14 ms·
How meta built the infrastructure for Threads
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Researcherry 3y agoIsn't thread dead yet?
- kmlx 3y agoon the contrary. more and more people are signing up and leaving twitter.
- cheviethai123 3y ago[flagged]
- GoToRO 3y agoWell, they need to fix the back button. When you press back, the original feed is shown and then it promptly updates. Twitter never caught in a lot of places while threads might have a chance.
- HatchedLake721 3y agoTell me you didn’t read the article without telling me. They used a small team to build an app in 5 months that handled going from 0 to 100 mil users in 5 days. Doesn’t sound neither lots of money and engineering, or false idea if it had 100 mil signups in 5 days.
- herbst 3y agoIt's kinda awkward that they insist on that 100 mil in 5 days number when they compare to apps that didn't have the half world available to aggressively advertise to for free.
- threeseed 3y agoThey reached 100M users without any advertising. Purely word of mouth.
- herbst 3y agoPretty sure there was (and still is) a very obvious button in Instagram, they didn't spend money on advertising is what I understood. At 1.2 billion monthly users that's a pretty average CTR for that kind of thing. A little extra because threads still isn't available worldwide so some traffic was just lost.
- zimpenfish 3y ago> they didn't spend money on advertising is what I understood They didn't have to, though - the news outlets were running stories on Threads and its impending arrival nearly every day. To claim, as GP does, it was entirely "organic" is nonsense.
- etchalon 3y agoPress mentions are generally considered "organic".
- threeseed 3y agoInstagram promotion was added in September [1]. Threads reached 100M users in July [2]. [1] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/threads-banks-on-instagram-promotion-combat-declining-engagement https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/threads-banks-on... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/07/10/with-100-million-users-in-five-days-threads-is-the-fastest-growing-app-in-history/?sh=78f0bbb149ab https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2023/07/10/with-10...
- adonese 3y agoIt's actually okay-ish so far. The people and the news are still on twitter but with the bots (twitter) and Facebook support (infrastructure, integration with existing fb products and the leaner upselling) I can see that it does have a good product market fit
- jonathanstrange 3y agoHonestly, I can't believe any real person still uses Twitter. I haven't subscribed to anyone and have no subscribers. Nevertheless, whenever I open it, I'm swamped with US Neo-Nazi tweets, as well as pro-Russia and pro-Hamas content. I'm not saying it's the only content I see, but enough to make Twitter look like the front page of a terrorist organization. Apparently, the Twitter algorithm has learned that I'm using it to look up political tweets from time to time by following links, and adjusted its content accordingly to convince me of a hundred times more radical positions than I would ever endorse or want to see.
- rglullis 3y ago> I haven't subscribed to anyone and have no subscribers. That's your problem, right here. The social graph is the strongest signal there is. Try following the people that are more interesting to you and your recommendations will vastly improve. Or don't, and just come to the Fediverse and use a nitter frontend for the occasional twitter link.
- pityJuke 3y agoYou’re not wrong. The FYP, at least for my unused account, is garbage tier. Hell, the latest phenomenon it has picked up on is meme pages used to advertise OnlyFans and gambling, and outright pornography and porn ads. Some of the worst human beings are on there spreading ideas about race theory. Responses to anything vaguely popular are filled with blue check marks either trying to make money with engagement bait, or clout chasing by reply spam. But Twitter allows you to curate your graph with the Following tab way better. There are enough sub-communities and funny people for it to still work. And all recommendation algorithms are vulnerable. Thread’s head honcho had to release a statement because the recommendation algorithm on Threads became awful over the holiday period. And they aggressively want you on the FYP!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- DeathArrow 3y agoWhat is Threads?
- pests 3y agoThreads is their Twitter / text-only offering.
- ranting-moth 3y agoWorth mentioning it's also a data harvesting app-only offering.
- MikusR 3y agoAnd here I was hoping that with technological advances spambots would at least post semi-truthful spam. Threads are fully functional on web.
- Ukv 3y agoWhen I tried to join, there was nothing on the threads.net website except the word "Threads" in front of some spiral particles and a QR code to get the app[0]. More recently it seems they've added a login dialog to the site, but attempting to log in still just immediately prompts you to download the app[1]. Presumably once you've used the app to create and set up an account you can now use it to browse online, but that's not really "fully functional on web" and, relevant for the accusation of data-harvesting, still requires you to download the app. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/PQF7bkm.png https://i.imgur.com/PQF7bkm.png [1]: https://i.imgur.com/zLfubq1.png https://i.imgur.com/zLfubq1.png
- MikusR 3y agoThen it has not launched in your region, probably. For me in EU it shows option to login with instagram or browse without a profile. No app needed.
