Technology

Maybe I should clarify with “each user successfully spun up…” I’m mostly curious if the 5000 microservers trying to federate is a more sustainable access pattern than 5000 users hitting the website.

Sustainable in what sense?

It's way more sustainable in the sense of "one website is not controlling the entirety of the experience of a given type of service for 5000 users", for example. I think it's important to talk about specific kinds of sustainability, and specific threats to it.

Things to consider (apart from bandwidth-related considerations):

• technical knowledge necessary to safely and securely run and maintain a service
• space, time, and resources (including financial) to do so
• ability, willingness, and energy to moderate a service (this is where Big Tech platforms are falling flat on their faces, for example, and where smaller fedi communities work pretty damn well)

But instance federation is an async process that is happening constantly. A user on your instance may be a realtime load, its only sporatic (on a per user basis). Basically, me spinning up an instance is a constant burden on the network, but me browsing is just a temporary load on a single server.

My understandings is that the best situation is a good number of powerful machines with instances with users evenly distributed amongst them.

But instance federation is an async process that is happening constantly. A user on your instance may be a realtime load, its only sporatic (on a per user basis). Basically, me spinning up an instance is a constant burden on the network, but me browsing is just a temporary load on a single server.

My understandings is that the best situation is a good number of powerful machines with instances with users evenly distributed amongst them.