“We rebuilt the Mastodon backend from scratch and made it able to handle Twitter-scale (500M users, 20M writes/second, unbalanced social graph, etc.)”
Congratulations, you reinvented Big Tech.
Did you stop to consider that fediverse (emphasis “diverse”) servers should not be trying to reach “Twitter scale?” That they should be kept small on purpose? That the goal isn’t to recreate Twitter but with some other asshole in charge?
@koen_hufkens It is but they state they rebuilt it from scratch. If so, it doesn’t apply. There isn’t much you can hit them with. These things were always going to happen given that ActivityPub has the same inherent economies of scale that the Big Web has. The only chance the fediverse had of resisting enclosure with its current architecture was social pressure but we’ve all but thrown that away with some of the most prominent folks rolling out the red carpet for Silicon Valley.
@aral TBH, "from scratch" is something I don't buy without proof to the pudding, certainly not in times of LLM and co-pilot. But yes, this is more a philosophical issue rather than just a technical one.
@aral the protocol is open, the rest seems perfectly possible given engineers who have experience scaling web stacks. I wouldn't expect the lay person on the street to know how - but plenty of developers scale this type of thing as part of their day job.
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