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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I’ve been on the fediverse since 2017. Anyone who’s dealt with running an instance knows how much of a pain in the ass dealing with huge monolithic instances is.

    Recently on Mastodon for example, Mastodon.social has had huge spam waves of bots creating accounts on it then randomly sending replies with spam links to anyone they can find. And of course because Mastodon.Social is a huge instance with not enough moderators, people on outside instances can’t really do anything except whack-a-mole with the constantly new accounts since the “flagship instance” has open registration. At one point the instance I use now had to suspend mastodon.social temporarily to make the spam wave stop, which of course screwed up everyone’s follows.

    The best part of Mastodon is the federated nature of the network, which gets completely screwed up when you have mountains of people on a handful of “too-big-to-suspend” instances rather than have people spread out across hundreds-thousands of smaller spaces.



  • Sure but that doesn’t mean your instances should just hand your posts over to Meta??? And other people here are wrong, maybe lemmy does it differently, but on Mastodon when you defederate from an instance, your instance stops communicating with that instance entirely, rejecting all attempts to exchange information from that server. Anything the suspended instance saw before the suspension sticks around, but that’s basically it. If they never get a chance to even see the information, then the server essentially gets nothing.






  • The ideal way that ActivityPub federation works IMO is a bunch of smaller nodes coming together to make a large network.

    If you have a bunch of people all on one or two instances then you’ll have a “central hub” of the network that’s constantly overloaded.

    That’s my advice to community builders on this platform… Spread out across smaller instances, don’t just all sign up to a big one.