File transfer costs on a typical provider will absolutely eat away at any money you could save through CPU or memory efficiency gains, I think. If you move to a different provider (like others have mentioned) to fix this then you'll often get good CPU and memory to go with it so the whole calculus changes. Those two resources are often the cheapest in the whole stack, for better and worse. You'll save $20 by using a smaller droplet but still pay $80 for outgoing traffic and another $30 for disk storage, and those are the costs that increase the fastest. The design of the existing Fediverse means that they just use a lot of bandwidth and storage. I think it would be a wash at the end of the day.
This would work for an instance of human accounts who need real UX. A bot instance should really work with the most basic Fediverse software, if it supports posting, reading, replying, etc.
This is a typical excuse I always hear in defense of Ruby but am yet to see a proof that it is the case, with plenty of arguments that demonstrate that Ruby also happens to be a productivity loss the moment the project scale goes beyond trivial.
It has such an embarrassing failure mode that is unthinkable in statically typed compiled languages. Rails is not even a better choice at its main selling point which is developer UX, it has been many years since the rest of the industry caught up and surpassed this. Nowadays, as a primarily C# developer I’m always baffled by the crutches RoR developers have to deal with - one would just not tolerate these in .NET.
At the end of the day, if every line of code costs 100x more, it’s very difficult to come up with a good reason where such Ruby tax is worth it in the projects that cannot afford to throw more compute and memory at a problem.
The proof is that Mastodon and his server were implemented in Ruby. It doesn't exist in another language. And it's the same language that he uses at his day job and according to him, it's part of what compelled him to work on it at all.
The fact that he built it and maintained it is the proof for the claim. Without Ruby it simply doesn't exist, so it doesn't matter how much hypothetically better your favorite language is.
