I assure you, I’m human.

If you can read this, flip me over.

– 5 slot Mudflaps

[email protected]

I am not a bot!

[email protected]

I am not a bot.

That’s a little harsh. I was here before beehaw defederated, and the content over there was high quality. Some bad actors spoiled it for everyone over here.

Hopefully they’ll be back once the mod tools for cross-instance content management improve.

No need to sneer at them, it was a community decision. You can still interact wth the content on most other instances than .world and .itjust.works

And my axe! 🎸

Large animals generally haven’t recognized humans as natural predators, prey or competition. As environmental pressures on habitats grow as habitats undergo variously anthropocentric destruction and reduction, competition will become more fierce to the extent that humans may now be recognized as predators (fight or flight), prey (viable source of food) or competition (territorial disputes).

It’s a circle of life kind of thing.

/c/ParlerTrick cries out to be born

DNS is very leaky no matter where you run it, unless you run DNS over HTTPS (DoH). Full stop.

I’m no fan of DoH because it scales poorly. Nevertheless, a combination of Tailscale (or tailscale-like securort overlay mesh network) and an in-mesh DoH DNS relay going to be more secure than most other setups. Relay the DNS out through Tor at your own (performance) peril, but that’s going to he very secure.

I’m not a practitioner of this method, but it’s how I would approach it if I needed to.

Without engaging the questions directly (in part because I’ve been discussing this for a fair part of my evening already), thank you for articulating the major discussion points succinctly for folks to engage.

Myself, I’m receptive to good-faith corporate participation in the fediverse, from the standpoint to engagement and dialogue. I’m less enthusiastic about corporate participation in ActivityPub governance because, well… *cough, Redhat*. W3C is a good curator of protocols though, and I hope they are able to resist the worst tendencies of our corporate overlords.

edit to add because “post” is too close to “preview:” I’ve come around to not being keen on the “defederate first” plan of attack. I think the extra participation will be beneficial before it becomes detrimental. Moderation is a platform problem here, and maybe that is where the defederation hammer falls. I dunno. I’m gratified to see ActivifyPub be acknowledged as more than some toy protocol. I guess we’ll see what comes of it.

Not a lawyer, but public utilities operate under civil oversight, usually a state or.county board of public utilities. The matters are civil in party because public utilities are usually necessities-- heat during cold snaps, water and power during heat waves, etc. The utilities are obligated to provide the product, and receive special benefits for access to market with provisos that they can’t just shut people off without due process. The “elderly lady on a pension” scenario. The public utilities can generally also write off losses.

Restaurants are entirely a luxury venture, where walking out of a bill amounts to theft of goods and services. You don’t need to eat out to survive.

It’s not consistent, but it is how the laws work.

Well stated! I agree wirh you on most of it The only point I want to make is:

the size of the userbase and the fact it meant you had access to literally any type of person at your fingertips

The niche communities themselves tended to be small and focused, which is what I say improved the quality of the content. Contrast with the large, default sub’s when I think we both agree failed to add value. I say that communities happened to accrete there was because it was low effort and low friction. Now, not so much. It was a naked grab for cash by usurping the uncompensated efforts of a few dedicated people. The true believers moved on.

As a market place of ideas, reddit was a good mega mall. The anchors sucked but the boutiques were cool. Now it’s just a great big building full of disregarded storefronts after the holiday sales have ended.

having the largest userbase, and therefore the most and best content

This is a non sequiter argument. It does not necessarily follow that good content comes from a large userbase. In fact, both of those things are rarely true at the same time. points vaguely at social media

I’m not saying Meta isn’t going to try to run the EEE playbook at some point. Its likely they will, but we are all already skeptical about it. More likely, the play now is to capitalize on the discontent and missteps over at Twitter, and capture the folks over there who are leaving¹. Mastodon and ActivityPub are a functional, free and open source implementation they can use to bootstrap a micro blogging and DM service that supports the familiar hashtag semantics. If they even decide to federate with us, it’s probably just an afterthought. We’re small, and already quite hostile.

