It’s just that activity increase isn’t 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 isn’t the real deal, it’s 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 “light” or “fast” anymore, just by virtue of the compounded network load.
♲ infosec.exchange/@WPalant/1093…
@hypolite I was wondering about this yesterday - I am a newbie here but I've noticed that the instance I'm on gets pretty slow during the North American day. With all these instances talking to each other, it feels like linear user growth is going to ramp up traffic by some kind of square (or exponential?) factor. I don't know how the system is designed, whether it's many-to-many or whether some sort of hub-and-spoke design might help?
But, as I said, total newbie, just thinking out loud.
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.
@hypolite I read the post (ok, skimmed it) and you're right, hub and spoke would probably fall foul of some of the design philosophy on here. I was thinking in terms of how content distribution networks work, but of course there's no "central" place we're all pulling content from. It's definitely beyond my knowledge/expertise but it's an interesting problem.