I’ve thought about this when @ar.al🌻 shared their massive #Mastodon worker activity increase related to the #TwitterMigration. This migration barely started, relative to the total number of Twitter accounts, and the #Fediverse wasn’t particularly under-provisioned.
It’s just that activity increase isn’t linear with the total number of users/instances. And as long as we were a marginal item, existing hosting solutions could stay ahead of the curve.
The Twitter migration isn’t the real deal, it’s a relatively small stress test, but its effects already are hard to handle for most existing servers.
I believe we may be at a turning point where no #Fediverse project will be able to claim to be “light” or “fast” anymore, just by virtue of the compounded network load.
♲ Yellow Flag - 2022-11-09 09:57:34 GMT
It will be interesting to watch live how Fediverse scales up in reality.
Thing is: Fediverse’s communication between instances is roughly quadratic in the number of instances, and it’s getting closer to quadratic as the instances are becoming more interconnected due to increased user numbers.
An additional issue: the effort of running an instance (e.g. storage space) isn’t linear in the number of instance users but rather roughly linear in the number of total Fediverse users across all instances.
In other words: if at some point the majority of Twitter users migrates to Mastodon or other Fediverse software, spreading the load across a huge number of instances won’t make it all too much easier to handle. On the other hand, the traffic required to keep all these instances in sync might become completely unrealistic.
Interesting times…
