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Blërg, a microblogging platform

blerg.cc

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Re: Blërg, a microblogging platform

#21

Post by vidarh »

dgellow wrote: post #15

> Ruby on Rails - Using rails to prototype a system is fine — scaling up to a million hits a day with it is just a bad idea. As the service grew, I'm sure it cost them a lot more time than it saved. I believe that Twitter runs on the JVM since almost a decade.

It was also never the problem with Twitter. As much as I detest Rails, Rails was used as an excuse for having picked an architecture that did not prepare them for the need to have a properly scalable backend.

Nothing in Rails prevented them from doing that properly, though Rails defaults may well have encouraged them to pick the easy way out initially (that in itself would not have been a problem either, if they'd started work on a proper backend in the background).

Sharded large-scale delivery of messages has been a "solved" problem for decades, irrespective of language. Twitter as-it-is now is big enough to have all kinds of fun operational issues, but when they were struggling their volume was nothing impressive.

Re: Blërg, a microblogging platform

#22

Post by rakoo »

newswasboring wrote: post #14
rakoo wrote: post #11

Interestingly this has the basics to provide a personal ActivityPub-enabled stack, so it could join the Fediverse and still be useful today (after some modifications)

Slightly off topic, but someone should sell Fediverse in a box. I should be able to go buy a physical credit card sized thing which I plug into my wifi and everything is setup for me. Is someone working on something like that or is the Fediverse not ready for this yet?

There is an active network of associative ISPs in France, and they have come up with an Internet-in-a-box thing: https://internetcu.be/. Basically it tunnels everything to a VPN of your choice (so you bypass your residential limitations) and has a yunohost "OS", so you can install anything you want with a few clicks.

I'm sure other projects have started something like that, but I can't find them

Re: Blërg, a microblogging platform

#23

Post by beagle3 »

From the site:

"""Is this a joke?

Yes. No. Maybe. Blërg is an exercise in constructive satire — a fully functional service created in a fit of hubris to poke fun at Twitter's engineering. It's just for fun, but no one is going to keep you from using it seriously. :]"""

Re: Blërg, a microblogging platform

#24

Post by Chris2048 »

doix wrote: post #10
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No people do this all the time - a few years ago I read an article where the secret sauce was writing everything in lisp (good luck hiring for that). Goldman Sachs does a lot of work in erlang but mostly to limit turnover on the dev side - try getting a job if all you have on your resume is years of working with a language nobody else uses, you can do it but it’s going to take a lot more effort on your part. I came a…

> Goldman Sachs does a lot of work in erlang but mostly to limit turnover on the dev side - try getting a job if all you have on your resume is years of working with a language nobody else uses, you can do it but it’s going to take a lot more effort on your part. My take on that is slightly different. Choosing a fairly esoteric language as a company reduces the amount of effort it takes to review applicants. Right no…

> post a job for python, you'll get thousands of applicants

I'm glad to see that Python is in that category. When I first abandoned Java in it's favor, I was given funny looks about why I'd stick with such an niche language..

Re: Blërg, a microblogging platform

#25

Post by dkarp »

doix wrote: post #10
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No people do this all the time - a few years ago I read an article where the secret sauce was writing everything in lisp (good luck hiring for that). Goldman Sachs does a lot of work in erlang but mostly to limit turnover on the dev side - try getting a job if all you have on your resume is years of working with a language nobody else uses, you can do it but it’s going to take a lot more effort on your part. I came a…

> Goldman Sachs does a lot of work in erlang but mostly to limit turnover on the dev side - try getting a job if all you have on your resume is years of working with a language nobody else uses, you can do it but it’s going to take a lot more effort on your part. My take on that is slightly different. Choosing a fairly esoteric language as a company reduces the amount of effort it takes to review applicants. Right no…

> Right now, if you post a job for python, you'll get thousands of applicants

Have you done this? I wish we received thousands of applications for each python role we post

Re: Blërg, a microblogging platform

#26

Post by k__ »

Haha, awesome!

I'm planning to build a "Microblogging for companies"/"Slack for microblogging" SaaS this year because I think asnyc communication is the way for remote work.

Currently, I'm looking at existing microblogging platforms to get an idea of common features.

Next step will be interviewing potential customers.

Re: Blërg, a microblogging platform

#27

Post by f6v »

jimis wrote: post #2

I was looking for Twitter alternatives and found this one, which is old and stale but looks like a very interesting experiment! Quoting its frontpage: But what's wrong with Twitter? I'M GLAD YOU ASKED. There are two aspects of Twitter that just bug me as an engineer: Ruby on Rails - Using rails to prototype a system is fine — scaling up to a million hits a day with it is just a bad idea. As the service grew, I'm sure…

> Ruby on Rails - Using rails to prototype a system is fine

The sad thing is that way too many developers never learn that programming language and framework is not the biggest bottleneck.

Re: Blërg, a microblogging platform

#28

Post by f6v »

lazyjones wrote: post #4
jimis wrote: post #2

I was looking for Twitter alternatives and found this one, which is old and stale but looks like a very interesting experiment! Quoting its frontpage: But what's wrong with Twitter? I'M GLAD YOU ASKED. There are two aspects of Twitter that just bug me as an engineer: Ruby on Rails - Using rails to prototype a system is fine — scaling up to a million hits a day with it is just a bad idea. As the service grew, I'm sure…

It seems to be down. And Twitter migrated to Scala a while ago (from RoR).

Anyone knows why Twitter fails to load one out of ten times?

Re: Blërg, a microblogging platform

#29

Post by newswasboring »

Alekhine wrote: post #17
newswasboring wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slightly off topic, but someone should sell Fediverse in a box. I should be able to go buy a physical credit card sized thing which I plug into my wifi and everything is setup for me. Is someone working on something like that or is the Fediverse not ready for this yet?

Wait, what do you mean? Set up Fediverse on WiFi? Fediverse refers to decentralized social media which can 'federate' with each other.

Fediverse is trying to give social media identities in a federated manner. I want a box which will have everything setup (software etc.) for my identity servers. Like I want my own mastodone instance or stuff like that.

Re: Blërg, a microblogging platform

#30

Post by nickdonnelly »

f6v wrote: post #28
lazyjones wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to be down. And Twitter migrated to Scala a while ago (from RoR).

Anyone knows why Twitter fails to load one out of ten times?

You likely need to delete your service workers for Twitter and let it re-create them.
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