> You can begin to understand this by starting with a simple observation: you can describe Mastodon (or Twitter, Reddit, Slack, Gmail, Uber, etc.) in total detail in a matter of hours. It has profiles, follows, timelines, statuses, replies, boosts, hashtags, search, follow suggestions, and so on. It doesn’t take that long to describe all the actions you can take on Mastodon and what those actions do. So the real question you should be asking is: given that software is entirely abstraction and automation, why does it take so long to build something you can describe in hours?
> At its core Rama is a coherent set of abstractions...
This conclusion is alarming to read from a company that's trying to sell a new platform. The vast majority of the work in building Twitter or Reddit is not about building a coherent set of abstractions, it's working with an often incoherent reality, dealing with a myriad of laws that describe, as if your web app were a human clerk at a post office, how to handle PII and credit cards and CSAM filters and audits and copyright claims and on and on...
I'm honestly shocked that the technical implementation of a simplified, coherent platform took a full 9 person-months. That shouldn't be the hard part. What I'd want to know as a prospective customer is how you handle exceptions to your beautiful, idealized architecture, when some foreign country requires that you only store comments posted by their citizens within their borders or something like that.