> How is it possible that we’ve reduced the cost of building scalable applications by multiple orders of magnitude?
> You can begin to understand this by starting with a simple observation: you can describe Mastodon (or Twitter, Reddit, Slack, Gmail, Uber, etc.) in total detail in a matter of hours. It has profiles, follows, timelines, statuses, replies, boosts, hashtags, search, follow suggestions, and so on. It doesn’t take that long to describe all the actions you can take on Mastodon and what those actions do. So the real question you should be asking is: given that software is entirely abstraction and automation, why does it take so long to build something you can describe in hours?
> At its core Rama is a coherent set of abstractions...
This conclusion is alarming to read from a company that's trying to sell a new platform. The vast majority of the work in building Twitter or Reddit is not about building a coherent set of abstractions, it's working with an often incoherent reality, dealing with a myriad of laws that describe, as if your web app were a human clerk at a post office, how to handle PII and credit cards and CSAM filters and audits and copyright claims and on and on...
I'm honestly shocked that the technical implementation of a simplified, coherent platform took a full 9 person-months. That shouldn't be the hard part. What I'd want to know as a prospective customer is how you handle exceptions to your beautiful, idealized architecture, when some foreign country requires that you only store comments posted by their citizens within their borders or something like that.
~~full text search doesn't appear to work... so it's possible they punted on one of the harder parts, which is fast efficient accurate fuzzy search, which moderation and a lot of those other harder things rely on.~~
eta: they say that had it but removed it because apparently it's not something mastodon supports. so I guess it is a pretty good high level implementation.
Building Twitter/Mastodon *not at scale* isn't that hard and certainly doesn't take 200 person-years. Building it *at scale* is a completely different story. Remember the fail-whale? That was years of Twitter struggling to scale their product.
That said, as we described in the post our implementation of Mastodon is less code than Mastodon's official implementation. So not only is Rama orders of magnitude more efficient for building applications at scale, it's also much faster for building first versions of an application.
Well since you use clojure, you probably know that to have small codebase, people often pick clojure. Going from point A to point Z quickly is rarely a goal for startups, going through A.. B... C... quickly, is the goal. I am still looking through all this, but a thought of having to bet on some java api + hope and pray it will jump over all unknown hoops, hm.
Comparisons to twitter are unfair, twitter is not really technical gem or is it? It's pretty impressive to build it with 3 ppl in 3 months, but hmm also seems feasible using other tech, given all blueprints are out there.
Well, as mentioned in the post Instagram literally just built and released their own barebones Twitter clone this year, and it took them 25 person years. They were also able to leverage all their existing infrastructure powering similar products.
So I would not say it's remotely feasible to do this in less than one person-year with any other technology.
So the things that make it difficult are all things you shouldn’t be doing in the first place? Well that certainly helps.
You shouldn’t be handling PII/raw CC’s anyways (assuming FinTech is not your core business)
Secretly scanning your customers private messages against an illegal and immoral hash table from a pseudo-government entity? Are you law enforcement? No? Then fucking stop.
Copyright claims? Fuck ‘em. Only do what you are absolutely, positively, no way-out legally bound to do. No more no less. Require formal, written requests and comply in the maximum amount of time allowed.
Audits? What kind of audit? If they’re non-financial you’re probably doing something wrong.
Corporate squares have ruined the tech scene, and it’s time to resist.
> You can begin to understand this by starting with a simple observation: you can describe Mastodon (or Twitter, Reddit, Slack, Gmail, Uber, etc.) in total detail in a matter of hours. It has profiles, follows, timelines, statuses, replies, boosts, hashtags, search, follow suggestions, and so on. It doesn’t take that long to describe all the actions you can take on Mastodon and what those actions do. So the real question you should be asking is: given that software is entirely abstraction and automation, why does it take so long to build something you can describe in hours?
> At its core Rama is a coherent set of abstractions...
This conclusion is alarming to read from a company that's trying to sell a new platform. The vast majority of the work in building Twitter or Reddit is not about building a coherent set of abstractions, it's working with an often incoherent reality, dealing with a myriad of laws that describe, as if your web app were a human clerk at a post office, how to handle PII and credit cards and CSAM filters and audits and copyright claims and on and on...
I'm honestly shocked that the technical implementation of a simplified, coherent platform took a full 9 person-months. That shouldn't be the hard part. What I'd want to know as a prospective customer is how you handle exceptions to your beautiful, idealized architecture, when some foreign country requires that you only store comments posted by their citizens within their borders or something like that.