volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@helgek @darnell @nickapos @jan

If you make a post now that is real hilarious, or a really cute cat, then you might get a couple of followers, so maybe not in 5 minutes but maybe in 5 hours you'll have more followers (depending on the cat) which means your next post will have n times more ActivityPub inboxes for your instance to deliver posts to.

So sure, if we stipulate that the network doesn't change or grow, then twice as many posts leads to twice as many messages, but I am happy to say that one part of social media is new connections being formed, and so the big-O analysis is making this greater than linear.

Which again, I've heard a bunch of people say in practice they have seen their costs spike.

@helgek @darnell @nickapos @jan

"if people post twice as much, you should expect twice as much traffic"

Here's where it broke down. People posting twice as much ended up requiring servers to spend twice times twice (or whatever) amount of bandwidth as the scaling went on.

This is core part of ActivityPub so it's unavoidable under that system.

@helgek @darnell @nickapos @jan

No! You have it wrong, and your error is exactly the point here!

ActivityPub specifies that every post should be delivered to different instances following that post, so no, if people post twice as much you should NOT expect twice as much traffic. You should expect traffic to grow by number of posts multiplied by number of followers, which feeds back into number of posts, which makes the traffic requirements not so simple!

These are exactly the scalability issues that I noticed when I read the ActivityPub standard.

@doctorcdf

Normally the way it works is that the compromise would be drafted and agreed to in a document that would be the basis of the rules committee.

It's more or less what was agreed to by the entire chamber, and it would require the entire chamber to agree to changes later on.

So it's not really up to McCarthy personally. It's more complicated than that.

@lovelylovely

I really wonder what is going through their heads.
Are the House Democrats really so stupid as to miss this opportunity to get a really big say in legislation, or were they doing some sort of really cynical ploy, intentionally setting themselves up for failure that they will blame on Republicans to try to get votes the next time?

Either way, Democratic priorities have been thrown under the bus now. And I am very annoyed about that.

House Democrats unanimously threw themselves under a bus here, and we really need to not forget about that over the next two years.

Every time they complain we need to keep in mind that, well you idiots chose this, and we need to vote you out as soon as possible.

@nickapos @darnell @jan

Sounds like my comment went right over your head there.

@lovelylovely

So the question I have is, well a little bit of background first:

Over the last few days Democrats had the opportunity to have a few of their members answer present to end all of the drama and set up a situation where the Republicans would negotiate with Democrats to get some Democrat priorities into legislation in return for getting past the fringe clown show that we saw.

But the Democrats chose instead to vote unanimously in ways that promoted the fringe and forced Republicans to bow to their wishes, actually putting the fringe representatives into gatekeeper rules that will lock Democrats out of the process.

So, who came up with that strategy? What Democrat decided and convinced the rest of them to shoot themselves in the foot that way? Was it Jeffries?

Someone on the Democrat side needs to be held accountable for that really horrible mistake.

@nickapos @darnell @jan

I'm talking about the underlying protocol, ActivityPub itself.

No matter what platform is implementing ActivityPub It has to make all of these connections and send all of these messages that just don't scale particularly well.

It's not about the language or how it's written. It's about the requirements of the system itself.

@darnell @jan @nickapos

Ergh, It just makes me think that it's yet another way that PKI encryption stuff built into the core of the system could have really improved things.

@jan @darnell @nickapos

Well right. Except for the things that make costs go really high, costs are low!

Yeah, following lots of remote people is one of the particular contributions to costs getting out of control under the design of ActivityPub, but since the whole offering is federation, well.

As long as you don't federate your federated part of this federated system you'll be fine? Not much of a vote of confidence there!

@jeffowski

Benefiting the oppressor is not being neutral

@jeffowski

Counterpoint: "do no harm"

@ravenonthill @darnell

When I mentioned this concern to one group somebody replied that they are not actually teaching big-O scalability analysis in computer science all that much these days.

I don't know if that's true, but considering this, I wouldn't be surprised.

@stevesilberman @Al_Drago

Really it's only jaw dropping to people who continue to overestimate the amount of sway Trump has these days.

The guy has long sense shown himself to be an impotent has been.

The sooner we fully embrace that and stop stroking his ego by treating him as if he still has sway, the sooner he will go away and stop being so damn annoying.

It's not jaw dropping. It's just the way most people would react these days.

@darnell @nickapos

Well in the end it's all about big-O analysis that I get the impression was rarely ever considered.

@kaelef @darnell

Well it's not an answer to your question, but I don't know anything about development or future of ActivityPub.

I'm just sitting here in my armchair to say that the improvements I would want to see would probably represent a whole new standard not just tweaks to this one.

For example I really grumble that end-to-end encryption sorts of features were not core to the whole thing. I really think ActivityPub missed a chance to really empower users using PKI in its core but at this point it would have to start from scratch for a solution that I would really be into.

I'm not sure what they could do about scaling now. The decisions leading to those problems might be too far ingrained into the standard to really address them.

@nickapos @darnell

No, I have heard people complaining about it even on relatively modest instances.

I've heard people complaining that marginal increases in users on their instances led to them having to completely reevaluate hosting plans because of how quickly it grew.

That's how such exponential scaling works, though. Small increases in users leads to large increases in costs.

@shakespearenut

I don't like McCarthy and I don't particularly like this speech, but I had to laugh that Jeffries came across as a badly written SNL character doing ironic beat poetry out of place.

That list of alliterative words was really the cherry on top. He seemed so proud to have come up with it, but, come on.

@ZuriBella

Oh it wasn't pointless.

The Democrats' strategy of unanimous voting managed to push the Republicans into caving to their fringe rebels so that now they've lost that enormous bargaining chip.

I have no idea why the Democrats chose that strategy, but hope it got them where they wanted to go.