Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by LurkersWillLurk 1987 days ago
Respectfully, how exactly would federation have helped with this outage?

Signal's own official clients failed to properly back off from spamming the server with incessant requests. I'm not entirely sure how more third party clients would have helped with this issue.
4 comments
Matumio 1987 days ago
It would not have prevented the outage. But there would have been other servers where people could register and communicate during the outage. At least with Mastodon this seems to be working in practice. Over-populated instances usually switch to invite-only registration.
link
Youden 1987 days ago
Federation would, technically, decentralize the network and ensure there is no single point of failure. Federation would mean Matrix is about as likely to have a network-wide outage as email (or, for a more apt comparison, Mastodon).

Realistically, I understand that the Matrix.org homeserver is an enormous part of the network and an outage there would be comparable to this one.

However I believe that to be an orthogonal problem that also should be solved.

I'm actually curious, why does Matrix promote the Matrix.org homeserver so strongly? Why isn't there an easy link to community-run homeservers?

If you look at Mastodon for example [0], their onboarding process directs you to a registry of community servers [1], which actively promotes diversity in the network and therefore network resilience and reliability.

Matrix meanwhile, just links you to element.io, which creates an account on the matrix.org homeserver.

[0]: https://joinmastodon.org/

[1]: https://joinmastodon.org/communities

link
xorcist 1987 days ago
"Oh no! Ten million people set up their own web page yesterday!

The web broke. We just have wait a bit while the Elders of the Internet sort this one out."

Said no one ever.

link
bilal4hmed 1987 days ago
My question exactly, if majority of the users have an account on the @matrix instance and if that fails, wont the same issue happen ?
link
rglullis 1987 days ago
The instance dies, not the whole system.

Synapse (Matrix reference server implementation) had for a long time severe performance issues when dealing with large rooms. Clients would try to enter a room and would take literally forever to be able to get messages for that room.

Also, the natural reaction from people upon seeing how some rooms from bigger instances were causing problem was to create their own instances and their own rooms.

Federated protocols are anti-fragile.

link