I don’t know a ton about the internals of federated systems, it’s been on my todo list for a while but it keeps getting pushed down by other things. But I still like that the fediverse exists and I’d like to pitch in, even if it’s only a few bucks of processor time / month.
Are there compute tasks that could be offloaded to a network of volunteers? Monitoring tools that could be run from outside the system? Something else I’m not thinking of?
An idea I’ve been kicking around is a sort of distributed down detector. Community members could download spin up a service that registers with a host’s statuspage service, which gives it a schedule for pinging monitored servers, and instructions for where to send the UP/DOWN results. Hosts can choose where to display the data (e.g.
statuspage.blahaj.zonewould display statuses for services on its own server as well as servers it federates with. If one service or server goes down, the outage would show up on federated services almost immediately. Intermittent outages would be easier to verify too.Monitor runners should be able to manually choose which pages they monitor and where they send reports, but it wouldn’t be too hard to provide fediverse hosts custom images with their preferred pages and report destinations all configured, so users could just spin it up and let it run.
That might be interesting! If you build on this idea, it would be cool to see ping times with location data, so instance operators can see what the performance is like with real world data. That was something we were concerned about when trying out different alternatives when leaving CloudFlare.