I believe many of the problems in our current social media landscape could be solved by eliminating the "feed" and instead displaying posts, updates, and pictures from friends, family, and those we know in real life. This approach might conflict with the profit models of big tech social media and could go against what most people have become accustomed to. Personally, I would love a smaller social network where I can stay connected with my school friends, college friends, and distant family without having to see irrelevant posts, like some stupid remark from a politician halfway around the world or influencers doing something outrageous just for attention.

I'd love to see a comparison with Mimir. Some of the problems that this article describes with Prometheus are also solved by Mimir. I'm running it in single binary mode, and everything is stored in S3. I'm deploying Prometheus in agent mode so it just scrapes and remote writes to Mimir, but doesn't store anything. The helm chart is a bit hairy because I have to use a fork for single binary mode, but it has actually been extremely stable and cheap to run. The same AZ cost saving rules apply, but my traffic is low enough right now for it not to matter. But I suppose I could also run ingesters per AZ to eliminate cross-AZ traffic.

I've used VictoriaMetrics in past (~4 years ago) for collection of not just service monitoring data but also for network switch and cell tower module metrics. At the time I found it to be the most efficient Prometheus-like service in terms of query speed, data compression and, more importantly, being able to handle high cardinality (over 10s or 100s of millions of series).

However, I later switched to Clickhouse because I needed extra flexibility of running occasional async updates or deletes. In VictoriaMetrics you usually need to wipe out the entire series and re-ingest it. That may not be possible or would be quite annoying if you are dealing with a long history and you just wanted to update/delete some bad data in a month.

So, if you want a more efficient Prometheus drop-in replacement and don't think limited update/delete ability is an issue then I highly recommend VictoriaMetrics. Otherwise, Clickhouse (larger scale) or Timescale (smaller scale) has been my go to for anything time series.

For those who have lived and worked in multiple EU countries, the benefits of EU membership are clear, including the relatively simple process of moving between countries.

Unique comparing to what?

There are other products that provide something similar, but are not as popular, as easy (part of easy here is integration with aws) to use and require extra tooling. This will be goto tool for many people working with data, and I'd expect "load_from_s3" to be added to many tools fairly quickly. That's unique.