Facebook is significantly larger than Twitter, in the Billions (depressing). Guessing they have decent ideas how to scale an operation in the 10s of millions of people.

I wonder if Elon helped bolster engineering jobs in other companies. Like "See what happens when you get rid of the engineers you think you don't need?"

[–] whoami@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Meta (for better or worse - definitely for worse) definitely is one of the few entities with the engineering expertise to pull it off. As for driving Twitter employees to its competitors, that's definitely happened.

Last I heard, Twitter's engineering team now mostly consists of a skeleton crew, and the only reason they're likely there is because of the terms on their H1B Visas.

edit: Slightly misread the second point. Given the rounds of mass layoffs in tech companies, I am not sure Elon's Twitter has served as much as a warning as it should've.

[–] fidodo@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

Threads is bootstrapped off Instagram. People I know who tried it out like it because they don't need to rebuild their network, it just copies the Instagram followers over so you start with all your follows and followers. Instagram also has over 2 billion users so they probably just tacked this on top of the existing Instagram infrastructure and called it a day. Instagram already supported comments so the backend for this probably required minimal changes.