Gregory's ServerFediverse can scale. This project is very interesting! (Although their use of "Mastodon" instead of "ActivityPub server" is grating).
 5 comments
@doctorambient imho the interesting thing is that there is now an existence proof that software can be built speaking fediverse protocols that scales to Twitter size. That had been a conjecture — and a sometimes disputed one — before. For that, their specific implementation doesn’t really matter.  @J12t I agree with you that it constitutes an existence proof that it can be done. But If they really spent a decade building the back end tools, it may not be a practically useful proof. Kind of like a proof by contradiction in mathematics, it tells you that hypothetically you can do something, but it may not tell you anything about actually doing it. Sadly. I think Mastodon may have too much lock-in. I'm not sure there's another team out there that can rebuild it from scratch efficiently. @doctorambient Nah :-) The 10-year product is their main product, of course they have invested in it, and presumably you can have all of its features if pay for it. So it's entirely available and it will have competitors real soon if it is any good. Also, Threads is the first such non-Mastodon scalable implementation. I think there will be others who also think that 25 person years (the supposed Threads development cost before launch) was "scrappy". We're only reaching the end of the beginning.  @J12t the Fediverse scaling issues are mostly non-technical IMO. Tech is easy to fix, moderation/financing/governance/… is far more complex. |
@J12t So, if I am understanding the link, they have built a commercial product called Rama, that acts as a generic infrastructure tool for dealing with distributed processes.
On top of this they implemented a Mastodon clone (in/using Rama). But surely the impact of this will be very limited, because, from the description, it looks like Rama is going to be a closed source product. Or am I misreading that?