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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Headline: "building Twitter at Twitter-scale"

Article: "building Mastodon at sub-Twitter-scale"

Actually if you read the article you can see we tested way above Twitter-scale. We can easily run this instance at full Twitter-scale by just paying for more servers.

The point isn't the Mastodon instance, but rather that Rama enabled us to build it at scale with in a tiny amount of code and time.

Mastodon and Twitter don't do the same amount of work per post. Mastodon doesn't have a recommendation engine, they don't have an advertising engine, they don't scan every post for CSAM, there's no global search, etc. (Some of these things are good not to have, but they still drastically change the scope.)

Claiming to have enabled significant scaling of a Mastodon/ActivityPub-compatible instance is fine. Claiming to have replicated Twitter on the cheap is, from the post, not accurate.

That's why we're comparing it to the cost of Twitter's original consumer product. As a demonstration of Rama, we scoped this project to the entirety of Mastodon which is roughly equivalent to Twitter's original consumer product (actually, it's probably greater in scope with additional features like hashtag follows and more complex filter/mute capabilities).

All those use cases you listed absolutely can be implemented with Rama, and Rama's extreme cost benefits would apply to those as well.

Thank - I've changed the title to be consistent with what the article says.

Minor gripe, but there's a misspelling in the title: it should read Mastodon not Mastadon.

Oops! Fixed now. Thanks to you, Fabricio20, and riffic.

Hey dang, I think you have a typo in the title.. says Mastadon instead of Mastodon!

masto not masta

That's not the title of the article and also not what the article says. I would be really pissed if you editorialized the title of my article like that.

I'm happy to correct it if anyone suggests a better one. The intention is to find a neutral title that accurately reflects what the article itself is saying.

We've learned that when an article's original title generates complaints like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37137317, the thread is likely to get derailed by shallow arguing about the title. It's in both the author's interest and the community's for us to nip that in the bud by (1) putting an accurate and neutral title at the top (preferably using representative language from the article itself), and (2) marking the title complaint offtopic since it no longer applies. These steps nudge the thread toward discussing the article's content rather than merely its title.

Alright, sounds reasonable. I think the problem here is that the author specifically says (in a sibling comment) that the point is not Mastodon and now it's in the title. Maybe they're fine with it though.

I'm no expert and definitely get things wrong - we only skim things and make a first crack at an attempt, and then rely on other people to refine it. If Nathan or someone else wants to suggest a more accurate and neutral title, we can do that - the goal is simply to clear the discussion space for something more interesting than title fever (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). But now I'm repeating myself!

We have twitter at home!

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