birddotmakeup

Updates from the last few weeks

Added 2023-03-12 15:34:08 +0000 UTC

Hello everyone!

Thought it would be nice to write a quick post with all the improvements I did in the last few weeks.

Scaling

People are continuing to subscribe to replicated account en masse! A least a thousand users sign up every week and current users create a least a thousand subscriptions every day. bird.makeup is also running from a rather small server (2 cores 4gb of ram) to keep costs under control.

So that means I have to do optimizations often to keep it from being overloaded. I fixed a problem with socket exhaustion (part 1, part 2). I made a large refactoring that allowed me to send tweets to multiple fediverse server in parallel. Server was crashing at peak times this weekend because remote servers were all fetching a boosted tweet at the same time, so I made it so that that a tweet only had to be processed once.

PostgreSQL (the database bird.makeup uses) was upgraded from version 9 to 15.

As more people sign up, I keep learning about weak points and improving them. I expect that to continue for a long while!

Twitter compatibility

A few quick wins here: I made long form tweets work. I also changed things to be able to make more requests to twitter (part 1, part 2) to refresh all accounts faster.

The famous bug that bird.makeup accounts are dropped from list randomly

That is not a bug in bird.makeup, but a bug in mastodon itself I believe, so this is quite hard to debug. I hypothesized that it was because public keys were being rotated. I persisted them and it looks like it works correctly now. You will have to remove them and add them back one last time though.

QT on icecube and Ivory

That is the most requested feature and also the one I want the most personally. To make that work, I have to implement some part of the mastodon API on bird.makeup. Unfortunately that will require another large refactoring before I can do it, and I'm currently planning it. So there is progress there when things are not on fire!

Onwards!