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ctrl+f "ads"

ctrl+f "monetization"

ctrl+f "moderation"

ctrl+f "existing infrastructure"

ctrl+f "personalization"

etc etc

Yeah about what I expect from a "we rebuilt twitter for cheap" post. There's no point to the comparisons with the Twitter codebase size/cost. It completely distracts from what is probably a perfectly fine project.

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That's a fair criticism - this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. What I find interesting about this is the cost of running the service. Being able to run a twitter-like thing on a hundred or so large aws instances is neat and I'm sure that many folks here dream of that kind of efficiency at their day jobs, but I'm more excited about how this scales down. Can you run a community of a thousand or so posters on a micro or nano instance for a few bucks a month or less? At that scale and cost, donations should easily be able to cover hosting fees and you would surely be able to deputize enough mods to keep things civil (for whatever definition of civil your instance lands on). Ads, monetization, personalization are non-issues (well, not major issues) at that scale.

The point is that much of that should be unnecessary to sustain the service because hosting costs are significantly (presumably 100x) cheaper.

They never claimed that hosting costs would be 100x cheaper, and given what they show with amount of machines in the scaling chart, I doubt it is.

It's a JVM application with all state duplicated N times, so at least on the memory side it's likely going to be a resource hog.

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