4 ms·

It sounds like you're arguing from a hypothetically perfect view with 20/20 hindsight. Scaling problems are good problems, solvable at the right time without th

It sounds like you're arguing from a hypothetically perfect view with 20/20 hindsight. Scaling problems are good problems, solvable at the right time without the evils of premature optimization. Doing work without a need is wasted effort.

pm_me_your_quan 3y ago
eh, I think it's arguable here that making a good experience here would really help cement people swapping over. Then again unclear if twitter is going to remove the super low limit, so people may abandon it anyway.
CharlesW 3y ago
> It sounds like you're arguing from a hypothetically perfect view with 20/20 hindsight. I'm just stating the obvious, which is that whether a service is centralized or federated has nothing to do with it. Mastodon would melt long before operating at Twitter scale, for example. (And to your points, I don't think that's necessarily bad.) But, if there's any company on earth that should have 20/20 hindsight about this, it's Twitter. Post-"fail whale" era and pre-Musk, the service weathered far larger challenges without collapsing.
- vidarh 3y ago
  It probably would, but Mastodon is now at around 13M accounts, but with ca. 3x as many instances as when it hit 10M, so it's increasingly better prepared for large user surges. E.g. signups have hit ~6x what they were earlier today but it's still only an average of one signup per instance per hour.
  - CharlesW 3y ago
    Great! I’m a fan and I hope Mastodon/ActivityPub continues to grow. I just wish it wasn’t prohibitively complex/expensive to host an instance with a few thousand members.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      I think Mastodon will continue to be expensive to host, as the way it's engineered is not well suited to cut costs, but I also think we'll see a lot of innovation in "slimmer" services that will be "Mastodon-compatible enough" but lighter weight. Ideally we'll eventually see some sort of standardisation of a client-server API (rather than just depending on people ad-hoc reimplementing Mastodons API), but that may take longer.

pm_me_your_quan 3y ago

eh, I think it's arguable here that making a good experience here would really help cement people swapping over. Then again unclear if twitter is going to remove the super low limit, so people may abandon it anyway.

CharlesW 3y ago

> It sounds like you're arguing from a hypothetically perfect view with 20/20 hindsight. I'm just stating the obvious, which is that whether a service is centralized or federated has nothing to do with it. Mastodon would melt long before operating at Twitter scale, for example. (And to your points, I don't think that's necessarily bad.) But, if there's any company on earth that should have 20/20 hindsight about this, it's Twitter. Post-"fail whale" era and pre-Musk, the service weathered far larger challenges without collapsing.

vidarh 3y ago
It probably would, but Mastodon is now at around 13M accounts, but with ca. 3x as many instances as when it hit 10M, so it's increasingly better prepared for large user surges. E.g. signups have hit ~6x what they were earlier today but it's still only an average of one signup per instance per hour.
- CharlesW 3y ago
  Great! I’m a fan and I hope Mastodon/ActivityPub continues to grow. I just wish it wasn’t prohibitively complex/expensive to host an instance with a few thousand members.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    I think Mastodon will continue to be expensive to host, as the way it's engineered is not well suited to cut costs, but I also think we'll see a lot of innovation in "slimmer" services that will be "Mastodon-compatible enough" but lighter weight. Ideally we'll eventually see some sort of standardisation of a client-server API (rather than just depending on people ad-hoc reimplementing Mastodons API), but that may take longer.