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The "reason" given why Parler failed is awfully glib and one dimensional. You can't just serve content to millions of people per day and think you can just up a

The "reason" given why Parler failed is awfully glib and one dimensional. You can't just serve content to millions of people per day and think you can just up and move to another provider. Had Parler just moderated their posts like they were asked to do, they would still be around. You can still have right wing, even extreme right wing views without calling for violence or organizing insurrections. The fact they essentially refused to moderate and let calls for violence fester on their platform is why they were shut off.

rbanffy 6y ago
That and their hardware footprint seemed ridiculously overprovisioned. You can serve content to millions of people per day with fewer boxes than they were using. I always try to design a "degraded mode" read-only into my apps that covers maintenance windows and unscheduled outages. That is usually easier to lift and shift than the full app and can even be hosted someplace else if you don't mind it lagging behind the live website.
- alkonaut 6y ago
  One can only assume that 90% of their hardware was doing something much heavier than “microblogging”. I’m guessing e.g tons and tons of media processing like video transcoding. Would be interesting to hear how much it costs Twitter to have video features. If I was Parler right now I’d just switch off media and throw up a very lean MVP version with just text. Even with millions of users Parler has the luxury of almost no consistency problems at all. It’s all eventual consistency and simple replication. Shouldn’t need a lot of hardware at all.
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    I'm thinking more about sentiment analysis and profile enrichment. Remember they are (or at least were) funded by the Cambridge Analytica folks.
_-david-_ 6y ago
>You can still have right wing, even extreme right wing views without calling for violence or organizing insurrections The insurrectionists did not actually use Parler. They used Twitter and Facebook.

rbanffy 6y ago

That and their hardware footprint seemed ridiculously overprovisioned. You can serve content to millions of people per day with fewer boxes than they were using. I always try to design a "degraded mode" read-only into my apps that covers maintenance windows and unscheduled outages. That is usually easier to lift and shift than the full app and can even be hosted someplace else if you don't mind it lagging behind the live website.

alkonaut 6y ago
One can only assume that 90% of their hardware was doing something much heavier than “microblogging”. I’m guessing e.g tons and tons of media processing like video transcoding. Would be interesting to hear how much it costs Twitter to have video features. If I was Parler right now I’d just switch off media and throw up a very lean MVP version with just text. Even with millions of users Parler has the luxury of almost no consistency problems at all. It’s all eventual consistency and simple replication. Shouldn’t need a lot of hardware at all.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  I'm thinking more about sentiment analysis and profile enrichment. Remember they are (or at least were) funded by the Cambridge Analytica folks.

_-david-_ 6y ago

>You can still have right wing, even extreme right wing views without calling for violence or organizing insurrections The insurrectionists did not actually use Parler. They used Twitter and Facebook.