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A comment on We tried to run a social media site and it was awful. Parent comment

Re:We tried to run a social media site and it was awful by UncleEntity on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @09:01AM (#34518310)
From what I can gather every follower gets an individual copy of every post sent to their server who either deduplicates it and stores it in their database or just stores the message per subscriber.

So if 10,000 people on server A subscribe to someone on server B then server B will send 10,000 duplicate messages to server A.

I hope I’m wrong but that’s what I’ve heard.

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Re:We tried to run a social media site and it was awful by dpkirchner on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @09:07AM (#34518369)
Reminds me of:

> This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. You message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.

From the rn usenet client, back in the day.

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Re:We tried to run a social media site and it was awful by dylan604 on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @10:35AM (#34519454)
Maybe if more people thought this, a lot less posts would be made. I'm guessing that would be a net positive for society in general.
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Re:We tried to run a social media site and it was awful by cratermoon on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @10:49AM (#34519684)
> Maybe if more people thought this, a lot less posts would be made

This is why we can't have nice things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...

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Re:We tried to run a social media site and it was awful by maegul on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @09:06AM (#34518360)
Oh my! I’d heard ActivityPub was chatty but haven’t looked into the details. This, if true, sounds … not good.

Anyone with expertise here who can speak to the scaling of ActivityPub?

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Re:We tried to run a social media site and it was awful by mariusor on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @11:21AM (#34520180)
The size of an ActivityPub payload overhead is minimal.

On each individual server they are ideally saved based on their unique identifier (which are RFC3987 IRIs) and I doubt that there is any software that will do it individually for each inbox instead of storing one copy to which each inbox links to.

To minimize even this, each server can store just the IRI(which is mandated to be de-referenceable) and load the payload when prompted by UI. I doubt that anyone does this also.

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Re:We tried to run a social media site and it was awful by maegul on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @05:53PM (#34525296)
Yes that makes sense! Thanks!
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Re:We tried to run a social media site and it was awful by stnmtn on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @10:02AM (#34519037)
Why are tech people so behind mastodon? If this is true this sounds incredibly worrying to scale; to the point where mastodon is limiting it's own growth potential
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Re:We tried to run a social media site and it was awful by dylan604 on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @10:36AM (#34519470)
If. Did you research if this was true before posting a knee jerk reaction to something that might not be true? If not, you are no better than the person that posted the misleading comment.
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Re:We tried to run a social media site and it was awful by smcl on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @10:48AM (#34519672)
Remember there's a fair bit of speculation here, I just thoughtlessly blasted my question here without researching (not sure where to start, tbh) and UncleEntity didn't seem too sure about the duplicated/redundant requests. It's entirely possible that Mastodon doesn't have this problem
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Re:We tried to run a social media site and it was awful by librexpr on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @10:06AM (#34519092)
I wish people wouldn't spread rumors like this. ActivityPub does have shared inboxes[0] and Mastodon does use them[1], so no duplicate messages will be sent in your example.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#x7-1-3-shared-inbox-deliv...

[1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/a5a00d7f7adff5e0af...

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