- puttycat 3y agoThe amount of (very impressive) human labor that went into building something that was dead on delivery. Kudos to them for being able to incentivize engineers to pull through this.
- realprimoh 3y agoDead on delivery? That’s pretty dramatic (and incorrect). 100M users in 5 days and it’s quite active today - very far from dead on delivery.
- okokwhatever 3y agomostly Ig users who got left the platform after a couple of days... quite impresive.
- glimshe 3y ago[flagged]
- realprimoh 3y agoNot sure how that correlates with usage. Your personal experience isn’t a generalizable experience. Nobody in my circle uses Snapchat, yet it’s worth $27B… If anything, this might mean your circle is quite small.
- glimshe 3y agoI have a large circle of friends. Many use Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter/X, TikTok, YouTube Premium, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal... Not ONE usage of Threads.
- wayfinder 3y agoInstagram has like 2 billion users and I got spammed the shit out of to open a Threads account. That’s like saying it’s impressive I made a million dollar company after my dad gave me 2 billion.
- rapsey 3y agoNever heard of ZippyDB. Shame it is not open source.
- Panini_Jones 3y agoIt's distributed rocksdb with some extra fun.
- esafak 3y agoJust use TiKV
- o10449366 3y ago[flagged]
- vik0 3y agoThe stock market isn't representative of how real world actors are doing at any given moment. I'd recommend reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb. But I'm glad you made money
- cactusplant7374 3y agoI find him impossible to understand. It also doesn't help that he is a bully.
- waihtis 3y agocongratulations on just playing right into Taleb's hand whether he's a bully or not has zero effect on the correctness of his statements
- blensor 3y agoI see some growth since they opened to European users late last year. It's going to be interesting if they really enable full ActivityPub integration
- saberience 3y agoI don't want to seem overly critical, but why is this comment relevant to an engineering focused article on how Threads was built? This article isn't FUD and your comment adds nothing to the discussion except setting up a strange strawman to attack for some reason I can't quite fathom. I don't want to see HN become more like Reddit where comments like this tend to dominate, they don't add to the community and only promote negativity and ill-will between community members.
- stetrain 3y agoThis comment follows multiple others in this thread calling Threads a "dead app" and a waste of money and development resources. Which seem equally irrelevant to the topic and incite this kind of discussion.
- Jare 3y agoOfftopic but here we go: Once Threads became available in the EU I, like I assume many others, made an Instagram account from my FB account in order to check it out. 2 days later, and without having posted anything except perhaps a "Hello world", my Insta account was banned for generic reason (breaking the TOS, nothing concrete). I only found out 2 weeks later, as I hadn't even visited the site(s) again. Their "Appeal" button leads to a request to send a confirmation code to my phone, but no code ever arrives (Spanish phone, not a complicated country). There's no button or link to tell them that it doesn't. I know of others who have experienced the same thing. Move fast and break things indeed.
- theragra 3y agoAlso, I constantly receive password reset codes to my email. I am not sure what scammers want to achieve, but it is annoying that Meta cannot do anything.
- sjhdjshdjskhds 3y agoMessage you friends and ask for emergency money.
- theragra 3y agoHow? They don't have access to my email.
- lapcat 3y agoIn trying to sign up for Threads, I was insta-banned when I created an Instagram account, without even having a chance to use it, for allegedly violating the ToS, which seems impossible, since I hadn't done anything yet. They wanted to extract my phone number from me, and then also a photo/video after that to "verify" my identity, so I aborted the process, because I'm not going to feed the data slurping machine. I think that's the whole point of these fake bans, to extract personal data from you. Twitter used to auto-ban me too in order to extract my phone number, and we know that Twitter illegitimately used phone numbers for advertising purposes. To hell with the corporate-owned social networks. I want no part of them anymore. I'm sticking with Mastodon, which is free from this garbage.
- revskill 3y ago[flagged]
- itslennysfault 3y agoI'm kinda loving the obvious "X" shills in the comments coming just to declare Threads dead. It is literally the 2nd most downloaded app in the AppStore (was #1 for a bit, but Temu is seemingly unstoppable). Personally, it has become my preferred social media platform. It's overflowing with content and I check in on it several times a day, and have been really enjoying the community that is emerging. It DOES however have a big porn bot problem, but I don't think that is unique to Threads. Hopefully, they can come up with a way to minimize it soon.
