This is a lecture series from John Vervaeke, a professor at the University of Toronto. It is very much a grand theory on how humans evolved to create meaning, why people seek it, and why there is a decline of meaning in modern society. The first lecture starts by outlining the evolutionary origins of rituals from Paleolithic times. I found it absolutely compelling and couldn't stop listening, so I thought I would share. If you like Robert Sapolsky you will, probably like this.
I learned about fan-out, and just how the average size of groups in messaging servers affects their load. It is pretty basic stuff I guess but not something you think about unless that is your jam.
I was stress testing a server I made and noticed a discrepancy between two tests. In on test 15 virtual users could send 450msg/sec (not realistic I know) for about 6750 incoming messages per second. In another, 1000 users sending a message about every two seconds was the limit, about 500msg/sec incoming.
Took me a little bit to figure out why, the outgoing messages between the tests were wildly different. In the smaller user tests the groups were about 3 on average, in the larger one they were 30. Group size is effectively a multiplier on incoming msg requests so when looking at the total traffic it was much closer between the two tests 15k and 20k.
Thanks for the feedback! I increased the max size from 125 hectares to 5000 hectares. I had some debate about what would be a good max size, not so large that it takes up a whole city, but also not so small that few people can join it. For some reason which I can no longer remember I landed on 125 hectares.
It is probably too small, but for now I just want to make it easy to use. At the default zoom level 125 hectares is tiny and I am not surprised it was hard to make something small enough. I just got so used to the way it worked when I was testing I would immediately zoom in without noticing.
It will not save your hub unless you're logged in. The logic was that since someone needed to be an admin, they needed to be logged in. I should probably find a work around for that for now while I am just trying to get people to test it out. No one wants to give their email to some random site.
I am going to work on making the hub drawing more intuitive. It should really have a done button.
Yep, these decisions are perfectly understandable, it's just that I need to know what's happening and why I can't do certain things. Drawing blindly only to be told that your area is 126 hectares, for example, is frustrating.
It's good that you increased the area for now, because there's no way that I find anyone on there in what's basically the size of a neighbourhood. Maybe you could reduce it if it gets more popular?
You should be able to accept the TOS on mobile now - although if your screen is really small it may be hard to actually read it, still working on that. Honestly I'm pretty embarrassed that I missed that. The TOS was the last thing I added late last night before making the post and I didn't check how it worked on mobile.
Thanks for all the feedback so far! It has been very helpful.
Well, now I'm even more embarrassed. I left some local variables in when I pushed the fix this morning and the site was blocked CORS for about an hour. This is why you don't push to prod when you're in a rush and half asleep. Thanks for letting me know.
Yeah, that is a good point. I might need to tone it down a bit. Not trying to be evil, the intent was to protect myself and the users. I worried about what could go wrong like chatrooms turning into toxic places or the service being used for nefarious purposes. I wanted set some rules. I am a student though and I don't have money for lawyers so I just copied a boilerplate legal contract from a service and didn't change much.
I'm trying to keep in mind this isn't something you approached as a product to release or anything, and you're a student. I feel like I'm coming off pretty harshly here, but... you should be more worried about the "nefarious purposes" part than anything else, right now. I feel like offering this sort of service publicly - particularly in 2025 - requires some legal counsel.
One other concern about the implementation: it sounds like Hub administrators - who is just the first person to create a Hub in a particular area - are given a lot of power. No more Hubs are able to be created in an area? So if a Hub admin abuses their power that area is screwed, unless of course you (or whoever would be handling such cases, if indeed that would happen) agreed that they've overstepped, which may or may not be the case, particularly with a vague TOS
Anyway I think the idea is intriguing, and like new ways of exploring social media/communities.
