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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

#51

Post by madeofpalk »

nightpool wrote: post #25
haileyok wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true. Third party PDSes are fully supported by our app view, and our app view generates timelines for all the users on those PDSes.

What does this have to do with third party app views?

The statement "any federated servers interacting with Bluesky" is ambiguous, because Bluesky's federated model means there's many different types of servers, and one user's view of what a "federated server" could be vastly different from another.

Federated PDS-s (which is probably the closest to what people mean when they say they want to federate on bluesky) would not need to reconstruct timelines if their users use the bsky.app appview.

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

#52

Post by psionides »

nightpool wrote: post #40
pfraze wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was open source (except the Scylla database layer) from the beginning, AFAIK - that blog post just says that they haven't set it up yet, because that's the hardest part to run

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

#53

Post by bitmasher9 »

jandrese wrote: post #49
gkoberger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Blu…

At the same time I feel like a lot of companies grow much larger than they need to be simply because of bigger is better mentality. How many of Uber's 30,000ish employees are involved with making sure the app and backend database are working properly? Are they really doing 600 times more work than Craigslist at connecting sellers with buyers?

You cannot compare uber to Craigslist.

Uber takes on so much more responsibility of the transaction. Setting price, handling disputes, real time coordination, etc.

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

#54

Post by xrisk »

dom96 wrote: post #28
xrisk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People want the old Twitter, and Bluesky is close to that. It also cosplays being decentralized to people who don’t look too closely.

What makes it not decentralised?

The fact that you have to be on “the” relay to meaningfully participate on the network.

If you instead claim that users can always choose to use other 3P relays, then you immediately lose all the nice things that Bluesky is able to do well today (search, discoverability, a “discover” algorithm). Indeed, you fall back to the same old problems that every other decentralized social network has.

Bluesky is just a shittier version of Nostr, except that the people over at Nostr don’t pretend.

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

#55

Post by psionides »

nightpool wrote: post #37
iameli wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 so…

It's not coming, it never went away… As I understand it, the "business layer" with all the logic is above the data later, shared by the Postgres and Scylla versions, and the data layer just makes queries to the database. I think they are using the Postgres version locally for development.

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

#56

Post by gkoberger »

jandrese wrote: post #49
gkoberger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Blu…

At the same time I feel like a lot of companies grow much larger than they need to be simply because of bigger is better mentality. How many of Uber's 30,000ish employees are involved with making sure the app and backend database are working properly? Are they really doing 600 times more work than Craigslist at connecting sellers with buyers?

I'm an Uber hater, but... yes.

Like, sure, they don't need every single one of those 30,000... but they have to have ground teams in every city in the world. Connections with every airport. Connections with almost every restaurant in the world. Customer support and safety (okay I know they don't nail this, but still). They need to pay out drivers in each country. The app needs to work in hundreds of countries, all with different laws, currencies, languages and more. Some places let you pick up anywhere, others require specific locations. And that's not even including marketing, partnerships, HR, finance, etc.

I don't think the employees are the problem with Uber, it's the shareholders. They need to make X back, so that delta is where drivers get squeezed.

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

#57

Post by nightpool »

madeofpalk wrote: post #51
nightpool wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this have to do with third party app views?

The statement "any federated servers interacting with Bluesky" is ambiguous, because Bluesky's federated model means there's many different types of servers, and one user's view of what a "federated server" could be vastly different from another. Federated PDS-s (which is probably the closest to what people mean when they say they want to federate on bluesky) would not need to reconstruct timelines if their users use…

Thanks, that's a fair point that I was overlooking. When I say a "federated server", I don't just mean a self-hosted PDS, I mean a third party app that potentially has its own lexicon and design decisions. Creating a robust third-party app that can meaningfully interact with the Bluesky network is still a very difficult engineering challenge, which I think this article does a good job demonstrating—that was the tension I was trying to underscore in my comment. Bluesky may be solving those engineering challenges for those clients who are satisfied with Bluesky's frontend and AppView, but every single other app built on top of ATProto will have to resolve those same challenges. This is directly downstream from Bluesky's "global firehose" topology and various design decisions that stem from that.

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

#58

Post by tdb7893 »

gkoberger wrote: post #31
autobodie wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Blu…

It's semantics but I like to separate money from profits. You need money to pay people and to survive but you don't need to be raking in endlessly growing piles of it. This is something that was really demoralizing about working for a big company, they could be making like 50000000000 a year in just profits but still be ruthless in getting more. Like I just want to make a product I'm proud of and I'm happy living a simple life, I am happier now making less money but not feeling like I'm endlessly milking customers.

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

#59

Post by redcobra762 »

jandrese wrote: post #49
gkoberger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Blu…

At the same time I feel like a lot of companies grow much larger than they need to be simply because of bigger is better mentality. How many of Uber's 30,000ish employees are involved with making sure the app and backend database are working properly? Are they really doing 600 times more work than Craigslist at connecting sellers with buyers?

Aren't you actually arguing in favor of profit-driven behavior? You're not disagreeing with profit as a motivator, you're questioning if the 30,000 employees is the maximal way to achieve profit.

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

#60

Post by cyberax »

gkoberger wrote: post #31
autobodie wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Blu…

On the other hand, running something like BlueSky is not terribly expensive. A foundation with a reasonable endowment can do that indefinitely.

Initially, it can be funded by selling tools that do analytics or by donations (like Wikipedia).

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