Back in late 2010/early 2011, I made a microblogging website and database project called Blërg!. It was both an exploration in database design and a jab at Twitter – a kind of technical satire.
The subject of ridicule was Twitter's engineering. At the time they were still running on Ruby on Rails, which turned out to be a legendary case study in technical debt. The little blue bird was officially their mascot, but the Fail Whale was certainly their unofficial one. And Blërg was written in C, which I felt was the philosophical opposite of Ruby.
The point I was trying to make was that Twitter was suffering from a lack of being Hardcore™. C was Hardcore™! If only they had someone like me, they could run all of Twitter on a toaster! I was dumber back then.
Of course, Twitter got their shit together. They became probably the world's foremost example of how to do data engineering at a worldwide scale. The Fail Whale became a distant memory. Of course a lot more disappointing things happened to Twitter in 2022, but that's another story.
I launched Blërg in January 2011 with a Reddit post. You won't find that post because I nuked my account from orbit when they shut down third-party API access (Reddit was never good enough to tolerate the ads). I think I must have posted it late at night, because I woke up the next day to being at the top of /r/programming. I think it got to #2 on Hacker News. I reconnected with old friends because of it. And it started accumulating users.
I had never really intended to launch Blërg as a service. The reddit post actually linked to the technical documentation. But the only way to put your money where your mouth is about performance claims is to build it and throw Reddit at it.
I got two repeated pieces of feedback - that it was very fast, and that it wasn't really Twitter-like. I was pleased to see that it held up fine to load and people thought it was snappy. I had written it more like a client-server application, where a single webpage loaded content dynamically through an API. That wasn't a novel technique in 2011, but the lack of bloat (and complete and utter disregard for making sure requests completed successfully) made it lightning fast.
But I didn't really have much to say about the Twitter comparisons. I kind of waved my hands about it being minimal and lean, but the fact is, I've never been a Twitter user. I didn't understand Twitter then, and frankly I still don't. But that's a tangent for later.
So after the initial hype died down, one or two users actually continued to use it. I had one guy who stuck around for years, posting music and general thoughts about life. I think he even donated like $10 to support the site. But eventually even he stopped posting in 2017. If you're out there, Derrick, I hope you're doing well. :)
The site sat dormant for a while, but then in January 2021 it started getting attention again. New users were signing up and posting. It had been discovered by people looking for Twitter alternatives. If that doesn't sound scary to you, greetings future reader! We're sorry about the climate thing, and I hope you are enjoying your insect protein. Let me give you the historical context for January 2021.
In the 2020 presidential election, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. Trump was a total sore loser about it, claiming widespread election fraud. On Jan 6, 2021, a protest rally led by Trump turned into a violent insurrection at the Capitol building. Trump's followers broke in in an attempt to stop the formal process of certifying Biden as president-elect. Twitter dropped the ban-hammer on posters of conspiracies and misinformation the following week, just before they started showing up on Blërg.
Since I had neither the time to effectively moderate nor the ability to kick fascists in the dick over TCP/IP, I put Blërg into read-only mode, where it remains today.
I don't think I'm going to revive Blërg — at least, as it is. In the intervening years I've learned a lot about security and I'm now quite strongly of the opinion that writing networked programs in memory unsafe languages is no longer a thing we can afford to do.
But I do think it would be neat to take another, slightly more serious crack at it. Funnily enough, Mastodon is also built on Ruby on Rails and it's also kind of a bloated beast. So maybe someday I'll make something that operates on the fediverse with a puking elephant logo. :D