Maybe unpopular opinion: this isn’t sustainable
If you’ve got so many users on your instance(s) that it’s costing you $4k pcm (and however many tens of thousands of dollars he claims to have spent so far) and you need to solicit money from your users/community, this is not “decentralised”
Dan needs to stop amassing users and focus on building the software. Let other admins carry the load of actually running the service
https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113887622931474663
@WiteWulf Every link that I post, the server gets HAMMERED as every single server that's linked to the original server (eg, your followers on different instances) individually requests the same page.
I posted a link to a NoMansSky image about an hour ago, and it's had 173 requests, 5 of which are from legitimate looking users, and not just a "Mastodon Bot" in the Agent String
@WiteWulf .. eg, this whole thing isn't just costly for the people running instances. It's hitting everyone else's bandwidth/costs, too.
As much as I appreciate that, we're talking about a picture that I linked to myself, with not many followers, and not much interaction.
You know how "X-Celeb posts a link and it blows up and the server craps out, because thousands of people are clicking the link"
.. Imagine that, but nobody's even had time to click it yet, because all the activity has been just the Mastodon instances.
@Jayenkai @dalias I’m thinking out loud here (not telling you what to do or giving advice), but would moving to a smaller instance help? Afaik, mastodon.social is the biggest there is, and federates with *many* other instances. If you wanted to limit the impact of posting links to stuff you self host that could be helpful
@dalias @Jayenkai yeah, 173 requests hardly seems like “getting hammered”, but is that the price you pay for exposure/popularity?
There’s definitely work to be done on the way federation caches and forwards media (this is the slashdot effect born again, in many ways), but CDNs are out of the reach of many fediverse admins
@Jayenkai@mastodon.social @WiteWulf@cyberplace.social how broken is your server? 173 over the course of an hour is ... not even the background noise of random bot traffic. i get scanned that often just for wordpress vulns.
just yell if you need help setting shit up.
@purple @WiteWulf My server's actually running really quite well, and is typically at <1% CPULoad.
I'm just worrying ahead, for that eventual instance where something gets super-popular.
I'm only being followed by 268 people. That's an alarmingly high percentage.
If someone "big" followed me and retooted, and then their followers do... it all expands exponentially, at an alarmingly rapid rate.
@Jayenkai@mastodon.social @WiteWulf@cyberplace.social yeah it's exponential, but the internet is well versed with handling the slashdot effect. your shit should be locally cached heavily, boiling the work down to a call to redis if it's mastodon we're talking about.
this isn't nearly the problem you seem to think it is, at least on a properly configured instance with properly configured infra backing it.