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Yeah, that's fair. We did follow up and I'm told we're unblocked now.

You're definitely right -- this is an issue. I could very well believe that we tripped some FB spam measures.

We have a very manual anti-spam process right now that relies on humans to detect it and action it. We have a couple of very dedicated folks who end up looking every few hours, but it's not automated, and we don't have full timezone coverage.

It's definitely something I'd like to see us improve, but we've been focused on other projects (like switching from mid-90s HTML to a responsive design, which is a slow rewrite of the entire site). That said, if you have any advice on reasonably scalable ways of doing this in-house that don't involve sending our user content to a third party, I'd love to take any recommendations!

Feel free to email me, [email protected], if you would rather do that. And if not, don't worry about it, I appreciate the comment anyway :)

Hi all! Co-owner of Dreamwidth here.

Pretty cool to see my project hit the front page of HN, but definitely a bit of a /shrug moment on the subject itself. "Facebook gonna Facebook" I think is approximately how we feel about this.

I know here on HN we're used to hearing stories about scrappy startups trying to carve a piece of the pie big enough to exit on, but that is pretty much the exact opposite of what Dreamwidth is. Our motivations are very different, so this FB block is mostly a curiosity to us.

Dreamwidth is a small, neighborhood corner store kind of site. We're run by a couple of dedicated part-time staff (who have other jobs/responsibilities in life -- I personally work for Discord!) and a cadre of amazing volunteers who donate of their time and energy to make a nice little corner of the Internet that isn't driven by the cycle of VC and growth and user monetization.

We do not have any goals around growth, we don't advertise, and we ultimately don't care that much what the other platforms do. Our goal is to give people a stable home where they don't have to worry about their data being sold, their writing being monetized. Users choose to pay us for a few more advanced features (like full text search), and we support ourselves entirely off of that.

We are home to a large group of online roleplayers, Hugo Award winning fiction writers, Linux kernel developers, parents, security researchers, artists, activists, recipe bloggers, educators, and everything in between and around the edges who would rather work with a service owned and run by people who are motivated by something other than get-big-and-exit. Large communities of online roleplayers who get together and build whole worlds on Dreamwidth, who tell stories together. I'm constantly impressed by the creativity of our community.

Anyway, it's super cool to see Dreamwidth on the home page here. It's been my side project for over a decade now, and I'm quite proud of it. Even if modernizing a 20+ year old Perl project is a hellish undertaking at the best of times... but we keep going. :)

(Discord infra person here.)

Actually we didn't update the reference to Cassandra in the article -- the read states workload is now on Scylla too, as of last week. ;)

We'll be writing up a blog post on our migration with Scylla at some point in the next few months, but we've been super happy with it. I replaced our TokuMX cluster with it and it's faster, more reliable, _and_ cheaper (including the support contract). Pretty great for us.

I work on infrastructure at Discord. Our voice and video infrastructure gets attacked quite frequently and we have pretty good tracking about which ASNs the traffic is coming from as part of our mitigation processes.

Anyway, Choopa is a common source of DDoS in our reports, so I can corroborate the OP's comment to some degree. They aren't the largest we see, but they're in the top 10 sources for us.

It looks like this web site is unmaintained and incorrect in at least the Discord case. I see a PR open since 2017, and a comment on it saying 'this site is unmaintained.'

Discord infra engineer here -- this blog post needs an update! Since then we've scaled this system much more. :)

The Fortnite Official server has exceeded 100,000 concurrent users, Discord itself is way past that 5M concurrent number, we're now using Rust in certain places to make Elixir go faster, we've built a general purpose replacement to Process.monitor that scales a whole truckload more that we're open sourcing next week at Code BEAM SF... the list goes on.

There's a lot of fun stuff going on to try to make this system even more efficient and reliable, there's a lot to do still. We run everything on a very small engineering team (there are 4 fulltime engineers on the core infrastructure, only about 40 engineers in the whole company) and we're always looking for a few more. Feel free to reach out to me (zorkian#0001 on Discord) if this blog post sounds up your alley!

Yes, yes we are.

Caveat lector: I'm one of the two founders of Dreamwidth.

Yes! Dreamwidth is a fork of the old LiveJournal code that is still being developed by a small team of folks who would rather see a small site run in an open, transparent fashion than be beholden to large corporate interests and the whims of monetization.

We're a very happy little family and it's always exciting to see Dreamwidth links end up on HN. :)

Another Delphi person!! Yay! I spent so much of my life writing Delphi code. As a teenager. Basically from 12-18 I wrote Delphi/Pascal. Hundreds of stupid little Windows apps (and some stupid big ones).

I ran into the same sort of thing you did re: Delphi jobs. I was pretty sad, honestly, having started in the original Delphi days (version 1!) and going to 6 I had gotten pretty good at it...

I worked at CCP and was on the same team as t20 for a while. He definitely wasn't the reason BoB succeeded for as long as they did.

In random point, I (while a dev) was a member of ASCN. I was there the day Steve was unveiled and the day it died in C9N-CC. We lost to BoB "fairly" (everybody suffered from the state of the servers in those days, so maybe it was "CCP won"). There was some bad blood, of course; I'm still a little bitter about Steve's death. But the cookies crumbled and that was that.

Ultimately: I don't think t20's actions contributed substantially either way to BoB's ascendancy. Organization, good play, and a willingness to use all avenues (within the game) turned out to be pretty successful.

(Also... no longer employed by CCP, but still play EVE. 12 years later... still the best game I've ever touched.)

Only slightly less euphemistic than flying's CFIT - Controlled Flight Into Terrain. AKA "whoops, the ground".

Woah, typing code at speed is incredibly difficult. I don't know if it picks languages randomly but it gave me Lisp just now, and... ack!

Unrelated, TypeRacer is amazing. We had a bunch of contests at my last job and they ended up making a trophy because I was the King of Speed. It was pretty fun. So, thank you!