Admittedly, the 100MB isn’t that bad, though at 100MB per post with several posts per day such a website does need to deal well with caching. I certainly would take my blog down if every time I posted something I needed to pay 15 cents for the privilege on top of my existing hosting costs.
However, an orchestrated attack could do thousands times more damage. A small group of Japanese middle schoolers managed to overwhelm all moderation tools the Fediverse had available to them with a quick script, and that attack only stopped because the police got involved. I can think of several ways to abuse the presumptions of friendliness that’s present within most Fediverse software.
Having 18000 servers download a couple hundred pages per hour is enough to take down most small websites, especially thanks to the geographically distributed nature of the Fediverse that requires every CDN node to be fully populated (and likely populated with spam), and that’s not hard to pull off with a handful of small domains and maybe a couple of Amazon IP addresses.
I’m not so worried about the traffic caused accidentally (though there is a separate thundering horde problem with many ActivityPub implementations) but the potential for abuse is there and it needs to be solved before it someone malicious finds out.
Fortunately, you’d be very hard pressed to find bandwidth pricing from 18 years ago.
The point is the claimed issue is really a non issue, and there are much more effective ways to stress websites without needing the intermediary of fediverse.
Admittedly, the 100MB isn’t that bad, though at 100MB per post with several posts per day such a website does need to deal well with caching. I certainly would take my blog down if every time I posted something I needed to pay 15 cents for the privilege on top of my existing hosting costs.
However, an orchestrated attack could do thousands times more damage. A small group of Japanese middle schoolers managed to overwhelm all moderation tools the Fediverse had available to them with a quick script, and that attack only stopped because the police got involved. I can think of several ways to abuse the presumptions of friendliness that’s present within most Fediverse software.
Having 18000 servers download a couple hundred pages per hour is enough to take down most small websites, especially thanks to the geographically distributed nature of the Fediverse that requires every CDN node to be fully populated (and likely populated with spam), and that’s not hard to pull off with a handful of small domains and maybe a couple of Amazon IP addresses.
I’m not so worried about the traffic caused accidentally (though there is a separate thundering horde problem with many ActivityPub implementations) but the potential for abuse is there and it needs to be solved before it someone malicious finds out.
Fortunately, you’d be very hard pressed to find bandwidth pricing from 18 years ago.
The point is the claimed issue is really a non issue, and there are much more effective ways to stress websites without needing the intermediary of fediverse.