Comment on Delusions of a Protocol

• wisdomchicken@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  i ddos my wordpress-activitypub-enabled website every time i boost a post made from there to my 10k followers. tried every single caching plugin for it as well.

  activitypub scaling is a very real issue

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  • poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    ActivityPub is designed to scale well for millions of users with a low number of subscribers each (dunbars number and so on). It is not designed as a mass media publishing tool where a few have tens of thousands or even millions of followers.

    I consider this a feature, but feel free to disagree.

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  • INeedMana@piefed.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It gets DDOSed because after the boost, all the subscribers’ instances are calling it to retrieve the content?

    Do you think a load balancer might help?

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    • chilicheeselies@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      OP would have to have their wordpress site running on multiple instances to leverage that. It would work, but now they are paying for more infrastructure.

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      • INeedMana@piefed.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Yes, but those could be just “read instances” spinned up by a peak in requests at load balancer. Not running all the time

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  • rimu@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Cloudflare caching can solve this. Cache based on the user agent.

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• chilicheeselies@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Yeah i guess you could look at it that way. Each instance would have to scale horizontally to handle the load, which is waste.

  I could be wrong, but my understanding is that ActivityPub is just a rest api contract that one can implement in order to communicate with the rest of the “network”. Its simple, but its such massive overhead to do this all via http. Pushing all your instances events to a dedicated stream and letting the other instnaces read it can be more performant and handle the load better. The downside though is who controls the streams?

  IRC is the OG of federation, i am sure we could learn something from it and have federated networks that are in turn federated with eachother. I dunno, just thinking out loud here.

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  • INeedMana@piefed.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    But is that a limitation of AP?

    As far as I understand one could split a fediverse instance into three parts: data, backend and UI.
    The data is not shared 1to1 - each instance gets a copy of the activity and from that creates it’s own copy. Hence the same post on different instances will have different id
    The problem we are speaking about is the capability of the backend to process incoming copies. Meaning, I also understand that the part that serves the local data to UI should not be the problem

    What if there was a queue at the front and from the backend a scalable ingestion worker would be split off? Those would only do the putting the actions onto the data. Probably with per community(?) FIFO topics/partitions, so we can process data in parallel and not worry about an updoot for a post that does not exist yet

    Those would still be fairly easy to deploy and be vertically scalable, right?
    Or is there some bottleneck in the protocol itself?

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    • chilicheeselies@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      So lets say there are 100 instances. My instance needs to issue api requests to each instance to sync with the network. They in turn need to issues 100 requests to me to sync (and eachother). What about when there are 100k instances? Its exponential.

      From the looks of AT, its farily linear because its really just operating on a set of giant event streams (like kafka).

      To me, ActivityPub being based on REST APIs was always a problem. On the upside it makes it approachable, but its not really the right tech imo. Use something without the overhead of http headers and whatnot.

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      • poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        So lets say there are 100 instances. My instance needs to issue api requests to each instance to sync with the network. They in turn need to issues 100 requests to me to sync (and eachother). What about when there are 100k instances? Its exponential.

        This falsely assumes that everything gets federated to everyone, which isn’t the case for ActivityPub. You only get what you actually subscribe to with it.

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      • INeedMana@piefed.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        From the looks of AT, its farily linear because its really just operating on a set of giant event streams (like kafka).

        Wouldn’t that mean that this stream will have to scale horizontally?

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