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Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

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Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#241
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also most of the rest of the world doesn't use Twitter (I'm seeing about 240M total users?). The ones that do use Twitter do so because of a significant amount of money going into marketing Twitter's platform. Conversely, relatively nothing goes into pushing people to use mastodon. It can only take off if it really does prove, not just useful, but more useful than a centralized version that's got money behind it.

What microblogging service does most of the rest of the world use? Weibo? Telegram channels?

The rest of the world uses WhatsApp Status. Twitter is for those who hand in their sanity in pursuit of an audience.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#242
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of it is that it isn't a company but a standard, so if one instance owner goes crazy and patches ads in you can move to another (or your own) and keep your network

Sorry if this is a dumb question, I’m still new to it. Wouldn’t you have the same problem as with an email address? I mean, your handle or whatever it is called would still point to that instance/owner right? Or is there some kind of “DNS” or registry so you can move your handle to other instances?

Yes. This IMO is one of the 3 key issues with federation as it is now:

1. Noone understand what "federation" is so they all flock to the big servers hence making the majority of the system totally non-federated in nature

2. Findability (of users, topics, servers) is terrible which pushes people to 1)

3. What you said. Until there's such a thing as federated identity, we're all still tied to one server, thus one server owner can ban / switch off / over-moderate and we're all back to square one

Some of this can be solved with ux and education but I worry that some of it is basically baked in to federation.

Edit: yeh I mean in theory you can move servers but it's apparently not easy...!

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#243

I think we're about at the point where the people who predicted chaos at twitter after Elon basically fired most of the experienced engineers have been proven correct. The duct tape is all coming apart at the seams now. It isn't quite as decisive as a submarine imploding, and ceasing to exist, but it has turned into a brightly burning tirefire.

I dunno. We are several months out after the major layoffs. Maybe some very recent bad decisions were made internally that pared back too far, but I think Musk has long since been proven correct that the core platform could function on a fraction of the workforce it had at the time of takeover.

It is a testament to the engineers of old Twitter that their systems stayed standing for as long as they did.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#244
post #231
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the loads are not comparable.

Honestly. what the fuck is this response? I hear always that centralising everything is great because efficiencies of scale: but then we have something that works as good or better and the response is; “ah yeah, but the load is so high!” Why do I care? I don't honestly give a shit about how much load you have, you could be factoring Pi on every page load; it means -nothing- to me. I kindly invite you to give more of…

I've been arguing with Twitter emigres who seem to think that the UX on masto sucks.

I would say that Twitter is an automatic transmission, mastodon is a standard.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#245
post #15

[flagged]

How about reading candidates' actual campaign platforms and watching campaign debates then?

Nobody needs a "wide swath of information" unless it's part of their job. The world needs to normalize unplugging and going offline more often.

Also, HN is far from being immune to information manipulation. 99.9% of non-tech articles on HN are either misinfo campaigns or egoistical turf wars.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#246

I think we're about at the point where the people who predicted chaos at twitter after Elon basically fired most of the experienced engineers have been proven correct. The duct tape is all coming apart at the seams now. It isn't quite as decisive as a submarine imploding, and ceasing to exist, but it has turned into a brightly burning tirefire.

I have to disagree. If you honestly take the emotion and politics out of this and evaluate on merit alone, what do you think?

Twitter wasn’t healthy before Musk bought it. It wasn’t a thriving business, it was a very old, very large startup still struggling to find market fit and loosing a lot of money.

Also, it wasn’t a thriving product. It was stagnant.

Since Twitter was purchased, the amount of features they have shipped has been impressive. They’ve shipped a lot of features and extended the platform a lot. To your point they have also done this with far less engineers than before.

Regarding any downtime, everyone has downtime. Google, Amazon, Meta… the best of the best still have it regardless of money or manpower.

Considering what that team has done with less resources, I think the achievement still pretty good. What do you think?

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#248
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure the loads are not comparable.

It withstands being one of the first link on HN, and it still loads comfortably. For a personal website, that's a great performance.

HN itself is run on a single server. So long as you’re not running something bloated or trying to host on a DSL connection, you’ll be fine.

Re: Twitter Is DDOSing Itself

#250

Meanwhile, I can see this very Mastadon post with no login just fine. And the interface is not trying to assault me. It loads quick. ...Seems like a better product than Twitter for a public feed.

Mastodon absolutely does not load quickly. I clicked the link and saw the followup tweet/post/whatever for a couple of seconds before it reflowed and showed me the actually linked tweet in a smaller body font. The had to wait longer for the whole thing to finish loading. There is a ton of unnecessary JS bloat on the linked site.
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