Interesting. TextDrive (which turned into Joyent) was one of the first Ruby on Rails hosting options, and Twitter was first built as a RoR app.

The truth is that Joyent bought TextDrive. At Joyent we were developing a big RoR app. TextDrive did great hosting. Jason and I decided to merge.

another fun fact: a lot of the early HackerNews posts were the daily drama of Twitter's RoR struggles.

I kind of miss seeing the Fail Whale.

same!

i also miss their xmpp bot for some weird reason.

Source? I've not heard that take and would be curious to read more about it.

This article makes it sound more like Twitter left the relationship because Joyent wasn't delivering on performance and stability.

It's true.

I even wrote a little poem about it at the time: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/birds

That's correct. :)