I have to admit, I’m surprised that just a few tens of thousands of new users can make Mastodon underperform. It isn’t exactly a new codebase and much of the work is spread out across many instances. I wonder what the biggest bottleneck is currently.

@cdevroe I’ve been toying around with my own instance on digital ocean. I was surprised when I had to keep bumping up the computing power to support… just me

@braker1nine I'm sure the performance issues it experiences are complex - database writes, file storage, lots of indexes to create. I just wouldn't think that 70,000 signups (which is what the media is reporting, I don't know how accurate that is) could bring the service to its knees.

@cdevroe I believe that most of the new sign ups we're going into just the largest two or three primary instances, Mastodon.social, being one of the largest and busiest. It was those particular servers that were having issues. I'm on a smaller instance and had no issues at all.

@lukemperez If history repeats itself, you're right. A burst of activity followed by people forgetting what they were upset about and going back to their old habits.

@cdevroe That and also the combination of network effects of everyone being on the same platform and (independently but deeply interrelated) the friction with which finding new face and old ones on a federated platform like Mastodon makes rebuilding something analogous to what one had on Twitter nearly impossible—especially for folks without a high technical competency.