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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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's not the appview, that's the client

App View is a bit fuzzy of a term. To me it seems like a combination of frontend, backend, custom lexicon, and supporting services. There isn't really another place in the spec or design where clients or browsers fit in, which do in fact provide a view of the network via an app.

"UI" is part of the definition they give in the glossary

https://atproto.com/guides/glossary#app-view

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (thou…

> though if you are thinking ahead you can open these in another tab

or add it to the "Watch Later" playlist :) so you can watch it...later.

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

#223

I'm a bit confused. The lossy timeline solution basically means you skip updating the feed for some people who are above the number of reasonable followers. I get that Seeing them get 96% improvements is insane, does that mean they have a ton of users following an unreasonable number of people or do they just have a very low number for reasonable followers. I doubt it's the latter since that would mean a lot of peopl…

> does that mean they have a ton of users following an unreasonable number of people

They do, there are groups of users on bluesky who follow inordinate numbers of other accounts to try and get follows back.

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

#225
post #146

I wonder why timelines aren't implemented as a hybrid gather-scatter choosing strategy depending on account popularity (a combination of fan-out to followers and a lazy fetch of popular followed accounts when follower's timeline is served). When you have a celebrity account, instead of fanning out every message to millions of followers' timelines, it would be cheaper to do nothing when the celebrity posts, and later…

At some point they'll end up just doing the Bieber rack [1]. It's when a shard becomes so hot that it just has to be its own thing entirely. [1] - https://www.themarysue.com/twitter-justin-bieber-servers/ @bluesky devs, don't feel ashamed for doing this. It's exactly how to scale these kinds of extreme cases.

Given that BlueSky is funded by Twitter, I'm assuming they know a lot more than us on how Twitter architects systems.

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

#226

The funny thing is that all of the centralization in Bluesky is defended as being necessary to provide things like global search and all replies in a thread, things that Mastodon simply punts on in the name of decentralization. But then ultimately, Bluesky has to relax those goals after all.

True. In context though Bluesky can tweak the volume knob as and when they see fit, whereas for Mastodon it's stuck where it is.

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

#227

I'm a bit confused. The lossy timeline solution basically means you skip updating the feed for some people who are above the number of reasonable followers. I get that Seeing them get 96% improvements is insane, does that mean they have a ton of users following an unreasonable number of people or do they just have a very low number for reasonable followers. I doubt it's the latter since that would mean a lot of peopl…

> does that mean they have a ton of users following an unreasonable number of people

Look at the accounts of OnlyFans models, crypto influencers, etc. They follow thousands or even tens of thousands of accounts in the hope that we will follow them in return.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Potential solutions:

- Make it easy to systematically unfollow people (or degrade them to a different tier, see below, or sort them automatically into a different feed; maybe even allow automatic following of certain people, like your cities mayor or local ice cream parlors). Like based on recent activity, last engagement with a post, type of content (pictures, videos, links ...), on a schedule (e.g. follow for 3 yeard, follow until 2028), special status (family, friends, member of congress, member of city council, mayor...), number/ratio of common followers, regex expressions, recommendations by certain accounts, letter-to-word ratio, season, planetary alignment, weather, age, train departure time, side-chaing based on other accounts, force accounts to play russian unfollow roulette, urgency to pee, healthcare CEO life expectancy derivative, ... or any combination of these.

- Allow different tiers of following someone. Like friends (never unfollow, always fetch updates), family (never unfollow, rate limit high-energy uncles), news (filter based on urgency or current topics of interest), politicians (highlight as untrustworthy, attach link to donation and board membership disclosure, attach term-limit and next election countdown), local businesses (hard rate limit, attach opening hours), bookmark (never unfollow, no updates), ... maybe multiple tiers in each category and allow those being followed to either temporarily boost their tier (or tiers of certain posts) or e.g. once per year.

- Allow people from exempting some of their posts from not being shown to some of their followers. E.g. two per week and an additional 5 per month.

- Allow people to choose which followers should be given a higher priority when writing posts to their feeds.

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

#229
post #167

So, let's say I follow 4k people in the example and have a 50% drop rate. It seems a bit weird that if all (4k - 1) accounts I follow end up posting nothing in a day, that I STILL have a 50% chance that I won't see the 1 account that posts in a day. It seems to me that the algorithm should consider my feed's age (or the post freshness of my followers). Am I overthinking?

Yeah, this seems concerning to me. Maybe now as the platform is new this isn't much of an issue. But as accounts go inactive people will naturally collect "dead" accounts that they are still following. On Facebook it isn't uncommon of to have old accounts of sociable people naturally collect thousands of friends.

It seems that what they are trying to measure is "busy timelines" and it seems bag they could probably measure that more directly. For example what is the number of posts in the timeline over theast 24h? It seems that it should be fairly easy to use this as the metric for calculating drop rate.

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

#230
post #9

[stub for offtopicness]

I don’t understand the infatuation with blue sky. The minute they need money it’ll go the way of the Reddit and twitter.

My bluesky feed is somehow even more abhorrent than my twitter one, except that instead of right wing hate it's Facebook memes about "reading banned books"
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