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Hypothetical: What would happen if every user in the fediverse hosted their own server? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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What would happen if instead of users swarming existing servers when a fediverse service was put in the spotlight, each user spun up their own micro-instance and tried to federate with existing servers?

There's always the odd person who decides to host a personal fediverse service in their homelab for themselves, but would the fediverse work if that was actually the primary mode of interaction? Or would it fail in a similar way to now where the servers which receive the most federation requests need to scale up?

Presumably the failure modes for federation are easier to scale than browser requests since it's an async process.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The way activitypub works is that each community has a list of every server that has at least one subscriber to that community.

Every time someone does something in that community, the community sends all those servers a message that tells them what just happened.

So instead of a few hundred servers it might have to inform of your one upvote of a post, it would have to basically inform every user (every user's server)

It would be bad, it's not designed to do that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So you're saying that there's a sweet spot between the number of servers being federated and the number of users per server. I wonder what the optimal network distribution would look like.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

not a great range but im going to guess between 1,000 and 10,000 users per node.

this is usually the point where midrange servers can be used successfully and the operation is manageable by normal people. This also groups people enough that they aren't spamming the network with more requests than necessary to sync with thier friends.