Scaling Mastodon is Impossible
published on 2022/11/16
So let's talk more about Mastodon here. I have been using this for a few weeks now in different ways and it's pretty clear that this thing is incredibly brittle. The ActivityPub is a pretty messy protocol, and it also appears to not have been written with scalability in mind much. The thing does not scale to the number of users it currently has and there is probably no trivial way to fix it up.
But before we even hit the issue of the technology, we hit the issue of there being absolutely no agreement of what the thing should look like or what the issue actually is and that's I think much more interesting.
A thought provoking essay from the creator of Python's beloved Flask web framework