Overheating issues

Some weeks fly by as pieces of the puzzle fall into place of their own accord, while others feel like a long slog through a muddy marsh. This week has been marshy.

For the past few weeks we've been syndicating this newsletter to the Fediverse and making it so you can follow updates here, directly on Mastodon. Though, not without some serious issues along the way.

Our team of science pugs is on the case, of course.

What's new with ActivityPub?

A few weeks back when we first made it so people could follow us from Mastodon, not everybody was able to. A couple of quirks between our implementation and how Mastodon does things meant that our profile inadvertently showed up as being private. Definitely not what we intended.

No big deal, we figured. We could see that around 160 follow requests still worked. We got to work resolving the rough edges, only to discover a new problem. Once people were able to follow the newsletter successfully, it turned out there were a lot more than 160-ish. There were well over 2,000-ish.

So when we sent out last week's newsletter, we quickly discovered all the ways in which our code was too slow to handle retrieving all the followers, iterating over each of them, and successfully delivering the post.

Is 2,000 a lot of followers? It is not. But it's about 10x more than we'd tested with so far! Inevitably the first alpha version of our codebase choked. We thought we'd have a little more time to test with a few people, but this newsletter keeps spreading much further than we expect.

In any event, we're learning as we go.

We've already made a lot of improvements and solved several of the underlying problems, but we're not out of the woods just yet. We're still making changes and iterations based on the many things you reported as not working in the comments last week (thank you!).

We're going to keep hitting this thing with a hammer until it's purring like a kitten.