This is really fascinating. A company rebuilt Mastodon’s core functions with a new dev technology that flies in comparison to Ruby on Rails. https://blog.redplanetlabs.com/2023/08/15/how-we-reduced-the-cost-of-building-twitter-at-twitter-scale-by-100x/
(EDIT: They may not be open sourcing the dev tech)
@scottarmitage “In one week we will release a version of Rama that anyone can download and use. This version simulates Rama clusters within a single process and can be used to explore the full Rama API and build complete prototypes. We will also release the Rama documentation at that time.“
It sounds like they're slow-rolling it. I'll take out the “open-source” modifier for now
@ernie @scottarmitage
What about this line?
"In two weeks we will fully open-source our Mastodon implementation"
@havn @ernie @scottarmitage that’s the Mastodon implementation _on top of Rama_. Say Rama were completely proprietary and unobtainable; that Mastodon source wouldn’t do anything. If Rama were also open source then you’re laughing.
Sounds like reality will be something in the middle, with Rama being “available” but likely not open source, and maybe not free. #speculating 🤷♂️
@scottarmitage @ernie Aha - yeah, seems plausible.
Proof of concept anyway, which will inspire others. Cool project anyway!
@ernie I see they use Java.
Definitely possible, but more likely they have not covered most of the edge and special cases yet.
write performance is one nice thing definitely.
Interesting will be how the read performance will be for access dimensions 100 times higher then writes.
And I have a feeling security people will also be having some fun with it 👀
Mastodon is built on inefficient technology that does not scale up to Twitter levels, and that is fine, the Fediverse should not have a Twitter.
Let's not share profit-driven ads for a proprietary, unfree and closed product. Please.
@unexpectedteapot I'll do what I want on my own account, thanks. I'll be friendly about it and I'll try to do the right thing when possible, but if I see something cool I'll share it no matter the source.
Gatekeeping sucks.
@ernie sorry if it came off aggressively, let me elaborate:
This is a common pattern in open technologies where profit-driven ventures and organisations embrace, extend and extinguish the free technology in favour of unfree and controlled profit-making tech: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Calling and shutting this out is deterimental to keep the Fediverse as an open, diverse and free platform, rather than yet another vehicle for profit and exploitation.
@ernie it relies on proprietary software. It is a standard advertisement for proprietary software masquerading as a cool write-up.
This is a common pattern that fills search engines when developers look for solutions: they find a blog post that tells them how by relying on their proprietary software. Hence the concern about keeping Fediverse an open platform by not sharing ads.
Anyway, you seem adamant about it, but I thought it is important to highlight these patterns. Have a nice day.
@unexpectedteapot You came into this thread late, so let me clarify. I said the tool was open source, then someone pointed out it wasn't, just the implementation of Mastodon would be. I corrected that.
And honestly, we don't know their FOSS plans, other than they've open sourced much of their tech already.
My point being, let's not jump on something as if it's evil before we even know what it is. They launched this today.
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