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

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420 points rvz | 1 comments | 31 Aug 24 13:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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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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kstenerud ◴[01 Sep 24 08:28 UTC] No.41415229[source]▶
Looking at the responses, I can see that people are still viewing this through the limited lens of left vs right.

This is of course a thing in that nobody can hide their colors anymore, but I'm specifically talking about the rich now feeling empowered enough that they even have the hubris to challenge governments of the world for their own benefit, and in some cases even build their own empires to escape the limitations of governments by forming their own rich-people-only worlds.

For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/28/magazine/prospera-hondura...

So long as you continue fighting left vs right, you're fighting the wrong enemy.

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AnonymousPlanet ◴[01 Sep 24 09:54 UTC] No.41415586[source]▶
As an outsider, I can't help but feel that the American election system that boils everything down to just two parties imposes a limited binary lens onto at least the American view of the world.
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1. jajko ◴[01 Sep 24 12:27 UTC] No.41416420[source]▶
No country that I know of adopted US election system. Its beyond obscure, unfair and set to be rigged for anybody looking from outside, with no normal way out. Its just not resilient enough to everchanging society. I know the historical reasons, but only fools get stuck in the past ways at all costs 'because, you know, in the past, XYZ so we are where we are so suck it up' when its clearly not beneficial to general population.

One reasons out of ocean of reasons - number of actual votes for X or Y is irrelevant, its all about blocks based on some old history nobody should care about much anymore that decide winner. Freedom of choice is very limited, strong populists like trump have much bigger and long lasting effect than in more multipolar elections.

But for sure its a spectacle for masses for a good year and polarizes society for whatever bad reasons there are, that should be concerned about more serious topics than this.