ugh so I believe this is a mastodon fail and def not a protocol fail.

(at risk of being wrong, and sorry if I am)

Mastodon only shows things that are pushed into it from other servers.

Push is only important for real-time synchronization.

IMO it's obviously a good idea for any AP Server to check like once a day or on-demand to make a single HTTP Request to an Actor's outbox and show its recent stuff.

But mastodon doesn't do this.

@Viss
This might have been true in 2014, but it’s not really true in 2024. Plenty of us have Rails fleets sized in the dozens with monthly traffic sized in the tens of billions of requests. Shopify does even more than that.

That said, the floor of resource requirements can be fairly high without tuning, but this is largely due to glibc’s malloc and jemalloc helps. This makes you think it scales linearly from this floor, but it doesn’t.

@Viss Hetzner LOVES rails apps.

That said, I can’t imagine running any of the other apps (Akkoma, iceshrimp, mbin, pixelfed, peertube, bookwyrm, or Lemmy) with 20k concurrent users, though u guess there may be a few lemmy instances that large

@ZiggyTheHamster @kissane @fediversereport

@polotek I feel like people are talking about it! But maybe less publicly than they could be.

(And I have no handle on whether what Ghost is encountering is an AP thing or a them thing—or, to be more precise to which degree it's one thing or the other.)

@thisismissem Yeah, I just can't understand this.

The fedi preview DDOS is obviously a thing, but the way this is presented just seems so weird. (And if it's actually about link previews, are they going to charge more for posts that get widely boosted? I have questions.)

okay, so I had a quick look, at it seems like they're processing everything in the request/response lifecycle, instead of using a queue:

1. github.com/TryGhost/ActivityPu…
2. fedify.dev/manual/mq

So by using queue they could probably get better performance

ActivityPub/src/app.ts at main · TryGhost/ActivityPub

A full-featured ActivityPub server for networked publishing with Ghost - TryGhost/ActivityPub

^GitHub

@pete I think that's a reasonable take!

It's also partly the information that to federate Ghost posts to a group that's equivalent in size to the number of people who follow me on Mastodon will cost at least $155/month—not counting email subscribers—is somewhat startling to me.

Like, I fully understand that infra isn't free, but Wordpress (which I am not going to use) charges $25/mo for a plan that includes AP federation.

@johnonolan

Tbh I appreciate the transparency, even when the implications are startling, in part because it draws out other people's similar struggles. It seems like a whole lot of factors conspiring to be a problem—but also some great people working on those factors.

@fediversereport @thisismissem @bengo @evanprodromou

@evanprodromou absolutely - we’ll try to keep publicly documenting gotchas and things we struggle with, to create more shared resource and knowledge

Hopefully along the way we’ll also document some solutions 😅