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Comment by nikolay | Hacker News Reader

How scalable is Mastodon though? I mean, it's written in Ruby a la Twitter.

Update: It is used by both Gab and Truth Social, which are centralized, not distributed.

Mastodon is one ActivityPub implementation. If you need something you can run on a teacup and string then https://pleroma.social is written in Elixer and seems to run well on tiny VMs.

You can even run WordPress with the ActivityPub plugin and be a participant others can subscribe/interact with:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/activitypub/

The Fediverse / Federated Social Web is bigger than Mastodon.

And there are others, e.g. GoToSocial ( https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial ), written in Go.

Twitter is no longer a Ruby application, they moved to Scala and Java after running into scaling bottlenecks.

It is a decentralized social media site, so it will surely scale well enough to meet realistic user numbers at least.

The most popular instance has 200K users. This is still way too little for a distrubted system given Facebook has over 2 billion users.

Ask GitHub, Basecamp, Shopify, Zendesk, Netflix, etc, etc. This notion that Rails is slow and doesn’t scale is misinformed at best.

One of the most recommended hosters [0] offers a 90 EUR/month plan just for up to 50 concurrent users! What I joke! This is like an instance fir my extended family and friends!

[0]: https://masto.host/pricing/

From https://masto.host/pricing/ - Under the Galaxy plan 90 EUR/Month: "2000 Active Users (estimated)"

Also, in the 'about the plans' section of that page, under 'Concurrent Requests' and 'Users and Active Users' you have more details. But one can think of concurrent requests limit as actions occurring simultaneously (eg: 50 people clicking a button at the exact same time). Even on the rare occasions when that happens, the actions are queued and take a couple more seconds to process.

Netflix runs Java heavily on the backend to scale their platform. Twitter ditched Ruby on Rails and moved to JVM (Sala) for the same reasons. Any benchmark comparison for programming language performs will show Java beating Ruby on Rails, Python etc by huge margin.

Also, isn't Netflix actually using Python instead of Rails?

https://netflixtechblog.com/python-at-netflix-bba45dae649e

The main thing Java beats other langs in by a huge margin is memory consumption.

Which isn't a little advantage!

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