- Joined
- Jan 15, 2019
That's what makes it ideal for something like mastodon (or at least something like it). To handle twitter-level traffic, a healthy mastodon network needs to be able to handle massive concurrency and distributed operation. The fact that it gatekeeps webshits is a major bonus.
Hmmm... I'm actually kinda tempted to give it a try, if for no other reason than to keep my Erlang/Elixir skills from getting rusty. I haven't had a chance to use them for production work in quite awhile.
ETA:
Yeah, that's going to be hilarious. To its credit, Ruby on Rails has been around for a long damned time (about 15 years -- very good longevity for a webshit project) so I imagine the core itself is pretty robust by now. But mastodon itself (as a project, a specification and an implementation) ... not so much. Maybe what, six or seven years? And it's never been a massively popular system (which -- importantly -- doesn't upset its contributors since they mostly preferred it to be a twitter alternative that didn't attract much external attention).
It's obvious already that performance is a massive issue (RoR has never been fast to begin with, and I have no doubt anything the mastodon lads have built greenfield has performance issues too because people very rarely include performance at the conceptual and proof-of-concept stages; and we all know how frequently "proof-of-concept" becomes "production").
RoR isn't designed (or intended) for horizontal scaling, though like most other webshit platforms it's not designed in a way that precludes it -- you can generally slap a load balancer in front of a handful of identically-configured servers to grow capacity in a (mostly) linear fashion, but that's expensive and not really too cost-effective and eventually you'll still hit a database bottleneck anyway.
Performance won't be an easy problem for them to fix without a rewrite using something better than RoR. DDoS is a massive risk for sure. Security concerns are going to be more entertaining in the long run though. There's gotta be something. I doubt they're doing any fuzz testing and haven't asked any competent third parties to perform an audit.
Exciting times ahead for sure!
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