from Hacker News

How meta built the infrastructure for Threads

by trojanalert on 1/8/24, 4:54 AM with 168 comments

  • by erulabs on 1/8/24, 4:51 PM

    Gotta love how far MySQL + k/v store can get ya. I have no experience with zippyDB, but MySQL and ScyllaDB certainly feels like having an M1 Abrams and a B2 Spirit in my back pocket. I’m constantly pushing the “relationships from MySQL, data from Cassandra” narrative. It sounds like Facebook has a similar approach - although this post doesn’t make it clear where message data actually resides.

    MySQL, ScyllaDB, and RabbitMQ. A stack made in pragmatist heaven by devops angels. Now to find some developers who don’t hate it ;)

  • by r721 on 1/8/24, 6:15 PM

  • by kenhwang on 1/8/24, 7:13 PM

    As a user of Threads and X (formerly known as Twitter). Threads is so dog slow, even compared to Instagram. Slow to respond to requests for just about everything (several seconds), even slower at showing an up to date feed (10s of seconds). Really think it's what's holding back adoption because Twitter can show up to date personalized posts in under a second.

    I love all the quality of life features Threads is adding, but it severely lags FB/Instagram/Twitter in showing up to date information quickly.

  • by rapsey on 1/8/24, 8:55 AM

    Never heard of ZippyDB. Shame it is not open source.

  • by deniscepko2 on 1/9/24, 8:36 AM

    "informed the infrastructure teams to prepare for its launch with only two days’ advance notice. "

    What a nice way to say we don't respect our engineers. They should hide in the woods with their planning skills and not post about it

  • by aschobel on 1/8/24, 5:44 PM

    What do folks use for something like Meta’s Async? RabbitMQ?

    > The workloads commonly executed on Async are those that do not require blocking an active user’s experience with a product and can be performed anywhere from a few seconds to several hours after a user’s action.

  • by DeathArrow on 1/8/24, 8:42 AM

    What is Threads?

  • by Jare on 1/8/24, 10:00 AM

    Offtopic but here we go:

    Once Threads became available in the EU I, like I assume many others, made an Instagram account from my FB account in order to check it out.

    2 days later, and without having posted anything except perhaps a "Hello world", my Insta account was banned for generic reason (breaking the TOS, nothing concrete). I only found out 2 weeks later, as I hadn't even visited the site(s) again. Their "Appeal" button leads to a request to send a confirmation code to my phone, but no code ever arrives (Spanish phone, not a complicated country). There's no button or link to tell them that it doesn't.

    I know of others who have experienced the same thing. Move fast and break things indeed.

  • by margorczynski on 1/8/24, 5:58 PM

    I will not touch anything Meta/Zuckerberg related with a 10 foot pole, and I would advise anyone to do the same. FB and Instagram are giant drivers of depression and bitterness, they shouldn't be supported financially or otherwise.

  • by laweijfmvo on 1/8/24, 4:53 PM

    (This is performance evaluation week at Meta)

    I can only dream of being able to cite an article like this on my impacc...

  • by treesknees on 1/8/24, 8:12 PM

    It really irks me when a big company like Meta tries to describe a new project as a startup created by a "nimble team of engineers". In the blog post they link to [1]

    >Threads was developed in an environment more akin to a startup.

    OK sure, a small group of people broke the model of development and did something new from the ground up?

    >Threads scaled successfully to 100 million users without any major downtime thanks to Meta’s underlying infrastructure and engineering foundations, which were critical to the successful launch.

    Ah, no. All of the underlying hard parts were done already for them. That's not a startup.

    [1] https://engineering.fb.com/2023/09/07/culture/threads-inside...

  • by itslennysfault on 1/8/24, 4:38 PM

    I'm kinda loving the obvious "X" shills in the comments coming just to declare Threads dead. It is literally the 2nd most downloaded app in the AppStore (was #1 for a bit, but Temu is seemingly unstoppable).

    Personally, it has become my preferred social media platform. It's overflowing with content and I check in on it several times a day, and have been really enjoying the community that is emerging.

    It DOES however have a big porn bot problem, but I don't think that is unique to Threads. Hopefully, they can come up with a way to minimize it soon.

  • by Panini_Jones on 1/8/24, 6:09 PM

    ZippyDB and Async have existed for years. This is nothing really new.

  • by Researcherry on 1/8/24, 8:36 AM

    Isn't thread dead yet?

  • by puttycat on 1/8/24, 8:43 AM

    The amount of (very impressive) human labor that went into building something that was dead on delivery. Kudos to them for being able to incentivize engineers to pull through this.

  • by bigtechdigest on 1/8/24, 5:29 PM

    I think the goal here is to build a free data harvesting machine for building LLMs.

    (and also a shameless plug: I featured this article in my last newsletter https://bigtechdigest.substack.com/p/most-read-tech-articles...)