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Are they good questions though? It feels like github/gitlab/gitea solve 90% of these questions at scale fine. Personally these questions came off as a rude rou

Are they good questions though? It feels like github/gitlab/gitea solve 90% of these questions at scale fine. Personally these questions came off as a rude routine to me, one that prefigure whenever anyone suggests networked social systems. Healthy skepticism is good, just but people who spread disbelief dont rank high in my estimation. As for rewriting history, maybe use a month by month git repo, so if old content needs to be rebased the blast zone is contained. Job done. Then git submodules to collect each month.

LinuxBender 3y ago
It feels like github/gitlab/gitea solve 90% of these questions at scale fine. Used as a social platform vs code repository? Surely Github have enterprise class storage and networking so if the question is around hosting the platform on Github then maybe that works at a technical level assuming one is willing to take the risk of Microsoft cancelling their social platform when someone complains about a comment and Microsoft don't want whatever divisive content is on their platform. If self hosting I would be surprised if a single server or single VM could scale git to millions of people making comments, tens of thousands of comments being edited and thousands of comments being purged. My experience with managing large git servers is that it gets exponentially slower with mass manipulation of the repositories and that was on fairly beefy servers and that was just Jira, Fisheye, Crucible and Confluence and less than 10k developers, not millions of individuals. That is unless by self hosting we are talking about using automation to spin up many instances and even then it is not clear to me that git can scale horizontally like that. Even then that is not really self hosting, that is getting VC funding and starting a new company which draws even more attention and requires even more staffing to manage the content. I think there would need to be some simulated load testing that attempts to replicate real world social platform behavior to see where git starts to fall over otherwise we would just be speculating in circles. I suspect if this were attempted there would be multiple layers of caching nodes not doing git and trying to minimize or optimize edits and purges to the storage and that may not even be enough.

LinuxBender 3y ago

It feels like github/gitlab/gitea solve 90% of these questions at scale fine. Used as a social platform vs code repository? Surely Github have enterprise class storage and networking so if the question is around hosting the platform on Github then maybe that works at a technical level assuming one is willing to take the risk of Microsoft cancelling their social platform when someone complains about a comment and Microsoft don't want whatever divisive content is on their platform. If self hosting I would be surprised if a single server or single VM could scale git to millions of people making comments, tens of thousands of comments being edited and thousands of comments being purged. My experience with managing large git servers is that it gets exponentially slower with mass manipulation of the repositories and that was on fairly beefy servers and that was just Jira, Fisheye, Crucible and Confluence and less than 10k developers, not millions of individuals. That is unless by self hosting we are talking about using automation to spin up many instances and even then it is not clear to me that git can scale horizontally like that. Even then that is not really self hosting, that is getting VC funding and starting a new company which draws even more attention and requires even more staffing to manage the content. I think there would need to be some simulated load testing that attempts to replicate real world social platform behavior to see where git starts to fall over otherwise we would just be speculating in circles. I suspect if this were attempted there would be multiple layers of caching nodes not doing git and trying to minimize or optimize edits and purges to the storage and that may not even be enough.