The fediverse scalability

Odin put it best:

Odin, courtesy of @benpate@mastodon.social

The news that Meta seems to be building a fediverse-based social network (codenamed P92), started a nice discussion on the fediverse about what to expect, from such a massive organization joining the fediverse with it's own software. Some people think that this is a good news for the fediverse, in the sense that it must be doing something "right", to spin the interest of an entity like Meta. Others, like me, doesn't see that as an interesting thing, for the simple reason that P92, will be out there, somewhere, and I will never, probably, interact with any of it's users.

Discussing with others, there are well-principled people that would like to make the fediverse inclusive and "better for everyone". This is, however, the same, centralized view, that drives commercial social networks such as twitter and Facebook.

The main issue, as discussed, is represented by the so called "federated timeline". Simply put: when two instances federated with one another, all the events for all of the users of that instance, percolate to the federated one, including boosts, likes and whatnot. It's my opinion that if the federated timline is forced on everyone, we will find ourselves with a handful of massive instance providers, essentially going back to the situation we tried to avoid.

That's why, I said that the federated timeline must go to the trash can.

There is no way that my instance, running out of a cheap $5 VPS, can sustain something like a federated timeline if completely forced at the protocol level. What will happen, is that I will need to shut it down, due to the enourmous amount of traffic the fediverse is going to generate and like me, a lot of other operators will do the same. The end result, will be that the fediverse will become centralized like the commercial social network it tried to disrupt and then, the same algorithmic timelines will start to appear because: "why not?".

As others said, The fediverse, even considering the sickness of ActivityPub as a protocol, resemble the most how our society is organized. You have the neighbour (your follows and followers), the city (boosts), the country (your local instance) and the continent (the federated instances). In real life, there is no way in hell that you will interact, daily, with somebody from Iceland, or things like that and in my case, I was able to build a nice timeline of people I like. As I wrote in another post, there is a high chance that the people I follow, right now on the fediverse, will be enjoyable to drink a beer with at a pub, or that the people following me, will enjoy meeting me in real life in whatever situation.

The last thing I want, is to have a timeline populated of random garbage spit out by billions of people. I'm not spending my time on the fediverse to deal with filters, and blocks, and defederations or whatever, I just want to have fun. And the actual setup is what makes the fediverse fun, for me.

Pleroma has a way of federating named "follows only", meaning, that you will see the content of a user from another instance, if and only if you actively follow them. If not, it will be like being in your neighborhood, from time to time somebody might boost something interesting coming from other instances, but you will not be flooded with toxic content, hot-takes, or whatever the shitty dynamics commercial social networks forces on their users. Honk works the same way. If you don't follow people, you will never see any content in your timeline. Your small corner of the fediverse, that's manageable, enjoyable and fun.

Do people want the masses on the fediverse? Sure, let them join, be it from P92 or whatever, but the importance of the distributed architecture of the fediverse, is that I'm not forced to interact with those masses, in any way, shape, or form. Odin on top put it best (thanks benpate): "The fediverse is not a place, it's a protocol". If you will force me to deal with the masses in active manner, to cleanup my "place", that will be the moment I will leave the fediverse.

Because it will not be fun anymore.