Ask HN: How to scale internet for 10B users? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to scale internet for 10B users?

1 pointz0mbie427 comments

The world population is growing and newer generation are more and more on internet.

How do you envision an internet scaled for 10G users ?

Not in terms of technical scalability & load balancing, but in terms of organization: how to handle resources scarcity like usernames ? How to handle content moderarion ? Do you think federation can help (as it's nore like our human societies are organised) ?

Any idea ?

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Don't Facebook and Gmail already have 2B registered accounts and support 100 languages? Handling x5 is not a huge stretch of imagination. Whatever database, content storage, global syncing of data they have will likely also work for 10B users.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#User_growth "The 2 billion user mark was crossed in June 2017"

But it seems that there is some growing problems with how FB or Twitter moderate content on their platform (And it's mainly for this reason that mastodon had some success in japan, where culture is different that in eastern countries and law allows some things that US/EU considers illegal).

On the other hand I don't see moderation made by a single enterprise scale to 10B users.

Federation of 10B users? I guess this is a naming standards or unique ID issue. ReOpenLDAP is said to scale to 100 million users. So I guess we need a bunch of those, each starting with a 4 digit prefix. [1]

That said, I am not a fan of federation. I would like to see the old stand-alone websites make a come-back.

[1] - https://github.com/leo-yuriev/ReOpenLDAP

So you think identity for 10B internet users should be centralized ? And then users would be able to login into other sites with this central identity provider ?

I honestly don't like the idea of centralizing / federating such a system. One bad actor and bad management of backups, yikes... In fact, nowadays, most people don't even have valid backups (that automation can't tamper with). This doesn't even get into anti-tampering, i.e. GPG signatures and the like.

Outside of that, I believe that every nation would have to agree (hah!) on some naming or ID standard.

All of that said, I think it would make sense for small communities to have a master-master LDAP setup for all their web, chat, various apps, forums, etc. i.e. Keep things off facebook and google.

This 'master-master LDAP setup' sounds a lot like mastodon's federation (not login with Google federation) and the problem with that is an user often belongs to many communities or may change from one main community to another during his life, so he would lose all his data when moving.

Yeah, they would have to register their username, etc... in each community. It is a middle ground between stand-alone websites and global federation. There are certainly pros and cons to each.

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