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Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

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420 points rvz | 6 comments | 31 Aug 24 13:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | source | bottom
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pfraze ◴[31 Aug 24 23:15 UTC] No.41412758[source]▶
Copying over my latest backend status update; figure folks would find it interesting

Servers are holding up so far! Fortunately we were overprovisioned. If we hit 4mm new signups then things should get interesting. We did have some degradations (user handles entering an invalid state, event-stream crashed a couple times, algo crashed a couple times, image servers hit bad latencies) but we managed to avoid a full outage.

We use an event-sourcing model which is: K/V database for primary storage (actually sqlite), into a golang event stream, then into scylladb for computed views. Various separate services for search, algorithms, and images. Hybrid on-prem & cloud. There are ~20 of the k/v servers, 1 event-stream, 2 scylla clusters (I believe).

The event-stream crash would cause the application to stop making progress on ingesting events, but we still got the writes, so you'd see eg likes failing to increment the counter but then magically taking effect 60 seconds later. Since the scylla cluster and the KV stores stayed online, we avoided a full outage.

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pcwalton ◴[01 Sep 24 01:52 UTC] No.41413569[source]▶
It's frustrating that anything related to X/Twitter is such a predictably-partisan tinderbox because this is really interesting technical information. Thank you for sharing it!
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kstenerud ◴[01 Sep 24 05:04 UTC] No.41414443[source]▶
It's partisan/political because Musk is partisan/political. And it's not just Musk.

We've been living in a fantasy land of "no political affiliation" in the tech world for decades, and now that the age of the hyper-rich has come once again, they are realizing the benefits of using the power they wield to shape the worlds they live in.

So now in the early stages of this century's great fight, we'll see our beloved tech giants join the political fray in full force, dragging their follower armies along for the ride.

And it works, too. Just look at the comments here.

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1. roenxi ◴[01 Sep 24 05:36 UTC] No.41414571[source]▶
> We've been living in a fantasy land of "no political affiliation" in the tech world for decades

Which "we" are you speaking for? That doesn't sound like the tech world, we've had a lot of explicitly political tech movements over the years. Off the top of my head some of the more successful and major ones were:

- Cryptography.

- Free Software.

- Cryptocurrency.

The Silicon Valley based companies have been politically active since at least 2016, there have been a couple of political exoduses by various groups to alternative platforms. The non-Silicon-Valley companies have been worse and generally suspect to the point where nobody expected political apathy (is anyone going to claim that Chinese social media are not politically subordinate to the state?).

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2. diffeomorphism ◴[01 Sep 24 05:47 UTC] No.41414628[source]▶
"Politically affiliated" is something very different than "political".
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3. roenxi ◴[01 Sep 24 05:56 UTC] No.41414648[source]▶
If you figure out what that difference is, let me know. The tech scene has been decidedly liberal (old school liberal, nowadays people maybe call that libertarian) and as political as it can be since the start. There has been a trend where other political cultures are getting involved too since ... probably the Obama campaign was when politicians really started noticing that spreading messages through the internet was more effective than going through the corporate news. But that is just a change of affiliations (maybe more accurately a broadening), tech has always been affiliated with someone.
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4. ◴[01 Sep 24 06:14 UTC] No.41414725{3}[source]▶
5. JumpCrisscross ◴[01 Sep 24 06:31 UTC] No.41414783[source]▶
> Which "we" are you speaking for? That doesn't sound like the tech world...Silicon Valley based companies have been politically active since at least 2016

That was the tipping point. Before Trump, it was common to hear techies in the Bay Area proudly proclaim that they didn't concern themselves with politics. (Reminds me of the way aristocratic Europeans talk about commerce.)

Tech always had views on policy. But it wasn't outwardly opinionated on politics, certainly not partisan politics, in the overt (and influential) way that it is today.

6. ben_w ◴[01 Sep 24 16:11 UTC] No.41418036{3}[source]▶
"Political" is anything related to inter-personal power in society, and can be anything from maintaining a homeowner's association bylaws to international spy-craft and assassinations, and is so broad as to be unavoidable in human behaviour.

"Political affiliation" is much narrower and comes with a specific named politician or political party — even if they're not going to get in, such as Lord Buckethead or the Green Party of America.