The (bumby) road to 20k users

Hello everyone!

As you might have noticed since my last update, bird.makeup has gotten quite a bit more popular, and we have since crossed the 20k users mark! It's been quite a ride though, with multiple cycles of reaching the limits of what the code could achieve, crashing, improving it, then repeating that whole cycle again. Thank you all for your patience while the site has been down or lagging behind by a few hours in the last weeks.

On the plus side there as been a lot of improvements, both small (better caching, better database indexes and queries, better parallelism of tasks, etc) and a very big piece I wanted to do for a while: bird.makeup can now make use of many servers! This solves a lot of the issue of a single server making too many requests to twitter and getting rate-limited, or being overloaded with demand. I can now simply add more servers as more people sign up.

The current split is like so: one cloud server doing all the web stuff (the UI and answering your follow requests), another cloud server crawling twitter and sending the tweets to fediverse servers, and a raspberry pie at home also crawling (I tried the web server on that first, but the pie just dies with the load). The cloud servers are on free tiers and I plan to sign up for more cloud providers and also invest some of the Patreon money in something more powerful than a raspberry pie.

I expect as the date Twitter will turn off official API access looms, a lot of users of other similar tools will switch to bird.makeup. Bird.makeup doesn't use the official API, but (basically) browses the web interface to get tweets, so it won't be affected by the switch. 

During the downtimes in the last weeks, many people asked me if there will be exclusivity for patreon supporters. I would really like to continue providing the service under a gift economy model inspired by the broader fediverse, where you pay according to the value provided to you and as a community we subsidize those that can't afford it. If computing/bandwith costs are too high I will have too, but I'm hopeful I can continue to scale under this model. 

Speaking of donations, thanks to you all I have upgraded some parts of my programming setup. I now have an annual sourcehut subscriptions (amazing company and service btw) and also an ultimate JetBrains subscription. 

Hopefully the scaling problems are now over, and I can get back to adding more feature to bird.makeup!

Onward!