this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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the_dunk_tank
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I don't think he's totally wrong.
With 10 engineers one should be able to set up a Mastodon instance and scale it.
I think the issue comes when you look at all the functionality that is much more nuanced than just the bare technicals.
A good algorithm to maintain high engagement and display relevant content and relevant ads. Moderation to maintain a balance between an environment friendly for advertising without feeling censored.
And all the data analysis and UX testing to achieve that.
Building a Twitter clone is easy. Dominating the niche is hard.
So he's right that you could make Twitter if you just don't implement 99% of the features that make Twitter, Twitter. Not to mention all the workers that work on the non-product side... All the various infra teams, security, abuse, etc. etc.
bruh come on...
I mean twitter didn't even have a personalized front page when it took off. Also you're not in disagreement with who you're replying to in any way that matters.
Yeah, it basically comes down to a complete lack of comprehension for how big something like twitter really is. On the surface level the functionality is pretty simple. But there's so much else going on that nobody sees, and a whole heap of it will be interconnected.
Twitter web, twitter app for ios and android, twitter api, advertising, content monitoring, content storage, caching, serving, twitter for businesses, content algorithms, accounts, privacy features, user settings, theming, ui, ux, embedded content. That's just off the top of my head. I'm sure a lot of these huge companies could be a bit leaner than they are, but usually the size is somewhat warranted.
This guys whole thing is just making stupid takes based on absolute surface level knowledge of things and sounding confident enough that people buy into it.
A Mastodon instance is used by, at best, a few hundred to low thousands of people, and is going to be small and relatively obscure
Twitter is used by millions, is the preferred quick communication tool of tens of thousands of companies, and is one of the single biggest presences on the net. It'll take far more than 10 engineers to keep it running when it gets randomly DDOSed for a laugh by some bored teenagers, where a Mastodon instance either wouldn't even be a target or would just accept going down temporarily
Both Gab and Truth Social are Mastodon instances (albeit not federated, though if they ever enabled federation they'd be immediately blocked by a majority of instances due to a combination of anti-corp and anti-right sentiments). Gab was actually the largest Mastodon instance for a good while (unsure about currently) - if you see any Mastodon clients that have negative reviews about not connecting to the largest Mastodon instance, that's what they're referring to (several clients blacklisted Gab at the client level).
mastodon itself has like 900 contributors tho, with 23 fairly active contributors. the distributed nature of it means that rather than just having 10 engineers, they need at least 1 maintainer for every instance. there are currently ~10,000 instances. so somewhere around 10,000 or more people are keeping it running
Mastodon demonstrably does not scale to twitter numbers. Even without feature parity it would be unusable.
Granted, twitter's unusable now, but it used to be usable.
Shopify and Github are examples of large web apps that come to mind. Granted, they aren't the world's town square, but I remember the "Ruby does not scale" meme and I feel like it's a bit overstated.