Comment on [deleted]
Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 5 months agoThe fediverse as designed is actually pretty inefficient. If it ever were to go to Reddit scale it would melt down.
That’s because there’s effectively no batching for federation currently … every single vote from an instance is forwarded back to the instance hosting the community and must be processed individually. So if you get 500k votes on something even if it’s from 200 servers, the servers hosting the community have to be able to withstand the flood of votes and store the associated data… And that’s just votes.
Worse yet, those votes then get replayed to every single one of those 200 servers one by one. So every server needs 500k vote entries and all the associated traffic … even if half of the servers are just 1 guy looking at cat videos once a month.
Federating actually is way more expensive than just adding another user as designed.
meekah@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’m sure if we reach that point, someone will add a method for batching cross-server communication. That’s the beauty of FOSS
fubbernuckin@lemmy.world 5 months ago
… Eventually…
Here’s a bug on Mastodon that’s existed since 2016 that makes small instances unusable. github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34
meekah@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That’s kinda the exact opposite. Not many people want to use small instances, so not many people are interested in fixing something like that. However, let’s say lemmy.world becomes unusable because of too much cross-server communication. That would cause inconvenience to way more people, increasing the likelihood that someone will do the work to fix it.