| > This ultimately polynomial direct-connection approach is clearly fatally unscalable. Is it? I mean, let's assume you post something popular, and 17,000 servers request it. How many people do 17,000 servers cover? Like even if we assume only 10 people per server. That's 170,000 people. How many people have 17,000 followers, nevermind 170,000 ? And 10 per server seems implausibly low for an average. 17,000 hits is... not particularly notable from a server perspective, triply so when they're all requesting the same "just posted" item which is still cached. Sure if like, someone with multiple millions of followers is on your server you're going to have issues, but seriously, twitter had issues with that too. Also keep in mind that there's no algorithm pushing people towards the same "popular" posts. Things grow organically. So, at what point are you suggesting that this becomes "fatal" and is that a point that anyone that isn't hosting literal superstars is going to encounter? |
The issue is that there's no federated "popularity" metric. Every user that has followers on 17,000 servers has every single one of their posts pushed to all 17,000. Automatically and immediately, not on demand. Posts by users with only a few followers will occasionally go viral, but an outsize portion of the load is due to "whales".