Sometimes you keep things optimized and under control, and sometimes you don't.
An issue I noticed a few months ago is that, whenever I made a news post, the main website and everything hosted on it (Creeper's Lab, Interordi and so on) would stop responding for several minutes. Obviously, having the website become unavailable right as I tell people there's news is not a good thing. Yet, it took me quite a while to understand what was going on.
Back in February, I decided to step into the Fediverse by launching a Misskey server. Soon after, I added an account for the Creeper's Lab, where the news would be automatically posted. You can find this one at @CreepersLab@social.interordi.com. I didn't realize it at the time, but I had planted the seed of the problem right then.
The way that Misskey, Mastodon and the wider Fediverse work is through a series of independent, interconnected servers that exchange messages with each other. While I made my news post locally, it would get sent and published on all other connected servers. Each one, in turn, checks the address of the news post to load some information about it: title, key image, summary and so on.
As the connections grew, so did the number of requests on the site. These all happen very quickly after a post. My latest one triggered 373 different servers to request information within a few minutes. Most read the news article itself, plus the key visual. Some also scanned for additional metadata from the website, or even checked its front page. But surely the website can handle 373 visitors at the same time?
Well, yes... or so I thought. One small element on the website is the list of currently online players, displayed on the sidebar. What I didn't realize at the time is that the list of players was loaded anew for each new visitor. This means that the website asked the games server to return the list of players, each time. All this additional data exchange was the source of the slowdown.
Once I realized this, the fix was simple: set a script that would load the players every minute and save the result locally. With this in place, no external call was required, no database connection to establish, just a very small text file to load and display. It instantly solved the issue, with my latest announcements having no negative effects on the availability of the website!
#social_media #projects #fediverse
– Doctacosa
Following up on my post from earlier this month, I decided to move forward with a permanent presence on the Fediverse by setting up my own Misskey instance at https://social.interordi.com/ . This one is the real deal; feel free to check it out if you're interested!
If you have little to no idea what this is, I've prepared a short starting guide that's now available online. In even shorter form, this is a social media platform that no one person controls: multiple servers talk to each other to form a strong network. Post, read, follow!
You can check my profile here, register from the front page or follow me from your current profile with @Doctacosa@social.interordi.com.
This is also another place where people will be able to follow Interordi news as they come. The Creeper's Lab already gets automated news posts on its profile, offering yet another option to people who might not be active in-game but want to stay in touch with us.
In installing this, I'm following the same core guideline that led me to run my own Minecraft servers: this is something that I have some amount of control over and that I'm hosting myself. This way, I don't have to worry about someone else getting tired of maintaining it and pulling the plug unexpectedly, or some billionaire tossing caution out of the window and destabilising the entire platform.
#social_media #fediverse
– Doctacosa
Trying to follow (or lead!) online trends can be a challenge, as I've written about before. One of the big aspects of this is choosing a platform (or many) and making the best use of it all. To better get an idea on my options were, I decided to look closer into Mastodon and other Fediverse services.
Now, many of you might be thinking “what the heck is a Mastodon?” Yes, it's an animal, it's also a band, but I'm not writing about either of these. Mastodon is a federated, decentralized microblogging service. Beyond the jargon, it means that you can write short-ish messages, publish them online and let others comment and react. Since it's decentralized, anyone can run their own servers and people are free to join the ones they like. There is no single entity like Twitter Inc. that owns the platform. Still, the multiple servers all talk to each other, so you don't need to join the same place as others.
After looking around, I've setup a Misskey instance for a trial run. It can communicate with other services like Mastodon smoothly, so you only need to join anywhere to get in touch with people. Easy! I'll be using this to test further and see what integrations I can do.
The goal here is to have a place that anyone can join and chat on, plus I gain a convenient spot to automatically post news on. Bonus, since this is linked to other online services, people can follow updates from whenever they like!
Note that this setup is temporary. If I move forward with this, it will be on a new install at a different address, so nothing will be kept.
If you want to give it a look:
To follow someone, you search for them. If we're both on the same server, you can just search for @doctacosa and follow. If you're already somewhere else, you can find my test account by searching for @doctacosa@misskey.interordi.com . Alternatively, I have an account already established at @doctacosa@social.vivaldi.net . Careful, the first @ is important too!
If you have any interest into this, check it out and let me know what you think!
#social_media #fediverse
– Doctacosa