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?
Comment on Delusions of a Protocol
chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 1 day agoSo 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.
INeedMana@piefed.zip 1 day ago
chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yes eventually, just like the instances do once enough users are hitting it. Its a matter of how much all servers in the network need to scale, but also the nature of the protocol itself. Streaming binary data is more performant than individual http api requests for instance. Event streams are the way to go un a decentrliazed network for sure.
INeedMana@piefed.zip 1 day ago
With AP does the exchange have to be http requests? If every instance had a stream instead, would that break the protocol?
With decentralized AT, who would be maintaining the stream? On the image I don’t see a connection between the alternative firehose and right-side pds’
chilicheeselies@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I suppose technically someone could implement streaming using AP payloads. So long as the format of the payloads are the same they could translate. It would be a different thing though without the pull part of it
poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 day ago
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.