Why so many POST requests?
Why so many POST requests?
I've been running my self-hosted one user Pleroma (like Mastodon) instance. When I discovered Lemmy I started following some communities from it and also posted some comments.
Since then lemmy.ml makes one request per second to my /inbox url.
Can someone who knows ActivityPub explain why is necessary one request per second always? What are all these POST requests for?
On top of that, is there any way to tell a server or a relay to stop sending information to my inbox? Like if for example I followed someone in that server, but I don't follow them anymore, is there any way to tell the remote server to stop? If I start returning a 403 or something like that will it stop?
POSTs are how federation works (ActivityPub is a Push-based protocol). When you "subscribe" to a community on say lemmy.ml, you are telling it to periodically send you updates about that community. This comes in the form of POSTS.
As to the frequency of the POSTs, I can imagine something like lemmy.ml having a lot of activity that it needs to inform your instance of (new votes, new comments, new posts, etc)... but I'm not sure if one request per second is reasonable or not.
I see, thanks!
If you inspect the POST what do you see? Is it not just a method to determine if you have unread mail to view?
I haven't inspected the content of the requests though, I just saw them on my proxy logs. It may be worth checking. Thanks!
Definitely the content of each request, otherwise you won’t know why your server is being hit. Use wireshark if necessary. Or there’s a command line utility to do the same thing but I can’t remember it’s name right now.
That's just how federation works. You've federated with an instance/user so now your self hosted instance will be updated.
Is there a reason you're concerned about the requests? The payloads should be relatively small, and unless you're running on some really old hardware, one request a second with a small payload should not have any noticeable impact.
Yeah I'm always running my self-hosted projects on the smallest and cheapest VPC I can find. But apart from flooding my logs I haven't noticed anything else being too much affected by this. I'm currently improving the observability of my system though, so who knows.
I was just a little concerned. Thanks for answering!
In addition to the suggestion from @etchinghillside@reddthat.com, it might also be helpful to ask in !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml