this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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So, as a rexxit refugee who doesn't fully understand the details of federation, I have a question. When I make a post or comment and it gets shared out, is the actual content shared out, or just a link back to my content. Because I can see Threads issues either way: if copies of the content get shared and Threads' userbase is so incredibly massive, then all the smaller instances are going to struggle with storage. And if links are shared, then smaller instances are going to struggle with traffic. [I suspect both storage and traffic will be issues anyway, but that each is more of a problem depending on how communication and federation is handled.]
It's just something I've been curious about, because most of the comments I've seen have been about the difficulty of moderating the content, or what Meta will do with the data or your they'll take over, but I don't recall seeing anything about the strain on actual infrastructure and the additional cost to support the influx of users.
I ran an instance for a bit when I thought the migration would be more substantial. Basically, each instance gets a full comment of every comment and post, less the heavier data like images and videos (but maybe sometimes images).
Its also all publicly available. If meta wants it, its all out there in the open now, no federation required.
So yeah, it could become an issue for smaller instances, but honestly, its a problem that smaller instances would likely welcome. I'm by no means advocating for meta here, but content, submissions, engagement; they are the life blood of places like this and we just do not have enough. No parts of the fediverse do.
I have actually seen people worrying about the computational burden of handling all the extra data this could produce. I seem to recall someone actually doing back of envelope math and concluding that federation with threads would be cost prohibitive for a lot of instances.
If that is true then the whole debate we are having is irrelevant because federation will basically not be possible for websites which are seemingly being operated without anything resembling a business plan.
You're completely right that there are likely to be major scalability issues, at this point I don't think anybody fully knows what the implications are, and it's not getting a lot of discussion. This is part of why Meta's proceeding slowly and presumably we'll see a lot of performance work over the next few months to deal with the expected onslaught.