this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
270 points (90.7% liked)

Fediverse

28721 readers
74 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I don't like the clickbait title at all -- Mastodon's clearly going to survive, at least for the forseeable future, and it wouldn't surprise me if it outlives Xitter.

Still, Mastodon is struggling; most of the people who checkd it out in the November 2022 surge (or the smaller June 2023 surge) didn't stick around, and numbers have been steadily declining for the last year. The author makes some good points, and some of the comments are excellent.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

@grue @ArchRecord An example of a database that doesn't keep it's data in files?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm not a big expert on database technology, but I am aware of there being at least a few database systems ("In-Memory") that use the RAM of the computer for transient storage, and since RAM doesn't use files as a concept in the same way, the data stored there isn't exactly inside a "file," so to speak.

That said, they are absolutely dwarfed by the majority of databases, which use some kind of file as a means to store the database, or the contents within it.

Obviously, that's not to say using files is bad in any way, but the possibilities for how database software could have developed, had we not used files as a core computing concept during their inception, are now closed off. We simply don't know what databases could have looked like, because of "lock-in."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Memory is still structured like a file and referenced over addresses, we just call it something else.