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Comment by pacbard | Hacker News Reader

The number of users of an instance is not equal to the workload for the instance because of how federation works.

The frontend serves 30,000 users. The backend processes their posts alongside the posts of everyone that replies to them and all posts from people that the “home” users follow. So, while the home user base is 30,000, the effective load on the back end is much more, depending on how many followers/following a person has.

You can find posts from people who were hosting their own single user instance that went down because of a popular post that got federated across multiple instances.

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> You can find posts from people who were hosting their own single user instance that went down because of a popular post that got federated across multiple instances.

I either understand something wring about it or that still points out to Mastodon being slow and badly engineered.

Like, the updates are per server not subscriber right ? That's at worst few thousand requests, all of them can be essentially served from RAM. Even if you get 10k responses to your comment, 10k responses within say 5 minutes is still only like 30-40 req/sec, that shouldn't be much even for Ruby

> You can find posts from people who were hosting their own single user instance that went down because of a popular post that got federated across multiple instances.

That doesn't give confidence to the typical self-hosting Mastodon user who goes 'viral' somehow. So they should expect that if they were to have a post to go viral across instances they have to become a sys-admin for the day to bring it back and scale it up to handle the traffic.

No wonder normal users are not self-hosting their own instances to fully own and self-verify themselves on Mastodon and have to search for an instance to re-centralize to.

That is very disappointing and not a great sell for Mastodon so-called 'verification', but not at all surprising.

So what I'm hearing is that the whole thing was designed as though any significant scaling was never really expected. That's not exactly encouraging for its future.

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