That is a fallacy. There are no better alternatives. HN lives in a bubble where something like Rust is considered "a better alternative" than Ruby on Rails for

That is a fallacy. There are no better alternatives. HN lives in a bubble where something like Rust is considered "a better alternative" than Ruby on Rails for consumer/SMB/social web application development. It's absurd. Don't get me wrong, Rust is great for what it's good at. Go is great for what it's good at. There are many languages that are good for what they're actually good at! Meanwhile, not only am I not surprised that Mastodon was built with Ruby on Rails, I would expect Mastodon to be built with Ruby on Rails. (Or maybe Laravel.) Outside of the HN bubble, this isn't controversial in the least.