> On a technical level, prioritizing big-world indexing over small world networking has multiple benefits.
It does ... if every node interacts with every other node on behalf of every one of its users. But if a PDS at pds.example.net mostly interacts with the fifty or so instances where its users have contacts while rarely to never interacting with 10,000 other instances, it doesn't need the BGS firehose, and it can integrate "app views" for its users directly into the same server.
Wow! I had forgotten about #Elgg. OpenUniverse and I had accounts on an Elgg instance in South America (time-wise, it was right after Mike's initial #Friendica instance closed, so we shifted existing conversations over) and got to see some of the posts about their #federation plans.
Note: this may have even been before changing the name from #Friendika to Friendica.
To what @lxo posted, because vertical scaling ("bigger servers") has its limits, the big #corpocentric #socnets split things up and use technological workarounds to appear to be one big server.
For example, one of the first things is to move the #database management system ( #dbms ) to a separate machine. Once this happens, hoizontally scaling the database by clustering (multiple servers handling the same db) is possible.
Next, we can perform similar clustering with the web server, and we can perform similar clustering at the processing layers.
Once we do this, we can expose things through various interfaces. This is what #cloud providers do with their separate compute, database, and storage services. Each such service relies on hundreds of servers pretending to be one.
Finally, we come to #federation, where we skip the pretense that everything is one big server and instead have many separate individuals and organizations running servers.
It isn't inherently more complicated, but it does mean users have to know that we're not all on big-centralized-server.com.
When someone closes their account on $INSTANCE, let people that want that same username know that name is available on other instances, but not that one. Any other choice risks someone accidentally sending non-public information to an account which is no longer the one they thought it was a year or two ago.
β² @dredmorbius@mastodon.cloud: Federated Networks Association
Federated Networks Association Ry is a non-profit volunteer organization that aims to spread knowledge about federated web projects and help people and projects involved in this area.
The #federation model is effectively collaborative #moderation. The behaviour of every individual is too hard to track, but the limits of what a particular server considers permissible is more easily discovered. A user can pick an instance based not only on their own instance's limits, but how their instance handles federation with instances with significantly different limits. Importantly, this model includes transparency and accountability. By contrast, shared blocklists address the scalability problem, but do so entirely without accountability. One of the largest shared blocklists on Twitter systematically blocks trans people, especially trans women. This list came about as a way to address the non-moderation of Twitter, but then, without accountability, became a tool furthering inequality and invisibilising marginalised people. What in scuttlebutt prevents this?
This requires some adjustment and fine-tuning, but you can subscribe to it through Diaspora, Friendica, GNU Social, Mastodon, Socialhome, Hubzilla, or anywhere that can use #OStatus, #ActivityPub, #Diaspora Protocol, or #Zot.
Sean Tilley (dsh@deadsuperhero.com)'s status on Saturday, 23-Sep-2017 06:41:23 UTC
Sean TilleyIt's always fun to see where my connections are coming from. I keep all of my contacts in collections based on what federated networks they use, which makes for tidy accounting. Also, I'd like to think that it adds a little bit of extra variety to my stream - people from GNU Social instances, for example, may act quite differently than people on Mastodon ones.
I connect to over 7 platforms now, through the Diaspora protocol or through OStatus. Everything else gets cross-posted to either Twitter, Pump.io, or Libertree.
Diaspora - 91
Friendica - 9
Hubzilla - 42
GNU Social - 47
Mastodon - 52
SocialHome - 2
postActiv - 9
Keep in mind, this number is constantly growing! I actively add people from platforms I had previously been active on, and occasionally will add random contacts from various different networks who appear to be active. This allows me to discover new nodes in the network organically over time.