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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

Yes, when I say scalable, I mean ability to scale without having to spend bucketloads on new servers.

Many of the mastodon servers I am seeing pause new registration/break down are at a few thousand members, maybe 8k max. I dont know how Mastodon is implemented, but my intuition is that a well written C++, Rust, or even Java service should be able to handle that many users on a single instance.

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It's Ruby on Rails, which is the second slowest web framework I would consider reasonable for production use (after Django).

Ah, it is all beginning to make sense now.

Twitter makes -200m a year hosting their solution.

Mastodon by contrast spreads out this load to servers paid for by users, not by ads.

If you cannot join any servers, pay for a managed hosting provider to spin one up, or host yourself on a vps or a home server.

That may be well and true, but seems unrelated to the point i am making, which is that I would expect a single instance to be able to handle a few thousand users.

Sure one instance could support that if you pay amazon $2k/mo for a monster instance, but most do not have that kind of money to donate.

Most servers will be small, or you can host your own.

I think we are talking past each other.

I hear you.

It would be cool if someone rewrote it with a Crystal framework. Although there are limitations to this because it's faster than Ruby and similar to Ruby but not completely like Ruby.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33398253

Sure, 'ability to scale' (scalability) might be an issue, but if you are using it, you will see that the majority pf people are on other servers or communities, some not even using Mastodon. Mastodon itself is just one of the implementations of the federated protocol that uses ActivityPub. A lot of alternatives exists, like misskey, pleroma, etc.

Or go with the best tool for the job - Erlang/Elixir.

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