this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Retroactively?? I'm sure that one could configure this to not be the case... no?
"Collapse" meaning what, exactly? Do you mean run out of storage from the volume of content, or that processing all the messages is too taxing?
How does it scale differently than Matrix?
Out of curiosity, why do you say this?
Years back, I setup a Synapse's server on my personal server (Yunohost). At some point, I joined the "big" Matrix room. Bad idea: RAM and CPU usage went through the roof. I had to kill the server but even that took forever as the system was struggling with the load.
But don't just take my words for it:
https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/7339
Last comment is from less than one year ago. I was told things should be better with newer servers (Dendrite, Conduit, etc.), but I've not tried these yet. They're still in development.
The Matrix protocol is a replication system: your server will have to process all events in the room one or more users attend(s) to. There is a benefit to this: you can't shut down a room by shutting down any server: all the other ones are just as "primary" as the original. Drawback: your humble personal server is now on the hook.
XMPP rooms are more conventional: a room is located on one server. That's an "old" model, but it scales.
https://www.ejabberd.im/benchmark/index.html
That's for the host. For other attendees, it's much lower.
I don't think I atteld any public room out there with 3k users, so I can't report my first hand experience, this is the best I found. But I never had to check for load issue on a small server (running Metronome and many more services).
I don't use the Fediverse the way I engage with individual people. If I want a closer relation with someone, I don't want to be bound to yet-another-messenging system, let alone on multiple accounts
And another reason is I may not want to be bothered by people I don't know, regardless how much I could appreciate reading and/or exchanging with them in the Fediverse.
Ignoring or declining requests from strangers can leave a lot to interpretation and then frustration. Remove the button and no one is tempted to press it the be disappointed with the outcome. Less drama.
And that's only considering well intended people.
But these are my humble 2cents.
It appears that issue is closed as per this comment:
So pehaps this issue that you are describing is now fixed?
This only scales so long as the single server is able to keep up with all of the requests. In the replication, as you have described, all the instances sort of act like load balancers -- they spread the individual requests, and concentrate them into single links between the instances.
I think I see what you are getting at with this. Would it be like, for example, if your Lemmy account is also tied to Matrix, then someone on Lemmy could send you a request to talk on Matrix? Granted this could already be assumed to occur if one uses the same username for all of their accounts, but it could possbily be more of an issue if it was more directly integrated. That being said, I'm not sure how realistic this scenario would be since the Matrix protocol is completely independent of Activity Pub. The only connection between accounts that I can think of is OAuth.