@PurpCat @coolboymew @jeff @kirby and just to be real real clear, the flagship instance had thousands of users so it could be scaled with difficulty. a lot of the scaling stuff was unused in the codebase until it didn't work anymore or the knowledge was lost over time, so the work I did to make gnu social run better was mostly fixing existing code to work again and re-discovering how to scale it without any help from people who had done it before.

another fun fact is that I made a plugin for gnu social for sensitive content images because I guess up to that point nobody posted much porn on the network before sealion.club, when mastodon showed up they deliberately implemented it in a incomatible way which along with a few other programming situations cemented what it was like interacting with that developer.