Forest @forestjohnson@pixie.town

Listening to *It's all about the Pentiums* by Wierd Al Yankovic while obsessively researching the newest SBC releases of the year

@polymerwitch

That would be a bold move on their part -- some fediverse admins will ignore it, some will fediblock right away. The more blocked tumblr gets, the less metadata they can collect from this fedi excursion.

Yes, injecting ads is standard practice for social media -- but injecting ads that masquerade as real posts has traditionally been done via "hiring an influencer" rather than by simply inserting rows into a database somewhere.

I think centralized social media is a very carefully orchestrated frog boiling operation, and tumblr probably can't afford to do something this drastic.

Wow this is an incredibly long and detailed read, great for desktop / integrated software developers like me to understand how these kind of attacks work and how to prevent them

https://emily.id.au/tailscale

@starless @fack @vvesley

I miss the one that said Gotta Go Fast but it got destroyed by dishwasher.

@maloki There is also a bot that measures total active fediverse accounts: https://github.com/gallizoltan/usercount

@chaosmonkey@masto.ai @huan yes this post was a part of a series I made where I talk about how gotosocial is being sponsored by NLNet. The good news is that its not a mastodon rewrite, its just a different fediverse server implementation. They are all compatible & part of the same network

@j3s

The hardware requirement to federate George Takei's toots right now is surely massive -- think ThreadRipper.

GoToSocial will probably be able to achieve a similar result on a mere Raspberry Pi 4.

@j3s

It's going to be a long time before GoToSocial is usable enough that it can see real-world load. But based on what I have heard about Mastodon outbox federation performance, I'm very confident that GoToSocial should smash Mastodon in terms of its ability to keep up with accounts that have thousands of followers from thousands of servers and post frequently.

@j3s

There's a lot that I don't know.

GoToSocial has had some performance issues in the wild already, mostly related to missing indexes on database / non-optimize queries. That's typical for any new application and usually very easy to solve in a relational database.

So I see two ways forward for the fediverse, either:

A. Mastodon has to be refactored / rewritten to use Ruby Fibers, the non-blocking concurrency feature for Ruby

OR

B. We have to switch to a different Fediverse software that is based on a more modern software development framework.

Personally I think B might be the best option, and my money is on GoToSocial!!

These days pretty much every modern web server framework or library is based on the same non-blocking IO primitives that `nginx` invented. But Mastodon is still lagging behind on thread pools where each thread blocks while it's waiting for the remote client or server.

Mastodon doesn't fork off a new process or spawn a new thread for every request, but it's darn close to it.

How did the web evolve past this scalability challenge? It didn't necessarily involve buying a faster computer. The developers of the venerable `nginx` web server famously struck first blood when they cracked what they called the "c10k" problem for the first time. (handling 10 thousand simultaneous connections to the same server application).

This happened in the early 2000s, and the nginx server in question was consuming only about 2.5MB of RAM during the load test.

This style of client and server application has its roots in things like `inetd` (internet daemon) and CGI (common gateway interface). Benno Rice explains in a section of his excellent presentation covering the history of linux and unix:

https://video.strongthany.cc/watch?v=o_AIw9bGogo&t=4m58s

> [Then things changed...] the internet happened. That inetd model was great when [you were dealing with a small amount of stuff going on], like, [only a few users would have telnet connections] ...The web looked like it would work that way too, and then it became really really popular. And so you end up with situations where forking off a process to handle every single connection doesn't really scale that well.

Many Mastodon server users and admins have mentioned that the load from all the new users is causing a strain on the system -- large outbound queues, delays on messages, slow page load times, etc.

The good news is that these problems don't have to be solved by buying a more powerful computer.

The Mastodon software uses an old (circa 90s and earlier) way of organizing its code, which I like to call "one-thread-per-request with blocking IO"

One of them is GoToSocial, which I see as a dark horse poised to surpass Mastodon and become the best general purpose Fediverse server implementation.

https://nlnet.nl/project/GoToSocial/

Congrats to everyone who has worked incredibly hard to make that project a reality!

Look at all the cool projects that NLNet is funding right now !!! 😮​

https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html