The performance on the example Mastodon instance is very responsive - almost anywhere I clicked loaded nearly instantly. I created an account and the only thing I found missing was it doesn't implement full text search unless my user was tagged, but that might be a Mastodon specific item.
I think they have thought a lot about typical hard problems, such as having the timeline processing happen along side the pipeline, taking network / storage etc out of the picture. Nice work!
That is indeed an intentional part of Mastodon's design, which we tried to be faithful to as much as possible. We originally implemented search across all statuses and had to reimplement it when we realized Mastodon is a little different.
Well, we didn't start from anything as we implemented this completely from scratch. I believe Mastodon is much more widely used than those so it seemed like a better target for this.
I think they have thought a lot about typical hard problems, such as having the timeline processing happen along side the pipeline, taking network / storage etc out of the picture. Nice work!