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

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.

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!

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.

To be honest with the current polarisation levels in politics it's no longer possible to be neutral. The conservative side is now even strongarming companies into abandoning their diversity programs! This is just really not ok, I'm part of the LGBTIQ+ support network in our company and this kind of thing is really making waves. People are worried, even though we're a Europe based company where this is not a contested topic (though we do have many offices in the US). See what happened to Ford, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, and many others. Decades of progress are being thrown out the window.

Many US companies are now feeling forced to choose a side. At least I now know which to boycott..

Hi! I'm neutral.

DEI was a political statement—one that you agreed with and felt was necessary. Abandoning DEI is also a political statement—one that you disagree with and think is not okay.

You're welcome to disagree with the people who disagree with DEI, but I'd hesitate to claim that these companies were "strongarmed" into it—the programs always existed as a political tool for the company to curry favor, not as something that was added for its intrinsic practical or moral value. The political climate has changed, which means they no longer serve their true purpose.

The important takeaway from this reversal is that the progressive theory of change that's been leaned on for the past few decades was a bad one. We thought that a lot of progress had been made, but it turns out it was all surface level and easy to undo when the pressure to keep up appearances went away or reversed. "We need to do this because it will look bad if we don't" is a very fickle tool for motivating real change.

Well companies are by their very nature immoral. They don't care about any kind of morals, just making money. You even have to strongarm them into following the law (see Boeing, Volkswagen etc).

Yes. Which is why lasting change will never come from persuading the leadership of companies that your personal set of morals need to be followed if they want to be successful—they'll follow you for as long as you are powerful and bail as soon as you aren't.

You have to change hearts and minds within the broader population in order to bring lasting power towards change, but that's something that the modern crop of progressives entirely gave up on 10+ years ago in favor of racing to the finish line and declaring victory prematurely.

(Cue comments that the right can't be reasoned with so there's no point in trying.)