FerrousFeb 27, 2023

There are all sorts of things to say about the advantages and disadvantages of Mastodon as a platform, but today I am mostly just appreciating the fact that I trust it to tell me about any comments someone leaves responding to something I've posted.

I don't know why #Twitter and #Facebook are so unreliable with that these days, but I assume it has something to do with them seeing it as a low priority to ensure their users have an okay experience on the sites.

Show threademma
@ferrous Someone who knows far more about this than me explained the problems in terms of the system no longer having enough resources to for its background tasks so notifications pile up in a queue, when the queue gets too large it's dumped and those notifications are lost.
I'll see if I can find it later, might have it bookmarked.
Feb 27, 2023 at 10:37amWeb
Show threadMalnormaluloFeb 27, 2023
@emmaaum @ferrous That's pretty much right. Replication issues are probably also part of it: Twitter is essentially centralized, but for performance reasons they have to spread data around many servers. This is a bit of a contradiction and very difficult to get right. Temporary inconsistencies are common in designs like this, potentially causing issues like missed notifications. Mastodon does this better partly because it does not try to act like it's centralized.
Show threadK.J. ElphinstoneFeb 27, 2023

@emmaaum

Interesting, thank you!

@ferrous