- cdelsolar 3y agoI kinda stopped using Threads and then they started putting controversial posts on it all over my Facebook feed. Pretty clever. Now I check it often again
- nimbius 3y ago>It is literally the 2nd most downloaded app in the AppStore when you push it relentlessly in the facebook app its kind of hard for it not to become #2 overnight. I give threads eight months before its either riddled with the same trash boomer content as Facebook, or devolves into X in a desperate attempt to emulate its former success. This is less of an innovation for Facebook and more of a convenient pivot now that theyve run out of gas entirely as a social media platform.
- brightball 3y agoI had some experience with this after setting up social media accounts for a conference that I took over in March. LinkedIn is beating them all, significantly. Instagram is next, which surprised me all little. After that it was X and then finally YouTube, which didn't have any content until September so it will likely/hopefully overtake some soon. Threads AND Facebook have been kinda terrible. We just shuttered the Threads account and probably getting ready to do the same for the Facebook account. Threads just picked up some followers from Instagram after the initial launch. Mastodon has a low follower count, but solid engagement among the followers who are there at least. Keeping that one around longer. We may try Bluesky at some point and I'll continue remaining open to trying new things as they come out, but nothing made me optimistic about Threads from our trial so far. Here's the report: https://twitter.com/CodesCarolina/status/1744410822720303348 https://twitter.com/CodesCarolina/status/1744410822720303348
- erulabs 3y agoGotta love how far MySQL + k/v store can get ya. I have no experience with zippyDB, but MySQL and ScyllaDB certainly feels like having an M1 Abrams and a B2 Spirit in my back pocket. I’m constantly pushing the “relationships from MySQL, data from Cassandra” narrative. It sounds like Facebook has a similar approach - although this post doesn’t make it clear where message data actually resides. MySQL, ScyllaDB, and RabbitMQ. A stack made in pragmatist heaven by devops angels. Now to find some developers who don’t hate it ;)
- neon_electro 3y agoCan you share your take on why MySQL and not Postgres?
- erulabs 3y agoFor me it's mostly about known-knowns. I've been responsible for pretty large/company-critical MySQL clusters and have managed to sleep soundly at night. I tend to be the "database guy" at every startup, and those startups tended to use MySQL. I have to say, I do love PostGIS. But for "this data absolutely cannot be lost or its game-over", I'd go MySQL every time. I can and have debugged MySQL replication on zero hours of sleep. It's entirely possible Postgres 16 is the better choice for new projects today, but I haven't had the time to try it out in production yet.
- brightball 3y ago> But for "this data absolutely cannot be lost or its game-over", I'd go MySQL every time. Man...times have seriously changed if that's the case. Good for MySQL to improve enough to get that recommendation.
- raffraffraff 3y agoIt amazes me how much better MySQL has been in this regard for at least a decade, and it's also amazing that it's still not that well-known today. Back in 2015 I worked at a fast-growing unicorn that had badly implemented basically everything because they started with a tiny ops team of grads and developers. Very little was being monitored, there were only a handful of metrics being graphed (mostly network stuff in Cacti). Our DB issues were all caused by stupid stuff : * undetected hard disk in array fails * battery in array controller fails * disk fills up * dubious backups, with no point-in-time recovery * extremely poorly written SQL queries * poory configured MySQL (in oh-so-many ways) The top three (at least) would lastly cause replication lag, which would eventually trigger an alert. ... And yet we never lost a cluster. (And we far a lot of them!) My team sweated blood improving processes and tooling, and then I spent a 6 month stint on database clusters (switching to GTID based replication and rewriting the ops config code so that they were all consistently configured and monitored). Occasionally we'd get a new senior hire insist that PostgreSQL was a necessity, so we'd stand back and let them produce a proof of concept that stood up to the types of failures our MySQL clusters dealt with regularly, without waking oncall up at night. And it was always a bit of a joke by comparison.
- laweijfmvo 3y ago(This is performance evaluation week at Meta) I can only dream of being able to cite an article like this on my impacc...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Panini_Jones 3y agoCQ and Laine are directors. ZDB and Async have existed for a while, nothing really new here. I guess they need to claim something on PSC.
- gopher2000 3y agoI've never seen a company where performance evaluation gets as much focus as it does at Meta. Some people's entire existence at the company is to game PSCs.
- bigtechdigest 3y agoI think the goal here is to build a free data harvesting machine for building LLMs. (and also a shameless plug: I featured this article in my last newsletter https://bigtechdigest.substack.com/p/most-read-tech-articles-in-2023 https://bigtechdigest.substack.com/p/most-read-tech-articles...)
