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Leonardo Di Ottio

@Gargron The #Trump #Mastodon rip-off is struggling. bbc.co.uk/news/technology-6092

Any ideas what their tech hurdles could be?

I assume they’re limiting new users because they expect their servers couldn’t cope with 1.5 million users. I also assume they’re not allowed on AWS, Azure etc.

Would, however, hiring a bunch of very heavy VPS instances from your typical far-right hosters not be enough to handle this load? Perhaps that is/was the role of Rumble?

6 comments
Eugen Rochko

@LeonardoDiOttio Scaling any service to millions of users requires some expertise that most developers and devops never get unless they work for one of the large companies, and from what I understand, they did not poach any FAANG people. Add to that that their developers did not actually develop the software and may lack critical understanding of its internals, and it starts to look like what we're seeing...

Dentaku (Thomas Renger)

@Gargron @LeonardoDiOttio It would still be interesting whether Mastodon in its current state would be able to scale to 1.5E6 users on a single instance (on the other hand given the federated design it doesn't have to).

Eugen Rochko

@dentaku @LeonardoDiOttio The question of how to scale a Mastodon server to 1.5 million users is primarily a question of how to scale PostgreSQL to 1.5 million users, because in every other way it's a simple matter of throwing more web workers at it

Leonardo Di Ottio

@Gargron @dentaku Good info, and makes sense I suppose. Would it be possible to, when needed, split the load over several Postgres servers? Not splitting the users over various servers but for instance storing the users on one instance, their posts on another etc. etc.?

Eugen Rochko

@LeonardoDiOttio @dentaku Out of the box, Mastodon supports connecting to replicas for read operations. Sharding, which you describe, would have to be manually organized.

Leonardo Di Ottio

@Gargron Yes, there is some analysis that suggests they have a hard time finding the techies to do some of the required work as most tech people are more likely to be in the liberal or libertarian quadrant rather than authoritarian far right.

I’m trying to establish whether this struggle is just a technical one or whether there might be other factors at play (economics, politics, loyalty, factions).

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