I couldn't say what it would take to run Twitter. My experience with software stacks caps at about 5000 users. To maintain those 5,000 users, it took about 25 full people worth of manhours and we didnt have developers on staff.
Scaling that up says 5 million people to serve 1 billion users. Twitter was doing that with 70k people. Seems not crazy, especially when some of that goes to legal overhead in each of those places (interpreting laws across the US' jurisidictions alone can take several people depending on your app's target sector).
Reducing to 10k sounds like a plausible target by someone who knows twitter better (e.g. an Elon). Going down to 50, as I saw somewhere in this thread, seems like tossing out the baby with the bathwater.
But aside from all the censoring, shadowbanning and promoting algos twitter is a pretty simple bit of software....( 126 characters dropped in at a time) it is really just a glorified billboard system. . The earliest of which were (I believe) Unix dial in servers with less computing capacity than your grandmothers PC.... I wouldn't be surprised if Elon takes it back to the pre 2016 clock tome feeds with minor tweeks for highly popular tags.... Remember that he outlined what a $8 check mark would get you and it is mostly reduced marketing in your feed and the ability to attach files.
I couldn't say what it would take to run Twitter. My experience with software stacks caps at about 5000 users. To maintain those 5,000 users, it took about 25 full people worth of manhours and we didnt have developers on staff.
Scaling that up says 5 million people to serve 1 billion users. Twitter was doing that with 70k people. Seems not crazy, especially when some of that goes to legal overhead in each of those places (interpreting laws across the US' jurisidictions alone can take several people depending on your app's target sector).
Reducing to 10k sounds like a plausible target by someone who knows twitter better (e.g. an Elon). Going down to 50, as I saw somewhere in this thread, seems like tossing out the baby with the bathwater.
But aside from all the censoring, shadowbanning and promoting algos twitter is a pretty simple bit of software....( 126 characters dropped in at a time) it is really just a glorified billboard system. . The earliest of which were (I believe) Unix dial in servers with less computing capacity than your grandmothers PC.... I wouldn't be surprised if Elon takes it back to the pre 2016 clock tome feeds with minor tweeks for highly popular tags.... Remember that he outlined what a $8 check mark would get you and it is mostly reduced marketing in your feed and the ability to attach files.