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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • The post is from 2 years ago but it does pose an important question which few people really talk about. The Fediverse isn’t scaling.

    Any distributed system is inefficient, for one, because it lacks the economy of scale.

    Sure, it’s probably worth the tradeoff, but what happens when we actually get so many people that servers start to collapse? Lemmy has ~45k active users, but let’s say we jump to 1 million active users. Small servers will stop working due to too much traffic, medium servers will need way more money to process the thousands of images per day, large servers will become too centralized. We’re already slowly going that way with the instance count steadily going down and users/instance going up.

    None of this matters now but within the next 5, 10 years I think we really need a game plan in order for these platforms to succeed. You can’t just increase the servers to spread the load, the load on all instances is steadily going up.






  • It’s big. According to Wikipedia they gained 30.5 million dollars in 2022 and have almost 170 employees - not mentioning probably hundreds of other volunteers. It sounds simple in concept but storing petabytes of data safely and maintaining complex software and hardware for it is impressive. That’s why there aren’t really any alternatives to it.

    They’re also much bigger than just the wayback machine, they have multiple projects like OpenLibrary which is a goodreads alternative and scans books to read online. The IA is also under constant legal fire for archiving copyrighted materials so I bet they spent millions of dollars on that alone.












  • It’s not even copyright, they’re suing for using things they patented, but their patents are extremely general. I kid you not, they have a patent for MOUNTING CREATURES, something hundreds of games have done.

    Abstract: In an example of a game program, a ground boarding target object or an air boarding target objects is selected by a selection operation, and a player character is caused to board the selected boarding target object. If the player character aboard the air boarding target object moves toward the ground player character automatically changed to the state where the player character is aboard the ground boarding target object, and brought into the state where the player character can move on the ground.

    I’m no lawyer so I can’t tell you how well this would hold up in court but it’s ridiculous. See more: https://patents.justia.com/assignee/the-pokemon-company



  • Everyone: I wish Mozilla would just focus on their browser and not their other BS

    fast forward to them cutting costs on a Mastodon server that nobody uses

    Everyone: WTF??? I KNEW MOZILLA WAS A FAILURE OF A COMPANY CORPORATIONS ARE NOT OUR FRIENDS WHAT CLOWNS

    Threads like this make me wonder why any corporation would bother with the fediverse when this is how most people are on mastodon