- kevincox 3y agoI think you are looking too hard for a secret purpose. I think they just want to keep making bets on controlling the social network space. They see Twitter failing and it seems like a great time to try and snag the market. They use ActivityPub as a selling point and Instagram users as an existing network and hope to replace Twitter. Instagram still seems pretty popular but they are clearly missing some part of the market with a text-based network so they are both expanding and diversifying. Facebook is already circling the drain (although it will probably be circling that drain for a decade) and they don't know if Instagram will continue to be popular. I'm sure harvesting data for LLMs is a great side benefit, but if that was their main goal they would probably just run a crawler. They could even crawl ActivityPub without having their own instance if they wanted. It is a public API. They would just miss out on private posts which is probably a small fraction.
- aschobel 3y agoWhat do folks use for something like Meta’s Async? RabbitMQ? > The workloads commonly executed on Async are those that do not require blocking an active user’s experience with a product and can be performed anywhere from a few seconds to several hours after a user’s action.
- rangledangle 3y agoSounds like something you could do with SQS and Lambda. They just have massive datacenter infra and compute at disposal.
- salil999 3y agoYeah but what about something that won't make my wallet cry?
- jjice 3y agoPretty much any queue and a compute will do. SQS paired with lambda an event bridge (I forget if that's the service to trigger the lambda or not) would be solid. I lean towards compute that's a bit easier to run in different settings so just any old code checking the queue and executing as expected also works. SQS is cheap and it's pretty damn solid. I believe it was the first AWS service. But in reality, any managed queue or even a well structured DB table can be fine, depending on your scale.
- cj 3y agoIs using Lambda with an external data store (like MongoDB) a solved problem? I remember this being an issue a long time ago, where Lambda pretty much was a non starter for use cases where you're running 1000 independent tasks that each, on their own, is a small unit of work (just 1 or 2 database queries). Long way of asking: is there a way to share a database connection between lambda functions or does each run need to re-establish / re-authenticate a new connection with the database?
- margorczynski 3y agoI will not touch anything Meta/Zuckerberg related with a 10 foot pole, and I would advise anyone to do the same. FB and Instagram are giant drivers of depression and bitterness, they shouldn't be supported financially or otherwise.
- leosanchez 3y agoAgree. I still don't have an instagram account even though everyone around me keeps sharing instagram videos.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Panini_Jones 3y agoZippyDB and Async have existed for years. This is nothing really new.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- r721 3y agoCloudflare Overall Ranking for Threads: https://blog.cloudflare.com/content/images/2023/12/pasted-image-0--2--2.png https://blog.cloudflare.com/content/images/2023/12/pasted-im... (source: https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2023-year-in-review-internet-services/#socialmedia https://blog.cloudflare.com/radar-2023-year-in-review-intern...)
- hn1986 3y agoThe trajectory shows it is going up. Threads is doing good considering they didn't have a web client until late August and wasn't in the EU until mid-December. Sadly, Cloudflare didn't include this in their notes for additional context - not the best journalism. It's in the top 5 overall apps across many countries in the EU. The Tech Threads and Photography community are especially good there.
- kenhwang 3y agoAs a user of Threads and X (formerly known as Twitter). Threads is so dog slow, even compared to Instagram. Slow to respond to requests for just about everything (several seconds), even slower at showing an up to date feed (10s of seconds). Really think it's what's holding back adoption because Twitter can show up to date personalized posts in under a second. I love all the quality of life features Threads is adding, but it severely lags FB/Instagram/Twitter in showing up to date information quickly.
- treesknees 3y agoIt really irks me when a big company like Meta tries to describe a new project as a startup created by a "nimble team of engineers". In the blog post they link to [1] >Threads was developed in an environment more akin to a startup. OK sure, a small group of people broke the model of development and did something new from the ground up? >Threads scaled successfully to 100 million users without any major downtime thanks to Meta’s underlying infrastructure and engineering foundations, which were critical to the successful launch. Ah, no. All of the underlying hard parts were done already for them. That's not a startup. [1] https://engineering.fb.com/2023/09/07/culture/threads-inside-story-metas-newest-social-app/ https://engineering.fb.com/2023/09/07/culture/threads-inside...
- sangnoir 3y agoThey never claimed their stack was startup-like, just the process. They are likely contrasting it with their usual[0] engineering practices: no focus-grouping, applying for headcount from 3 directors and making a 4-year roadmap after a gaggle of project managers finally agree on what to build. Perhaps its just one decision-maker and bunch if empowered engineers and no red tape - which would be very much be closer to startups, without denying themselves access to humongous datacenters. 0. Exaggerating some of the bureaucracy I've seen in larger orgs
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deniscepko2 3y ago"informed the infrastructure teams to prepare for its launch with only two days’ advance notice. " What a nice way to say we don't respect our engineers. They should hide in the woods with their planning skills and not post about it