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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

#91

Post by snailmailman »

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…

I guess I hadn’t considered that search engines could be reranking pages on the fly as I click them. I’ve been seeing my DuckDuckGo results shuffle around for a while now thinking it’s an awful bug.

Like I click one page, don’t find what I want, and go back thinking “no, I want that other result that was below” and it’s an entirely different page with shuffled results, missing the one that I think might have been good.

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

#92

Post by steveklabnik »

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.

> Given Bluesky is a quasi-clone, I wonder why they did not follow in these footsteps.

There are only six users with over a million followers, and none with two million yet.

I'm sure they'll get there.

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

#93

Post by rconti »

> Additionally, beyond this point, it is reasonable for us to not necessarily have a perfect chronology of everything posted by the many thousands of users they follow, but provide enough content that the Timeline always has something new.

While I'm fine with the solution, the wording of this sentence led me to believe that the solution was going to be imperfect chronology, not dropped posts in your feed.

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

#94

Post by singleshot_ »

PaulHoule wrote: post #85

An 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…

Does the fact that an airline booking system must be perfect explain why so many flights are overbooked or cancelled?

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

#95

Post by rconti »

PaulHoule wrote: post #85

An 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…

Especially for a free service!

Think about other ad-supported sites. If you're an engineer working on an ad-supported product, the perfect consistency you strive for in your code is not the product. The product is the sum of all of the content the user sees. And the costs of the tradeoffs you make are paid for by ads.

Am I willing to see 10x more ads for perfect consistency? Definitely not.

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

#96

Post by jsnell »

timewizard wrote: post #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?

What alternative design did you have in mind, given that a Twitter-like data model of individual follows is likely a strict product requirement?

There are obviously other ways of doing it (doing the timeline propagation in a batch job, fanning out the reads rather than the writes), but they've got their own problems. Probably worse ones.

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

#97

Post by rconti »

singleshot_ wrote: post #94
PaulHoule wrote: post #85

An 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…

Does the fact that an airline booking system must be perfect explain why so many flights are overbooked or cancelled?

No, overbooking is a business decision justified by the fact that, statistically, not all passengers will actually show up for their flight, and lower load factors cost money.

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

#98

Post by verdverm »

immibis wrote: post #75
verdverm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Create an account you own instead of having someone else run it. Maybe you can get your data, maybe you can ask Bluesky for a review (there were bugs and scaling issues against bot networks that cause false positives)

I'm not seeing that handle resolve in the normal places. Do you have the DID? You should use a custom domain so that you can control the the reference and lookup.

You can run your own PDS and manage complete account lifecycle

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

#99

Post by darknavi »

PaulHoule wrote: post #85

An 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…

It's funny because from my experience airline systems are very imperfect (timing wise).

I (unwisely) tried to purchase an Icelandair ticket via the Chase travel portal. I would get a reservation number, go buy seats on Icelandair's website, and a few days later the entire reservation would vanish into the ether. Rinse and repeat 3x.

I can't remember the exact verbiage, but basically tickets can be "reserved" and "booked". One means the ticket is allocated, and one means the ticket is actually paid for. I eventually sat on the phone with an executive support person as they booked the ticket and got it all the way through. It turns out Chase reserves a ticket on an airline but as an SLA of ~3 days to actually pay for the ticket. Icelandair's requires a ticket to be paid with in 24 hours, so it was timing out.

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

#100

Post by GlickWick »

glerk wrote: post #78
ddejohn wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

I use Bluesky and literally only see Gamedev content. Unlike X or whatever, I control what I see.
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