Explained by Rob Colbert, previously the CTO, now the creative director. ActivityPub is the protocol that powers Mastodon and other fediverse websites.https:...
Gab employee talking about problems they ran into with ActivityPub at scale.
If you won’t want to listen to a gab employee I’ll summarize.
He said that with activity pub, if you are on server a and have 3,000 followers on server b server a will have to make 3,000 separate http request to update server b with each having to separately encrypt the message. All of the encryption calls use up a lot of cpu usage and all the http request use up a lot of bandwidth.
This was being used as an attack vector. People were spinning up little mastodon instances on remote vpc’s and trying to over load gabs system.
It sounds like batching responses would really improve things with activitypub. Making 1 request with 3,000 id’s with one encryption.
What do people here think about this? Can the activitypub spec be updated overtime to improve this? Or is he right that a new spec should be created. I want to hear other people’s opinion on it.
That’s what the most administrators on Mastodon already do. Some of them already closed their registration, so that interested use other instances. But this is also to avoid that a huge number of users would be affected by a possible server down.
that gab started out as the largest instance so they would have scaling problems
It’s definitely a scaling problem. An issue that big networks like Facebook and Twitter had too. But they solved the issue instead of searching the issue somewhere else.
A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.
Fediverse is a portmanteau of “federation” and “universe”. It is a common, informal name for a federation of social network servers whose main purpose is microblogging, the sharing of short, public messages.
That’s what the most administrators on Mastodon already do. Some of them already closed their registration, so that interested use other instances. But this is also to avoid that a huge number of users would be affected by a possible server down.
It’s definitely a scaling problem. An issue that big networks like Facebook and Twitter had too. But they solved the issue instead of searching the issue somewhere else.