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When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

jazco.dev

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

#101

Post by pfraze »

evbogue wrote: post #71
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 go…

isnt that ssb?

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

#102

Post by pfraze »

trhway wrote: post #80

So the system design puts the burden on what seems to be synchronous, not queued, writes to get easy reads. I usually prefer simpler cheaper writes at the cost of more complicated reads as the reads scale and parallelize better.

you're underestimating the read load, by a lot

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

#103

Post by josefresco »

rconti wrote: post #97
singleshot_ wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is the "no show" rate?

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

#104

Post by Eric_WVGG »

sphars wrote: post #69

When I go directly to a user's profile and see all their posts, sometimes one of their posts isn't in my timeline where it should be. I follow less than 100 users on Bluesky, but I guess this explains why I occasionally don't see a user's post in my timeline. Lossy indeed.

Are you using an app, website, or combination?

Various clients (I’m writing one) interpret the timeline differently, as a feed that shows literally everything includes could things that most people would find undesirable or irrelevant. (replies to strangers, replies to replies to replies, etc)

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

#105

Post by PaulHoule »

snailmailman wrote: post #91
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 goo…

That's connected with a basic usability complaint about current web interfaces, that ads and recommended content aren't stable. You very well might want to engage with an ad after you are done engaging what you wanted to engage with but you might never see it again. Similarly, you might see two or three videos that you want to click on on the side of a YouTube video you're watching but you can only click on one (though if you are thinking ahead you can open these in another tab.)

On top of that immediate frustration, the YouTube style interface here

https://marvelpresentssalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/id...

collects terrible data for recommendations because, even though it gives them information that you liked the thumbnail for a video, they can't come to any conclusion about whether or not you liked any of the other videos. TikTok, by focusing on one video at a time, collects much better information.

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

#106

Post by whyrusleeping »

skybrian wrote: post #81

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?

people get so up in arms when you suggest there might be a limit on how many people they can follow.

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

#107

Post by evbogue »

pfraze wrote: post #101
evbogue wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 go…

isnt that ssb?

reverse-ssb

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

#108

Post by cgriswald »

snailmailman wrote: post #91
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 goo…

I don't use DDG, but in my (very limited, just now) testing it doesn't seem to shuffle results unless you reload the page in some way. Is it possible you're browser is reloading the page when you go back? If so, setting DDG to open links in new tabs might fix this problem.

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

#109

Post by ARandumGuy »

tshaddox wrote: post #88
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.

Or just enforce a maximum number of followed accounts.

No matter how high you set a maximum limit for interactions on social media (followers, friends, posts, etc), someone will reach the limit and complain about it. I can see why Bluesky would prefer a "soft limit", where going above the limit will degrade the experience. It gives more flexibility to adjust things later, and prevents obnoxious complaints from power users with outsized influence.
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