4 ms·

How scalable is Mastodon though? I mean, it's written in Ruby a la Twitter. Update: It is used by both Gab and Truth Social, which are centralized, not distrib

How scalable is Mastodon though? I mean, it's written in Ruby a la Twitter. Update: It is used by both Gab and Truth Social, which are centralized, not distributed.

bee_rider 5y ago
It is a decentralized social media site, so it will surely scale well enough to meet realistic user numbers at least.
- nikolay 5y ago
  The most popular instance has 200K users. This is still way too little for a distrubted system given Facebook has over 2 billion users.
clajiness 5y ago
Ask GitHub, Basecamp, Shopify, Zendesk, Netflix, etc, etc. This notion that Rails is slow and doesn’t scale is misinformed at best.
- suyash 5y ago
  Netflix runs Java heavily on the backend to scale their platform. Twitter ditched Ruby on Rails and moved to JVM (Sala) for the same reasons. Any benchmark comparison for programming language performs will show Java beating Ruby on Rails, Python etc by huge margin.
  - TruthWillHurt 5y ago
    The main thing Java beats other langs in by a huge margin is memory consumption.
    - nikolay 5y ago
      Which isn't a little advantage!
  - nicce 5y ago
    Also, isn't Netflix actually using Python instead of Rails? https://netflixtechblog.com/python-at-netflix-bba45dae649e https://netflixtechblog.com/python-at-netflix-bba45dae649e
- nikolay 5y ago
  One of the most recommended hosters [0] offers a 90 EUR/month plan just for up to 50 concurrent users! What I joke! This is like an instance fir my extended family and friends! [0]: https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/
  - hugogameiro 5y ago
    From https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/ - Under the Galaxy plan 90 EUR/Month: "2000 Active Users (estimated)" Also, in the 'about the plans' section of that page, under 'Concurrent Requests' and 'Users and Active Users' you have more details. But one can think of concurrent requests limit as actions occurring simultaneously (eg: 50 people clicking a button at the exact same time). Even on the rare occasions when that happens, the actions are queued and take a couple more seconds to process.
posguy 5y ago
Mastodon is one ActivityPub implementation. If you need something you can run on a teacup and string then https://pleroma.social https://pleroma.social is written in Elixer and seems to run well on tiny VMs.
- riffic 5y ago
  You can even run WordPress with the ActivityPub plugin and be a participant others can subscribe/interact with: https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ The Fediverse / Federated Social Web is bigger than Mastodon.
- _emacsomancer_ 5y ago
  And there are others, e.g. GoToSocial ( https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial ), written in Go.
your_username 5y ago
mdoms 5y ago
Twitter is no longer a Ruby application, they moved to Scala and Java after running into scaling bottlenecks.

How scalable is Mastodon though? I mean, it's written in Ruby a la Twitter. Update: It is used by both Gab and Truth Social, which are centralized, not distributed.

bee_rider 5y ago

It is a decentralized social media site, so it will surely scale well enough to meet realistic user numbers at least.

nikolay 5y ago
The most popular instance has 200K users. This is still way too little for a distrubted system given Facebook has over 2 billion users.

clajiness 5y ago

Ask GitHub, Basecamp, Shopify, Zendesk, Netflix, etc, etc. This notion that Rails is slow and doesn’t scale is misinformed at best.

suyash 5y ago
Netflix runs Java heavily on the backend to scale their platform. Twitter ditched Ruby on Rails and moved to JVM (Sala) for the same reasons. Any benchmark comparison for programming language performs will show Java beating Ruby on Rails, Python etc by huge margin.
- TruthWillHurt 5y ago
  The main thing Java beats other langs in by a huge margin is memory consumption.
  - nikolay 5y ago
    Which isn't a little advantage!
- nicce 5y ago
  Also, isn't Netflix actually using Python instead of Rails? https://netflixtechblog.com/python-at-netflix-bba45dae649e https://netflixtechblog.com/python-at-netflix-bba45dae649e
nikolay 5y ago
One of the most recommended hosters [0] offers a 90 EUR/month plan just for up to 50 concurrent users! What I joke! This is like an instance fir my extended family and friends! [0]: https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/
- hugogameiro 5y ago
  From https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/ - Under the Galaxy plan 90 EUR/Month: "2000 Active Users (estimated)" Also, in the 'about the plans' section of that page, under 'Concurrent Requests' and 'Users and Active Users' you have more details. But one can think of concurrent requests limit as actions occurring simultaneously (eg: 50 people clicking a button at the exact same time). Even on the rare occasions when that happens, the actions are queued and take a couple more seconds to process.

posguy 5y ago

Mastodon is one ActivityPub implementation. If you need something you can run on a teacup and string then https://pleroma.social https://pleroma.social is written in Elixer and seems to run well on tiny VMs.

riffic 5y ago
You can even run WordPress with the ActivityPub plugin and be a participant others can subscribe/interact with: https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/ The Fediverse / Federated Social Web is bigger than Mastodon.
_emacsomancer_ 5y ago
And there are others, e.g. GoToSocial ( https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial ), written in Go.

your_username 5y ago

mdoms 5y ago

Twitter is no longer a Ruby application, they moved to Scala and Java after running into scaling bottlenecks.