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?
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.
Yea, ping times is a great idea. I’ve been debating what kind of location data to include. I think it should default to “nothing” but if users feel comfortable sharing rough location (Country, Province/Region/State, City, nothing more granular than that) that should be configurable and would be nice data to see. I suspect a lot of fediverse users pipe all their traffic through a VPN, and if users feel comfortable reporting which VPN they use, the data could show performance across those networks too.
If non-VPN’d users felt comfortable sharing their ISP, that would be useful as well to see if services are degraded on a particular provider. It would also be a warning bell against ISPs censoring federated services. I don’t think that’s happening now, but it would be nice to have some independent verification.