Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Mastodon seems to be a lot more fragile than USENET; the whole PubSub thing seems to assume better connectivity than old-style distribution permits

This blog has been offline from ActivityPub / Fediverse for a few days, due to a bug in the WordPress Supercache plugin regarding (not) honouring the HTTP Accept header.

Back in the days of USENET, a node going offline for that length of time would not be a huge problem; the articles would be pushed or offered downstream to other peers, and dropped if they were deemed too stale (generally 1 week, often more) and all that would happen is a brief spike.

In this case with ActivityPub on WordPress however, an example Mastodon server has dropped everything posted in the past 4 days with the exception of the first thing I posted this morning, after finding a workaround for the bug.

Yes, it’s a different world with different choices Alec, blah blah blah blah blah, but I am not impressed. If the ActivityPub architectures are not tuned in the expectations of delivering robustness of communication in the face of outages, it is going to (for instance) lose all account of protests in <some oppressive regime> where the in-country instances can only achieve intermittent connectivity in the face of state attempts to block communication.

It could be WordPress at fault, it could be Mastodon, it could be the ActivityPub spec or the recommended timeouts or who knows what cause; I cannot say and I am also not going to be the one to fix it because I also have bigger fish to fry.

But nor am I going to leave this issue unobserved. We need to talk about weakness in order to have it addressed.

⊞

Comments

9 responses to “Mastodon seems to be a lot more fragile than USENET; the whole PubSub thing seems to assume better connectivity than old-style distribution permits”

  1. utzer [Friendica]

    @alecm I wonder, were these posts dropped because of being to old, my server is not running Mastodon, but I drop all unclaimed posts after 7 days or so.Or are the posts deemed too old when received because the creation time is too old?

    1. alecm

      Honestly, I don’t know, but Mastodon.Social seems to be tracking everything just fine; Infosec.Exchange, not so much.

      Reply
  2. dwatchnews

    Our international-coordinating editor & president, Dean Edwards @salembard@ on the Mammoth app and server, was a faq writer and moderator back in the Usenet days with particular responsibilities in the soc.religion hierarchy for shamanism and for gnosis. Ah, the Internet frontier!@alecm

  3. Solarbird flag_cascadia

    @alecm I’ve had the WordPress plugin fail on me several times including going offline; posts made during that time don’t federate on repair. I’ve also had my mastodon instance (that I run) go offline overnight a couple of times; unlike WordPress, it catches up. WordPress does know they have a lot of functionality to add with the plugin and they are regularly adding features so this will hopefully be something they address.

  4. Sebastian "spaetz" Spaeth

    @alecm I hear you. But let's be careful to not mix up problems of a specific implementation (which is quite young still) with problems of the Spec (=ActivityPub). Not all nntp server implementations were great either.That having said, robustness in the face of temporary failure is certainly needed, fully agreed.

    1. alecm

      Aside: NNTP? IHAVE/SENDME? Some of us were shipping rnews batches…

      Reply
  5. Nik | Klampfradler ??

    @alecm It’s WordPress. That thing does not cache or queue anything, it only reacts the moment something happens. That makes it entirely useless in real-world scenarios.ActivityPub states delivery should be retried, and in my experience Mastodon is very robust in doing that.

    1. alecm

      I would believe that if not for the fact that other mastodon instances are behaving just fine.

      Reply
  6. ??? ??????

    @alecm problem does not seem to be with activityPub where you can do pretty much all you mention – the problem is wordpress and how it is congested by half-baked plugins that do not play nice together. With activityPub I could easily import 1000+ posts from my instagram dating back to 2012, and they just got federated with the correct date and without flooding the servers. It was done 100 posts at a time and duplicates were removed without any fuss.

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