At some point they'll end up just doing the Bieber rack [1]. It's when a shard becomes so hot that it just has to be its own thing entirely.
[1] - https://www.themarysue.com/twitter-justin-bieber-servers/
@bluesky devs, don't feel ashamed for doing this. It's exactly how to scale these kinds of extreme cases.
I've stood up machines for this before I did not know they had a name, and I worked at the mouse company and my parking spot was two over from a J. Beibe'rs spot.
So now we have Slashdot effect, HN hug, and its not Clarkson its... Stephen Fry effect? Maybe can be Cross-Discipline - there's a term for when lots of UK turns their kettles on at the same time.
I should make a blog post to record all the ones I can remember.
Given that BlueSky is funded by Twitter, I'm assuming they know a lot more than us on how Twitter architects systems.
We never actually had a literal “Bieber Box”, but the joke took off.
Hot shards were definitely an issue, though.