It probably wasn't a big deal when it was a niche project until Twitter imploded. Then all the public instances got overloaded with new users and the limits became obvious.

A better design is Lemmy which is written in Rust so it has far more scalability. It's compiled and because it's tokio / actix based, it can also do a lot more stuff asynchronously so it's not spawning thousands of threads to cope with concurrent requests.

@pkill Yeah seems that way, judging by their scaling up documentation: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/scaling/

Although hey, it all depends on a whole bunch of stuff written in super optimised (and kinda scary) C !

@programmer_humor