Re: "Evolving ActivityPub to reduce infrastructure costs"

Deflate and gzip certainly help, you guys are right, and I don’t mean to hark on that particular one.

I just think that if there is an impression “out there” by some people that ActivityPub needs to be evolved "to reduce infrastructure costs” then this group here should be aware of that. That was the purpose of this post. I have no data to say whether that’s 1 guy out of 20,000 server admins who thinks that, or 19,999 server admins, but I think it’s always useful to be aware of anecdotal user feedback.

As there are new “competing” protocols popping up left and right, it’s also important to understand and manage perceptions, in particular if they are not entirely accurate.

Perhaps we should do a FediForum session on “perceptions and reality of ActivityPub”? (Not me, though, I wouldn’t be qualified to run such a session.)


Cheers,



Johannes Ernst
Blog: https://reb00ted.org/
FediForum: https://fediforum.org/
Dazzle: https://dazzle.town/



> On Mar 15, 2023, at 06:13, Evan Prodromou <evan@prodromou.name> wrote:
> 
> But *with* gzip compression, those duplicate strings should be close to the cost of a single copy -- maybe less.
> 
> We should use the easy methods available to reduce resource requirements significantly before we start worrying about optimizing out the timestamps.
> 
> Evan
> 
> On Mar 14, 2023 19:27, Johannes Ernst <johannes.ernst@gmail.com> wrote:
> This was brought up by somebody as a subject to talk about in the questionnaire we ask for FediForum [1] attendees when they sign up.
> 
> Looking at real-world messages as they are being sent around today, I sympathize with this comment. I suspect it would be easily possible to reduce message length by 50%, even without compression, just by avoiding redundancies.
> 
> Random example from my Mastodon outbox:
> 
>       "published": "2023-03-14T17:44:24Z",
>       "to": [
>         "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
>       ],
> ...
>       "object": {
>         "id": "https://social.coop/users/J12t/statuses/110022876518950247",
>         "type": "Note",
> ...
>         "published": "2023-03-14T17:44:24Z",
>         "to": [
>           "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
>         ],
> 
> Without changing anything, really, just documenting the right defaults would reduce the two “to” entries and the two “published” entries to one each.
> 
> I don’t know whether the particular individual had other things in mind beyond message size reduction.
> 
> But IMHO it would be worthwhile to look at ActivityPub from the perspective of efficiency as well in future work. Maybe make a list of potential candidates in the meantime?
> 
> Best,
> 
> 
> 
> Johannes Ernst
> Blog: https://reb00ted.org/
> FediForum: https://fediforum.org/
> Dazzle: https://dazzle.town/
> 
> 
> 
> [1] https://fediforum.org/ — online, 2 half days, end of the month, you are all invited :-) Disclaimer: I am a co-organizer.
>