In yesterday’s post, I mentioned my belief that a big part of the problem that microblogging sites are having with scaling is the result of their design being primarily that of a content management website and not that of a messaging system which, I believe, is the more proper model. I thought, after listening to last weeks FLOSS Weekly, that Laconica was taking a step toward this approach. I’ve had some time to browse their website, and, they too are still primarily designed as a website. I can understand their rational: They want to scale through federation, so they want people to run individual sites for small communities. To achieve this, they’ve come up with a design that will run on the lowliest of shared web hosting sites. Finding a hosting service that allows you to run your own daemons and setting them up is much more complex than installing a PHP website. It’s too bad. A lot of what they are building in PHP is already in existing or drafted XMPP Specs.
As long as the sites size remains under, say, a few thousand simulataneous users per server, I think this approach will probably work okay if coded efficiently. However, I still believe that to scale the true national service size companies like Twitter aspire to be, you need a tiered architecture with the subscriptions and routing handled in the messaging server. That server then feeds real-time track searching engines and the database which feeds the website.