Now… Is there value in having a gateway to that content? That’s arguable. I find the kind of stuff posted on Insta to be vapid enough or sufficiently commercial that I feel no need to interact with it. I probably still wouldn’t interact with it even if it happens to show up here. Same for the herpaderp-maga dingbats and their chicanery wandering into discussion threads. Down vote, block, move on. For certain, I would never get back into bed with Meta because-- c’mon-- they’re Meta, and they’re a known quantity. Same as if Google, Amazon, Apple, Reddit (and other failed social media giants) signed on. If their content is available here and of high enough quality to interact with then I’ll interact with it from here or I won’t interface at all. But no, I won’t go into your walled garden to play with your toys. “My terms take em or leave em,” and I think a lot of us feel the same way, deep down.

I do, however, think corporate engagement here IS valuable. In the same way that social media teams at your favorite retail brands engage on the Big Socials, I would also welcome their engagement here as well because its another avenue to interact with the brand as a potential, current or disgruntled customer. There’s no reason the media teams at Nabisco or Target couldn’t set up their own instance and interact with users on other instances. If they play along with us in flgood faith, it works. If they start being evil corporations they get defedersted and lose engagement.

ActivityPub isn’t going anywhere. It’s a standard and a suite of software implementations that nobody can take away. The early adopters are here the community is vibrant llterally in spite of Big Social and now the entrepreneurs are following.

Anyway, I think you’re right to be wary of this move, and about the prospects of the EEE playbook being deployed here as well. I also think we can afford to be a little more sanguine about it for the moment because Meta’s enemy is making a mistake, and we happen to be the arms dealer this week.

Make popcorn and watch the theater. I just read Twitter is suing Meta already, so you know this is gonna be fun!

–

¹ Conspiracy theory (I just can’t help myself!): On today’s episode of Billionare Behaving Badly, Zuck underwrites a portion of Musk’s Twitterbuyout. Musk trashes the brand and liquidates the stock. Tesla buys the infrastructure and Meta buys the user base and their analytics

I’m talking about Cisco IOS-XR, Juniper JunOS, Arista.EOS and others.

Those operating systems are disaggregated, meaning different features can be restarted, replicated, scaled out horizontally, or upgraded without having to disturb the other components in runtime.

Maybe we’re getting at the same point from other ends. I’m not a traditional software engineer,but ai have had academic and professional training on these topics.

Fedizen, as a portmanteau of Fediverse and denizen

There can be better efficiencies by disaggregating the full stack into microservices and making IPC calls among scalable workers versus strictly service-per-server models which, yes, incur scaling issues from network iowait. Modern network operating systems do this, which allows heavier loaded processes more access to resources while lesser loaded processes are deferred.

Mostly serious answer: the current implementation is not going to scale effectively with growth. The software implementation is still rough around the edges, and the ActivityPub protocol probably needs more knobs to handle bulk data synchronization. Within the service, moderaton is a serious challenge with many unanswered questions.

Likewise, the back end software implementation is monolithic, meaning it’s one software stack that does everything from sign in to subscriptions to synchronization and scheduling. Housekeeping and garbage collection probably isn’t that tight, either. This is mostly speculation as I’ve watched things over the last couple of weeks’ growth.

I believe the data store is based on Postgres RDBMS, which while being robust and scalable is fussy and needs tuning when turning over large amounts of highly unique data.

None of this is an indictment on the devs! Rather the opposite, because the software IS chugging along while experiencing tremendous growth.

I expect over time the back end will devolve into micro services that communicate over a highly scalable, or stream-based messaging bus. Larger instances could probably also benefit from static caching and CDN techniques to keep pages loading quickly even while the back end thrashes.

The structure.if the ecosystem needs to strike a balance between fewer large instances and many-many small instances. In the first scenario, the scaling limit is in the monolithic stack, which introduces I/O bottlenecks and serialization delays (even if massively threaded). In the latter scenario, message state and synchronous distribution become challenging because a full mesh of federations could scale faster than network state tables have room to support. Some middle tier might be needed, and I have no idea what that might even look like.

So to answer your question, can it scale indefinitely? Probably not because we hit scaling limits pretty quickly on a number of dimensions. Nevertheless, smart people.are starting to hang out here, and I expect will take an interest in how it all works. Improvement is inevitable, and I think the early roadblocks will be overcome easily enough

Edit to add: I’m a systems engineer in my day job but I work adjacent to the applications teams. The preceding commentary is just (un-)educated guesswork on my part.

Bad donkey! This is great work