The slow march of progress

Welcome back! It's the end of another busy week of Activity here at Pug headquarters, and that means it's time for another update. Last week we discussed performance problems overheating our initial implementation. This week, we've managed to overcome... some of them.

What's new with ActivityPub?

When it turned out that several thousand of you were trying to follow this newsletter from the Fediverse (rather than the several hundred we'd expected), we quickly discovered a number of different bottlenecks. Some of them have been very simple to address: The server we're running things on was under-resourced and struggling to keep up. The only thing we had to do there was bump it up to a bigger machine.

Other issues have been more challenging. We were trying to naively store everything about an ActivityPub account each time someone sent a follow request, which turned out to be 25mb+ of data at a time, every time. It took us a while to figure out why and what was overheating, but we're starting to get a handle on how to evolve things to be more performant.

In the interim period, we've resolved a couple of the smaller issues — like the "Browse more posts on original profile" link on Mastodon leading to an error page on Ghost. That now correctly links to https://activitypub.ghost.org, as you would expect.

We have not yet fully resolved the performance issues, though.

While some people will see this post show up on Mastodon, others won't yet. We're still pugging away and moving things around to make this work for everyone, reliably!

On the client side, though, we've been going full steam ahead. Ghost Admin is evolving rapidly to be able to handle ActivityPub interactions as we flesh out the design for how you will actually see and interact with posts.

Fortunately, these two areas of work can progress independently of one another. So when the back-end implementation catches up, the front-end client will be ready and waiting to load in some real data to work with. Like when you're eating dinner and your dog is very patiently, very obediently waiting for you to drop a bit of steak. Just one little piece. Come on.

Answering your questions

Things you want to know, and we want to answer.

I want an ActivityPug t-shirt. Long may you woof.

While we're busy fixing bugs, we're also working away on a few of your other requests. Stay tuned for more.

Commenting for the KPI!

Blessed are the commenters, for they shall inherit the Earth; and delight themselves in an abundance of pugs.

How come you didn't manage to fully fix those bugs LAST week?

Massive DDoS attack.