important question which few people really talk about. The Fediverse isn’t scaling.

Any distributed system is inefficient, for one, because it lacks the economy of scale.

Sure, it’s probably worth the tradeoff, but what happens when we actually get so many people that servers start to collapse? Lemmy has ~45k active users, but let’s say we jump to 1 million active users. Small servers will stop working due to too much traffic, medium servers will need way more money to process the thousands of images per day, large servers will become too centralized. We’re already slowly going that way with the instance count steadily going down and users/instance going up.

None of this matters now but within the next 5, 10 years I think we really need a game plan in order for these platforms to succeed. You can’t just increase the servers to spread the load, the load on all instances is steadily going up.

Most of the fediverse is just text and metadata which is relatively small and easy to handle. The issue arises when we start hosting images/videos ourselves which consume far more bandwidth and storage. We are then distributing all the media across to all instances multiplying the requirements.

What we need to do is implement a bittorrent proxy as our cache server. Activpub distributes links that can be accessed directly getting served by a bittorrent proxy or torrented by the client itself. This means u dont need ur instance to have a copy of the media as long as enough other people have it ur good. If the client itself is doing the torrenting then popular posts get more people serving it thus shifting the load to many client and lowering load in each individual instance.

The other solution is to implement fediverse gold. Let it be a monero based donation with a reward split of 50% to instance 50% to content itself ie community, post, comment itself, etc. If u make it so gold ranks things heigher it aligns the incentives quality content generation and quality instance/community management with that of the financial incentives. Instances get paid to host, people get paid for heigh quality content. The whales get to have a power trip effecting rankings with pay to win, the tankie devs get their baby corrupted by capitalism. Win, win, win, win.

Usually the issue of media storage (photos, videos, etc) is brought in as an Issue. For now I’ll skirt the “legal ramifications” including copying media and privacy, as those are an ever changing landscape of legal wanking that wankers can speak of much better than one can (and evil wanking still needs to be fought against).

One idea I’ve seen floated around is to have some sort of cooperative CDN for instances. Let’s say four or five relatively kindred instances, make a commitment to last and pool their resources to maintain a joint CDN from from which they’ll get their “media federation” from. This would reduce costs and issues a lot, since by the very nature of the fediverse, if everyone builds their own caches most of those caches are going to be hosting most of the same content. Basically: deduplication, but the poor man’s version.

Another alternative is to just ditch storage of videos and images. Just take links to Elsewhere and let Elsewhere handle it.