Please tell us in detail about the Twitter stack.
Because I always find it fascinating how people think they can estimate the effort to maintain it whilst having next to no understanding what so ever of the tech stack.
1. A single person can run a mastodon instance in their spare time. Spinning up some containers for the app, a background worker and a database is quite simple.
2. Modern devops tooling makes it fairly trivial to spin up 10k instances of a container instead of 1, by just altering a number in a k8s manifest somewhere.
3. Ergo, a single person equipped with modern tooling (and sufficient funding) could spin up any number of mastodon instances.
4. Twitter is just a big mastodon instance.
5. Now that keeping everything up is sorted, add another 99 devs for feature development and you are done.
Now this is obviously faulty logic because points 3 and 4 are very false, but they look reasonable enough at first glance.
15 database admins
10 linux sys admins
5 kubernetes specialists
10 windows tech support
25 front end developers
15 back end developers w/ Scala
10 machine learning experts
Whether that makeup could or couldn't do it is a different question, or whether it would be a different mix; all of that is up for debate, but the 1/99 ratio is just one very specific, extreme, and laughable mix for anyone who has supported a system of any real size.
Yes, using open source code built and maintained by 732 contributors: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/graphs/contributors
These can make for a massive hairball of complexity that can swell the number of people needed to support it.
This reminds me of a talk I once saw by a Netflix SRE, who showed a crazy convoluted mess of a diagram with thousands of crisscrossing lines going everywhere, and him screaming "No one understands Netflix!!!"
Source: Wikipedia pages for both
It was also pathetically unprofitable, and had serious problems with inappropiate child photos, gore etc.
Some of those problems require man power, there is no 10 man team who are very good at devops who can solve that.
THEY could probably do it with 100 people, YOU cannot.
100 people is most likely within the ballpark for a group of people whose sole purpose is to write and maintain twitter's tech stack. Unfortunately, that is not NEARLY the sole purpose of most people in businesses and that adds all kinds of productivity hits.
What happens is that people like yourself become convinced that's the only way to operate.
Likewise, bringing in Ad money would be a few more hundreds, because you need to chase leads in all countries.
Getting the Ads to work? That's tech and I'd be surprised if it was less than 100 people, too.
I subpoena telcos all the time. My sense is that the number is closer to 2 to 3 dozen.
Maybe the user facing site, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
There are plenty of internal/backend/restricted systems to support and/or monetize this part.
And that's not counting the huge number of support people & moderators needed.
It is so incomparable in scope I don't know why people bring it up.
They are entirely different technological challenges.
The point I’m trying to make is that it takes some effort (beyond just the plumbing) to create an experience that folks actually want to use on an ongoing basis
And a website is easy. You could do it with 1 person.
But Elon is such a machine, he could keep it running by himself.
Making it globally available and legally compliant, that's where the next few thousand folks come in.
The people shouting loudly about how Twitter must have been so bloated are really just shouting their obvious inexperience working at global scales or their localized ambitions.
Could there be too many employees at Twitter? Sure. Most companies have dead weight. The number who were "extra" is probably not 9/10ths the employees though.
This is because you don't see the complexity. What you see as a Twitter user is a fraction of what's actually there.
You have to build a platform for ads. Not just serving ads, but allowing advertisers to prepare their collateral, preview them, get their results, and be billed. So that's an entire content and invoicing platform separate from your main feed.
And since your platform is all user generated content, you've got to build a moderation pipeline. A place for users to make reports, but also an interface for your content moderators to view content and make decisions. Oh, and while you're there you'd better build a portal for law enforcement to make data requests, along with your DMCA takedowns. Oh yeah, DMCA - that's another whole thing you've got to worry about.
Then the EU comes along and needs you to build something to support your GDPR obligations. Then India wants something similar, but only for its citizens. Your users also want verification, so better build that platform for securely verifying accounts and awarding checkmarks.
It snowballs. Was Twitter's engineering group bloated? Probably. Most large companies are. Could you run the whole Twitter tech stack as it exists today with a hundred people? Absolutely not.
Separately, some commenters here are flatly delusional about the effort to ship a site, android and ios apps, internal mod tools, help docs, support, and legal docs in 34 supported languages. Not to mention obeying laws in all the countries that implies.
Or image and video hosting! With recoding of videos, resizing of images, and the management of what is surely petabytes of images and videos with very high reliability! That is not a 1, 2, or 3 person job to do well.
Anyone who has used Twitter, have you seen any evidence they do this beyond extremely basic geographical targeting.
Like people keep listing off all this stuff when we’ve all used the site and can see if it does have a team working on it then they’re not doing it to the levels of their competitors.
It takes an army of engineers to build a resilient architecture at Twitter's scale.
And why are we even talking about "keeping the lights on"? Elon is claiming he's going to build a better video platform than YouTube, complete with better tools and for creators, for crying out loud.
"20 with cloud, 40 without. So much overlap between iOS, Android, and the web, three people can do all three. More for the backend." https://twitter.com/realGeorgeHotz/status/159371372367535718...
>Their moderation
Above I assumed their moderation team was probably larger than their engineering team, and mostly contractors. Thus I kept my estimate to the size of their engineering team.
