The topic of Decentralized Twitter (Dewitter) App Scenario led me to write this post…
When talking about decentralized Twitter, we have that in the form of Mastodon, Pleroma and other microblogging apps that federate together in the Fediverse.
Some more combinations of Solid + ActivityPub to ponder, maybe. In a recent toot and another follow-up I discovered how incredibly much space is needed by server instances to save timelines / social graphs. For instance, a single-user installation running for 2,5 years requiring 821 MB and a 14 user instance with DB size of 4 GB. Interesting is that more users per instance requires less storage space per user. As @masto.host explained to me:
In terms of sizes scaling with the number of users, usually it doesn’t scale linearly because if you have 10 users and 5 of them follow remote account X. The posts from account X are only federated/stored once. So, in general the larger the number of users the smaller the database space per user.
Obviously depends on usage. If you have a closed Mastodon server where the users down follow remote users or a small number of remote follows, this isn’t the case.
In the future Fediverse will probably move from a federation model to hybrid decentralization, supporting both federated and p2p nodes. This move will be accompanied with support for content-addressing (see e.g. ERIS).
There are two things I wonder about:
- What are experiences with Solid in terms of storage space and also amount of requests to reconstruct social graphs (performance), esp. when having a lot of following/followers and you are an active communicator. Interesting to hear from SAFE as well (@happybeing?).
- Thinking of combinations with federated ActivityPub-based solutions that would lead to smaller db sizes on the server instances, and more control / ownership over own data.
Especially the Direct Message functionality of Mastodon / Pleroma can be improved. This is private data (only select audience can see it), but if I clean up my own DM inbox (delete messages) via federation it leads to similar deletion of messages in the inboxes of those people tagged in the DM discussions.