Kris Nóva on Scalable Systems

I am a firm believer that no system is ever “designed” for the consequences of high adoption. This is especially true with regard to Mastodon, as most of our team has never operated a production Mastodon instance before. To be candid, it would appear that most of the internet is in a similar situation.

We are all experimenting here. Hachyderm was just “lucky” to see adoption.

There is no such thing as both a mechanistic and highly adopted system. All systems that are a consequence of growth, will be organic, and prone to the symptoms of reactive operations.

In other words, every ugly system is also a successful system. Every beautiful system, has never seen spontaneous adoption.

— Kris Nóva, Leaving the Basement

Great write up from Kris Nóva on scaling the Hachyderm.io Mastodon instance to 30,000 users.