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When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

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Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#31

Post by gkoberger »

autobodie wrote: post #24
bitmasher9 wrote: post #19

It’s really impressive how well Bluesky is performing. It really feels like a throwback to older social media platforms with its simplicity and lack of dark-patterns. I’m concerned that all the great work on the platform, protocol, etc won’t shine in the long term as they eventually need to find a revenue source.

Absolutely. The profit motive is the root of most evil. It is a shame that so many are trained to believe it is the only motive available.

I completely agree with this... but without profit, people can't get paid, and they'll stop building. I do hate this incredibly need for growth, of course, but financial growth is necessary to pay people and give them raises and allow them to have upward mobility at the company.

I hope Bluesky is able to find a model that works for them AND for consumers. (I do know it's an open protocol, so it'll live on without Bluesky itself! However, as this post shows, it's a lot of work to build on the prototype... so if not them, who? And if someone else, how will they become sustainable?)

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#32

Post by mullingitover »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #19

It’s really impressive how well Bluesky is performing. It really feels like a throwback to older social media platforms with its simplicity and lack of dark-patterns. I’m concerned that all the great work on the platform, protocol, etc won’t shine in the long term as they eventually need to find a revenue source.

They've done an incredible job running with an extremely low headcount and crazy efficient use of hardware. It would be easy to 10x their expenses if they were blindly following the standard cloud deployment playbook. Hopefully this level of efficiency mean they don't have to work as hard and can stay pre-revenue, a pure play, for a very long time.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#35

Post by verdverm »

nightpool wrote: post #29
verdverm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The App View frontend is open source: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app Much of the backend is open source as well: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/tree/main/packages What is not are the extra services they run to provide a better and faster UX. Even if it was open source, it likely costs 10s of thousands to run per month (they have moved largely to "onprem" hardware instead of the cloud aiui)

That's the frontend code, it doesn't include the backend API services, which are closed source.

Which is what I said in the second sentence

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#36

Post by half-kh-hacker »

nightpool wrote: post #29
verdverm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The App View frontend is open source: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app Much of the backend is open source as well: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/tree/main/packages What is not are the extra services they run to provide a better and faster UX. Even if it was open source, it likely costs 10s of thousands to run per month (they have moved largely to "onprem" hardware instead of the cloud aiui)

That's the frontend code, it doesn't include the backend API services, which are closed source.

the backend (the AppView) can be found here:

https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/tree/main/packages...

there are various supporting services written in Go as well

https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#37

Post by nightpool »

iameli wrote: post #15
xrisk wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What reason does Bluesky give for not opening up their AppView code? Another notable component that is closed source is the discovery feed generator, where at least there is some reason.

I asked this and got > We did a backend rewrite from postgres to scylla and it has a bunch of deployment specific stuff, but is functionally identical to the open source postgres version. Its not really a "v2" in terms of new features, we just made it make use of our hardware really well[1] [1]: https://bsky.app/profile/iame.li/post/3l7e3jfqit22s

Thanks, so are both the Postgres and Scylla versions maintained in terms of new features?

I wasn't aware that AppView v1 was open source, and the most recent info I'm aware of on the topic is https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q, https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/2961 and https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-archit..., and everything I've heard about Bluesky was that open source appview is "still coming".

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#38

Post by knallfrosch »

Anyone following hundreds of thousands of users is obviously a bot account scraping content. I'd ban them and call it a day.

However, I do love reading about the technical challenge. I think Twitter has a special architecture for celebrities with millions of followers. Given Bluesky is a quasi-clone, I wonder why they did not follow in these footsteps.

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#39

Post by [deleted] »

knallfrosch wrote: post #38

Anyone following hundreds of thousands of users is obviously a bot account scraping content. I'd ban them and call it a day. However, I do love reading about the technical challenge. I think Twitter has a special architecture for celebrities with millions of followers. Given Bluesky is a quasi-clone, I wonder why they did not follow in these footsteps.

[deleted]

Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

#40

Post by nightpool »

pfraze wrote: post #20
nightpool wrote: post #2

Note that all of this reflects design decisions on Bluesky's closed-source "AppView" server—any federated servers interacting with Bluesky would need to construct their own timelines, and do not get the benefit of the work described here.

As others have noted, the appview is open source. The dataplane has two implementations, one in postgres and another in scylla. The scylla dataplane is closed, the postgres one is open. The interesting next stage for the postgres implementation is to create a sync engine for partial syncs of the network, so that an appview can run affordably. We ran some benches on the current state of the postgres implementation and…

This is great to hear—my current understanding of the most recent state of the art on the topic is https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q which mentions that the self-hosted appview is not yet open source. So I'm glad to hear the situation has changed in the past 3 months.
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