single point of failure

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Single points of failure (SPOFs) are aspects or parts of a system which, when they fail, cause crucial parts of (or the entire) system to fail; on the web, the most visible examples are silos and massive site outages when they all depend on a common provider like AWS.

SPOFs are an important thing to take into account when designing software, or creating a protocol, or setting up a personal websites.

IndieWeb Examples

Examples of IndieWeb singular services/sites that are heavily relied upon by the community, what functions they’re used for, and code you might find on your site if you’re depending on them:

Bridgy

brid.gy (running Bridgy)

backfeed and POSSE

webmention.io

Receiving (and sometimes displaying) responses
<link rel="webmention" href="https://webmention.io/YOURDOMAINdotCOM/webmention"/>

Alternatives to Webmention.io

IndieAuth.com

indieauth.com

OpenID delegation
- <link rel="openid.server" href="https://indieauth.com/openid"/>
IndieAuth authorization_endpoint
- <link rel="authorization_endpoint" href="https://indieauth.com/auth"/>
IndieAuth token_endpoint
- <link rel="token_endpoint" href="https://tokens.indieauth.com/token"/>

Alternatives to IndieAuth.com

Aperture

https://aperture.p3k.io (running Aperture)

Microsub server, subscriptions, caching feeds
- <link rel="microsub" href="https://aperture.p3k.io/microsub/YOURAPERTUREID"/>

Alternatives to Aperture

Yarns Microsub Server for WordPress
Create your own Microsub endpoint

Superfeedr

https://pubsubhubbub.superfeedr.com service of Superfeedr

WebSub notification delegation
- <link rel="hub" href="https://pubsubhubbub.superfeedr.com/"/>

Alternatives to Superfeedr

Previous IndieWeb Examples

silo.pub

Service Examples

AWS

Main article: AWS Downtime

All the downtime of services which depend on AWS when it goes down
https://twitter.com/BW/status/1402212023786692613
- "Some of the websites appearing to experience outages this morning:
  
  -Amazon Web Services
  -New York Times
  -Reddit
  -The U.K. government's website
  -Spotify
  -Twitch
  -Twitter
  -GitHub
  -Us (hope you can read this article)
  
  https://trib.al/W16KFK9" @BW June 8, 2021

IFTTT

See: IFTTT#SPOF

Silo Examples

Literally all the silos — when their site goes down, all your stuff there is inaccessible.

Single external authentication providers

Websites that only offer Twitter (or another silo) as an authentication provider will fail 100% of time to allow users access if Twitter (or that other silo) is down.

Software

All users on a hosted instance of Mastodon or Diaspora will lose all services if that instance goes down

More Examples

Websites on hosting providers, DNS providers or the like that go down will lose access to the Web.

Articles

2021-03-27 Bloomberg: Suez Shows Civilization Is More Vulnerable Than We Think
[...] In the strategy and military realm, such bottlenecks are also known as “choke points.” And we often don’t pay enough attention to them until something goes wrong.
Systems designers strive to avoid these single points of failure, so that transport, energy and communication networks are able to withstand attacks or unexpected calamities. [...]
[Emphasis added]