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We reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100x

blog.redplanetlabs.com

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Re: We reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100x

#291

Post by gexla »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #231
RomanPushkin wrote: post #163

> ...10k lines of code. This is 100x less code than the ~1M lines Twitter I wish I didn't see this comparison, which is not fair at all. Everyone in their right mind understands that the number of features is much less, that's why you have 10k lines. Add large-scale distributed live video support at the top of that, and you won't get any close to 10k lines. It's only one of many many examples. I really wish you compa…

We see this type of post regularly. Something like, "How I built a better clone by myself in a month." Well, no, usually it's just a bare skeleton with the least amount of functionality. Not only that, the software is the least of the functionality. The organizational structure around the app is what matters most to keep it going. It's an attention seeking ploy and the whole thing usually disappears real quick.

If you want background, you can go to the blog in his bio and read the first post, which mentioned he worked at Twitter starting in 2011. He mentioned elsewhere that his comparison is early Twitter, as opposed to current Twitter.

The background makes this a bit more interesting, because you can imagine how those early days impacted the arc of his work.

Re: We reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100x

#295

Post by typon »

doublepg23 wrote: post #234

HN seems to be putting you through the wringer, I for one am excited you guys made this and plan to open source it- it looks like a fantastic project.

Why not? Incredible claims should have equal amount of scrutiny. I am glad that HN has a default skeptical bias - we don't want to be swept up in frenzies. If anything, HN is still relatively prone to these frenzies from time to time.

Re: We reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100x

#296

Post by jeremyjh »

hosh wrote: post #289
jeremyjh wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scrutiny from investors, legal and compliance exists because the risks are real, and they don't go away just because there isn't a Serious Business involved. Once someone operating one of these is publicly damaged, the risk will be better understood and marked up accordingly.

They sure are, which brings back to the point: how much did this implementation of Mastadon adequately addressed these risks with the reduced code count?

I assumed this is just marketing, so it addressed the risks by never operating a public instance.

Re: We reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100x

#297

Post by syntheweave »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #241
nathanmarz wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're comparing just to the original consumer product, which is about the same as Mastodon is today. That's why we said "original consumer product" and not "Twitter's current consumer product". Mastodon actually has more features than the original Twitter consumer product like hashtag follows, global timelines, and more sophisticated filtering/muting capabilities. Some people argue it's not so expensive to build a sc…

I work in gaming, so I cannot speak to your specific experiences. Entity Component Systems are extremely performant, really good science, and shipping in middlewares like Unity. However, in order to ship an ECS game, in my experience, you have to have already made your whole game first in a normal approach, in order to have everything be fully specified sufficiently that you can correctly create an ECS implementation…

Yes, this is along the lines of what I'm suspicious of too, as an also-gamedev that has done some ECS.

It's too easy to study an existing system and, given the resources, create a perfect demo for how to dramatically improve it in certain ways. You can go on to ship the demo, but the demo wasn't made by the same kind of organization, with the same kinds of goals, as the original system builders. The extreme example of this is, of course, the demoscene and its hardware-bending tricks that achieve the impossible through a significant modification to the design of a "production" equivalent.

So it's better by performance metrics, better by codesize, but unknown on other metrics. Like, "do I know how to start building new things with this?"

Re: We reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100x

#299

Post by throwuxiytayq »

Aeolun wrote: post #288
ricardobeat wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all, especially because React doesn’t do much dependency tracking on its own and is built for predictable UI updates and not performance. To be honest any parallel with frontend here is meaningless, reactivity and all the concepts at play have existed long before JS and browsers came along, it’s easier to explain from first principles.

I think that’s probably not the case for many new developers that don’t have any exposure to anything not React. Of course ‘react for data’ is entirely misleading, but it may give a decent idea if you don’t have an hour to spend on an explanation.

In other words, it’s the Dark Souls of application backends, but entirely different.

Re: We reduced the cost of building Mastodon at Twitter-scale by 100x

#300

Post by moate »

syntheweave wrote: post #297
doctorpangloss wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in gaming, so I cannot speak to your specific experiences. Entity Component Systems are extremely performant, really good science, and shipping in middlewares like Unity. However, in order to ship an ECS game, in my experience, you have to have already made your whole game first in a normal approach, in order to have everything be fully specified sufficiently that you can correctly create an ECS implementation…

Yes, this is along the lines of what I'm suspicious of too, as an also-gamedev that has done some ECS. It's too easy to study an existing system and, given the resources, create a perfect demo for how to dramatically improve it in certain ways. You can go on to ship the demo, but the demo wasn't made by the same kind of organization, with the same kinds of goals, as the original system builders. The extreme example o…

Asking “what are you optimizing for/building towards” and getting different answers for different products isn’t proof that either is inferior, just that they may be better at different things.

Your comment makes it seem like their post is misleading, when it isn’t it just might be that what they do best isn’t useful to you (or possibly anyone).

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