Ruby On Rails...
On top of that, the federation part is basically ingestion of all the federated servers across the world, so Postgresql would see a constant write despite the users of the instance aren't posting anything
Imagine your subscriptions and account living on one server, then when you log in that server gives you the list and your client goes and gets all the data.
We already had this sort of federation figured out, it's the open web. We just have to find a way to get the open web to provide the things that google, facebook, reddit, provided.
Easy way to contribute content.
Discovery for new content.
Search ability.
Kill the things centralized websites provided, let people host websites within that system, and let the clients handle dealing with the fact that there are all sorts of providers out there.
That would suck on a mobile device with limited bandwidth and/or data. Also lots of repetitive fetching when people have large number of followers too, no?
Why would it be any different than using a mobile feed reader to follow hundreds of blogs, or using a podcast app to follow hundreds of podcasts? Both are commonly done on mobile all the time. Checking if a feed has been modified since the last time the client checked costs virtually nothing.
bioemerl: I've been casually digging into Mastodon and ActivityPub for the last few weeks and FWIW I think you're absolutely right — with the caveat that I may be missing something obvious, it's seems very dumb for Mastodon/ActivityPub servers to be downloading and delivering content on behalf of client apps.
In my experience, you generally do that through an aggregator which has already cached the articles for you and you're doing a bulk fetch from a single host - that is quite different to calling out to hundreds of individual hosts and fetching a page from each.
> it's seems very dumb for Mastodon/ActivityPub servers to be downloading and delivering content on behalf of client apps.
Isn't that literally what an RSS aggregator does?
My understanding is that a cloud-based aggregator (like Feedly) delivers feed and state information to clients, but not the content itself.
To test this with blogs, I did a new install of Reeder, synced with Feedly, then turned off Wi-Fi. In my subscriptions, I got everything that would be in the feeds themselves (notably item titles and descriptions as created by publishers) but nothing beyond that. The offline experience was mostly useless, suggesting that the client does most of the heavy-lifting even when leveraging cloud-based aggregators.
So is making a few REST API calls a significant savings over checking a couple hundred (or whatever) RSS feeds? With "If-Modified-Since" checks being so cheap, I'm not sure that inserting Mastodon instances as middleboxen makes sense. If all Mastodon did was store subscriptions and state info, it seems like we'd have a far more resilient microblogging ecosystem.
Depends entirely on the feed. Just checked my most recent 100 entries from Feedbin - that comes back with 23k of `summary` and 508k of `content`. That was one call to return 661k of JSON covering 28 feeds.
> So is making a few REST API calls a significant savings over checking a couple hundred (or whatever) RSS feeds?
I've made one call to get (assuming >2k in `content` is a full article) 74 full articles from 28 feeds. Add another 26 and I'm looking at 27 total.
Even just retrieving the RSS feeds is 28 and 26 more for the non-included articles to make a total of 54 - double what I had to do via Feedbin. That's before we start considering response times and latency for each of those sites which would drag things down even further.
There's a reason why people use RSS aggregators!
It would be akin to having single-user mastodon instance
Wasn't it solved by moving to RSS aggregators and doing a single bulk fetch of your cached N blogs rather than calling out individually to N blogs?
It's great for reading from lots of new sites at the same time, but it's clear that it hasn't taken off and when that happens it's normally for pretty good reason
As in you can subscribe to who you want and no moderator will stop you and then you can... just comment on a blogpost or article, with no 3rd party aside from this particular space moderators
Would be interesting seeing Twitters complete backend and while mastodon might not be apples to apples also interested cost per user to infrastructure analysis too.
I have no love for Rails, but blaming it for Twitters old problems is not fair.
That said, Mastodon has much of the same problem, and is only "saved" by the combination of federation and ten years of hardware advances. Thankfully, the federation means there's plenty of opportunity for people to experiment with other implementations of ActivityPub (or even implementations of the full Mastodon API), or fixes to it.
I dread to think how much a busy 30k user instance does.
[1] https://the-federation.info/pleroma [2] https://instances.social
Sure ... but that's not what I was talking about. It's still talking ActivityPub and that seems, to me, from my low use, few user instance, to be an extremely chatty protocol. I don't know if the ActivityPub traffic scales linearly with users but it would be a not inconsiderable number for 30k users.