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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

the IT department realizing the tiny little instance they put up as a test is now on HN

This was my thought. I'm not sure government officials themselves would be able to handle using Mastodon in the same way they do twitter/etc.

I don't really know how Mastodon works, but one thing I've wondered is, how does is a small instance affected by federating with a large instance? If, for example, some instance were to grow to a significant percentage of Twitter in terms of usage, does that spill over into servers that are federated with it? Or do instances only pull data by request so that it's own userbase size is the main determiner of load?

ActivityPub has the notion of a "shared inbox", so if N different accounts on alpha.example follow an account on beta.example then beta.example only has to send a single copy of a post made by that account to alpha.example rather than N copies of the same post.

Federating with other instances isn't binary: instances subscribe to individual users.

Better to discover now, than when there is a population level event.

Instance is down at the time of writing this.

This just shows that Mastodon isn’t fit for this use case.

I mean an IT department, having to manage resources, load, live traffic, just for what?

A PA that will ‘benefit’ (as a gimmick) a tiny fraction of the citizens.

eh, it's a pretty vanilla rails app. they can scale horizontally with the right resources, connection pool settings, and a db that is adequately sized.

chances are this was just allocated a small number of initial resources as it was never intended to hit a high traffic page like HN

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