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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

#71

Post by evbogue »

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.

My thinking has evolved on this topic significantly as of late. My current thinking is we should create a secure gossip network on top of the Bluesky API, and forgot about all the DAG-CBOR stuff that gets stripped from the Jetstream. Hash the posts on the gossip layer and if posts change then diff them. This is all prep for when X billionaire buys out Bluesky then we just pop some signing key crypto on top of this gossip layer and wow! It's distributed!

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

#72

Post by culi »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #66

As a systems enthusiast I enjoy articles like this. It is really easy to get into the mindset of "this must be perfect". In the Blekko search engine back end we built an index that was 'eventually consistent' which allowed updates to the index to be propagated to the user facing index more quickly, at the expense that two users doing the exact same query would get slightly different results. If they kept doing those…

What became of Blekko?

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

#73

Post by culi »

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.

Maybe not hundreds of thousands but I'd follow anybody that looks remotely interesting and then primarily use customized feeds. E.g. if I wanna hear about union news, my personal irl network, etc I check that feed

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

#74

Post by culi »

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.

I love Mastodon but I have to admit that BlueSky has clearly out-engineered them. Of course they started with much more expertise and resources. I hope ActivityPub compatibility soon to unite the two

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

#75

Post by immibis »

verdverm wrote: post #11
VectorLock wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People seem to lark on and on about how it has better "default moderation" than Mastodon.

It's not that it is "better" but that the choice is individual, not up to the mastodon server. In Mastodon, you trade Elon for some other group of individuals, so what happens if they make decision on moderation or content you do not agree with? ATProto is designed around accounts that are independent of data host, application, and moderation, all in the name of giving users individual control over these things. It's…

You have the opportunity to demonstrate this. I am banned from Bluesky. (They didn't tell me why - just a generic "you violated community guidelines")

Tell me, concretely, how people can choose to continue following me, even though I am banned.

Profile: immibis.bsky.social

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

#76

Post by culi »

zoul wrote: post #42
dang wrote: post #9

[stub for offtopicness]

I would be so much more interested in Bluesky if it were technically impossible for a random super rich guy to buy and bend it to his whims.

Isn't that the whole point of bs? Empowering users to take their data where they want. It's completely open-sourced and well-documented. If someone buys bluesky you can move all your data to a different service that follows the same protocol

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

#77

Post by immibis »

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 approximately a million dollars a year that it costs to run another copy.

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

#78

Post by glerk »

ddejohn wrote: post #43
glerk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is such a lazy, uninformed take that people just love to repeat. 1) the left on Bluesky is full of in-fighting because neolib left are convinced that Harris lost because of racism/sexism and the progressive left spend a lot of their time trying to educate (and dunk on) them for their braindead takes, and 2) any social media platform will become an echo chamber if you only choose to follow people that echo your s…

> the left on Bluesky is full of in-fighting

yes, the right is full of infighting too as shown by the recent H1B debate, that doesn't contradict my point.

> any social media platform will become an echo chamber if you only choose to follow people that echo your sentiments

bluesky is almost 100% political and almost 100% left-wing. There is literally no one else to follow, at least for now. X still has non-political content, I mainly follow AI, technology and cryptocurrency, and I couldn't find similar content on bluesky.

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

#79

Post by jarjoura »

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.

There's no reason Bluesky has emulate what FB Newsfeed and Twitter/X did to solve engagement by promoting certain items over others.

At the very least, they do have hindsight to learn from.

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