What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet? • Hacker News Board

Re: What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet?

#131

Post by Vendan » Sun, Sep 23, 2018, 8:34 PM UTC

ChristianBundy wrote: post #130

Vendan wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scuttlebutt has a lot of work to do before I'll consider it as even approaching usable, mostly to do with the protocol layer. It works great for very small (<1000 member) communities, but it scales extremely poorly, and the protocols are poorly designed and cumbersome to work with.

Could you point out why you think it scales poorly? I've never heard those complaints, and my laptop benchmarks 100,000 basic messages in only a few seconds. Even so, you only replicate friends of friends, which for me is about 2500 people. I'd appreciate your input, thanks!

So the protocol issues are not to do with the scaling, but with the fact that the choice was made, early on, to support node.js as the primary implementation language, and little thought was put into the protocols from that point on. It's nearly impossible to implement in anything other then node.js at this point.

I suppose I am a little off in my <1000 estimate, but 2500 is still hilariously small compared to the internet as a whole. Try it with 400 thousand users and 20 million messages (which activitypub type stuff can handle)

Re: What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet?

#132

Post by ChristianBundy » Mon, Sep 24, 2018, 3:17 PM UTC

Vendan wrote: post #131

ChristianBundy wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you point out why you think it scales poorly? I've never heard those complaints, and my laptop benchmarks 100,000 basic messages in only a few seconds. Even so, you only replicate friends of friends, which for me is about 2500 people. I'd appreciate your input, thanks!

So the protocol issues are not to do with the scaling, but with the fact that the choice was made, early on, to support node.js as the primary implementation language, and little thought was put into the protocols from that point on. It's nearly impossible to implement in anything other then node.js at this point. I suppose I am a little off in my <1000 estimate, but 2500 is still hilariously small compared to the in…

> little thought was put into the protocols from that point on

It's currently being implemented in Rust, and I'm personally working on off-chain content that would allow data to be passed in any syntax: JSON, YAML, TOML, ProtoBuf, or your favorite binary syntax. I believe there's also a Python implementation.

> Try it with 400 thousand users and 20 million messages

Why would I want to do that? I download and replicate the feeds of the people that I follow (and the people that they follow), and that ends up being about 2500 people out of the 8000 Scuttlebutt users.

Do you also scoff at apps like Signal that only download the threads you're a part of? My friends and I aren't sending each other millions of messages, we're chatting about life and playing chess and pushing Git commits. I think we can do better than ActivityPub.

Re: What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet?

#133

Post by Vendan » Mon, Sep 24, 2018, 6:23 PM UTC

ChristianBundy wrote: post #132

Vendan wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the protocol issues are not to do with the scaling, but with the fact that the choice was made, early on, to support node.js as the primary implementation language, and little thought was put into the protocols from that point on. It's nearly impossible to implement in anything other then node.js at this point. I suppose I am a little off in my <1000 estimate, but 2500 is still hilariously small compared to the in…

> little thought was put into the protocols from that point on It's currently being implemented in Rust, and I'm personally working on off-chain content that would allow data to be passed in any syntax: JSON, YAML, TOML, ProtoBuf, or your favorite binary syntax. I believe there's also a Python implementation. > Try it with 400 thousand users and 20 million messages Why would I want to do that? I download and replicat…

I implemented it in Go myself, so I do speak from experience..., and the issues are known by core scuttlebutt devs(Just scoffed at and ignored).

> Why would I want to do that? I download and replicate the feeds of the people that I follow (and the people that they follow), and that ends up being about 2500 people out of the 8000 Scuttlebutt users.

Scuttlebutt gets actively clumsy in conversations that involve people that aren't in your FOAF range, whereas stuff like ActivityPub (and others, like IndieWeb) don't. So yeah, scuttlebutt is worse, IMO.

Oh, and scuttlebutt is also a constantly growing append only log for each person, so no way to garbage collect really old stuff. Again, a tradeoff, but other systems let you choose to remove old stuff, scuttlebutt just breaks if you try.