this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Mastodon's Next Major Release Enables Full-Text Search (wedistribute.org)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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It's hard not to overstate how much of a big deal it is that Mastodon is adopting this kind of search functionality. Mastodon still makes up a vast portion of the Fediverse.

While other platforms have supported this for way longer, having buy-in by the biggest player in the space will probably have a huge effect on standard expectations moving forward.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It also adds to the deployment complexity even more. Just from memory, to run Mastodon you need:

  • any number of Rails web servers (horizontally scalable)
  • any number of Sidekiq worker processes (horizontally scalable)
  • a PostgreSQL database for persistent storage (vertically scalable modulo sharding)
  • a Redis server for caching and Sidekiq (vertically scalable modulo sharding)
  • a Elasticsearch server for full text search (vertically scalable modulo sharding)

So this is at least 5 different server processes to manage, In reality for almost all deployments, Redis and Elasticsearch are unnecessary; the database can be used for jobs and full text search. Further, it could even be SQLite for all but large instances.

The deployment story for Mastodon is a nightmare and a substitute like Pleroma or even better something in Rust is necessary.