Going by their claims, they are showing off their generalizable platform, Rama, by building an application on top of it. The application is an example, not the product. For example, someone implements a Todo app on their hot new javascript framework in 10 mins, your objection would be, "But it took you 2 years to make the framework, so actually it took you 2 years plus 10 mins". Why stop there? It also took many years to build the underlying language, networking layers, infrastructure, processors, materials etc etc. You have to draw the line at the point where the application specific code starts and the generalizable platform ends, no?

Actually took them longer than that even.

They had to invent the computer first, and before that they had to create a universe capable of sustaining both life and computers.

The JVM took years to write. It took decades to develop the technology necessary to build a modern microcomputer. Before that, millennia to invent written language. And now that those platforms (including Rama) all exist, one can deliver a Mastodon server on top of them in about 9 man-months.

Their point is to show off the power of Rama, I.e. it is possible to build such applications on top with little work.

Exactly, why are so many people missing this point. It's not "we built a narrow, tedious framework for knocking off Twitter clones", it's "We built a platform that turns data processing on its head and look in a couple of months you can clone Twitter just imagine what YOU can do with this."

I see parallels though to Datomic, where they turned the database inside out, co-located the app logic and data and indexes, etc. There are a bunch of great videos on YT about Datomic by Rich Hickey & co, worth a watch and I think shine a light on the approach here, too.

I think they didn't do a good job making the point clear for people who just clicked the link without context. It starts off talking a lot about the Mastodon clone and then gradually starts talking about Rama as it goes.

People should probably close the TikTok and pick up a book instead to increase their attention spans then :-D

So if one was building a database, and then later building an app against their own database, they should not get to claim how much time the latter took alone? There are enough hyped bullshit in the world to call out, but I would not be so quick to dismiss this one, especially given that the author does know what he talks about (he used to work at twitter)

No it is not disingenuous. They didn't built Rama to build a twitter clone.

And you can't take the "twitter engine" out of twitter and build other apps with it. A lot of it is custom built to fit the twitter data model.

Unlike - it seems - Rama.