This design makes sense if you didn’t previously have any limit on the number of people an account could follow. But why not have a limit?
When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
81–90 of 315 posts
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#82> This process involves looking up all of your followers, then inserting a new row into each of their Timeline tables in reverse chronological order with a reference to your post.
Seriously? Isn't this the nut of your problem right here?
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#83As 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?
> It was acquired by IBM in March 2015, and the service was discontinued.
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blekko
Perhaps GP has a more interesting answer though.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#84Earlier 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…
I totally get/relate to your perspective, but to be the annoying leftie in your ear: A) Sustainable revenue is a requirement for any company, yes, but the unlimited (above-inflation) growth demanded by most large corporations is absolutely not. Lots and lots of companies operate for a long time without expecting massive growth, raises n' all. MBAs pejoratively call such companies "lifestyle businesses"--as in "just p…
All of the big tech companies today are the result of 100s of smaller, well intentioned tech companies that got acquired into these behemoths.
I always look at how WhatsApp played out as the company. They were the good guys, and didn't want to get acquired. Zuckerberg, almost bankrupt FB at the time giving into all of the ridiculous demands WhatsApp made. No one at WhatsApp thought it was going to happen, until it did and did result in a once-in-a-lifetime transfer of wealth to several hundred employees.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#85An airline reservation system has to be perfect (no slack in today's skies), a hotel reservation can be 98% perfect so long as there is some slack and you don't mind putting somebody up in a better room than they paid for from time to time.
A social media system doesn't need to be perfect at all. It was clear to me from the beginning that Bluesky's feeds aren't very fast, not like they are crazy slow, but if it saves money or effort it's no problem if notifications are delayed 30s.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#86Ok I'm curious: since this strategy sacrifices consistency, has anyone thoughts about something that is not full fan-out on reads or on writes ?
Let's imagine something like this: instead of writing to every user's timeline, it is written once for each shard containing at least one follower. This caps the fan-out at write time to hundreds of shards. At read time, getting the content for a given users reads that hot slice and filters actual followers. It definitely has more load but
- the read is still colocated inside the shard, so latency remains low
- for mega-followers the page will not see older entries anyway
There are of course other considerations, but I'm curious about what the load for something like that would look like (and I don't have the data nor infrastructure to test it)
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#87Earlier 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…
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).
If Bluesky ever gets close to becoming a serious threat to Meta's walled garden, the effort to fight back against them will take a lot of capital. Just the legal battles alone will cost a fortune.
Wikipedia isn't a threat to anyone, they just have to generate enough capital to exist.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#88Anyone 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.
Or just enforce a maximum number of followed accounts.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#89As 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…
Would you be willing to share more about how you guys did click ranking at Blekko? It's an interesting problem.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
> 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.
Not op, but chiming in. There's a lot of content regarding aquatics and home automation (separate topics). I avoid the politics stuff entirely, and much of the crypto stuff on X tends to be promoting scams and rug-pulls.