Gab employee explains why ActivityPub sucks
youtu.beGab 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.
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If this was/is such a problem, big instances like mstdn.social and mastodon.social would do something. To me, it sounds like whining by a largely excluded society of Nazis by creating “issues” that apparently aren’t, in order to generate attention.
He sorta addressed that by saying that gab started out as the largest instance so they would have scaling problems mastodon.social didn’t have.
And that might be the design of it I guess. maybe it just works better with many small instances than huge facebook size instances
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.
Activitypub has shared inbox, which solves that problem (and is implemented by Mastodon). But i suppose it is possible to ddos a server by sending many messages to individual users. Blocking that might be quite tricky, especially as the Mastodon codebase seems to be in a very bad state afaik.
I need to read about the shared inbox .
TBH Gab looks pretty nice in the UI department, I really like it if it not were full of nazis.
Yeah, that’s because they didn’t make it. The UI is Soapbox which was made by Alex Gleason. You can use it with any fediverse instance.
Color pallet is good. Reading replies and stuff kinda sucks there.