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When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

jazco.dev

271–280 of 315 posts

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

#271
post #265
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can move your data, but whoever controls the AppView controls what people see “on Bluesky”.

Yeah but anyone can make a GreenSky. The source code is all there

But the users are not. The app and the AppView can be bought and then you are in control of what people can see. Good luck trying to move them to the alternative.

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

#272

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…

> Some of the most interesting, and most subtle, algorithm work was done keeping that system "critically damped" so that it would converge quickly.

Looking back at my early work with microservices I'm wondering how much time I would have saved by just manually setting a tongue weight.

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

#273
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't see that accommodating this behavior is prosocial or technically desirable. Can you think of a use case? All sorts of bots want this sort of access, but whether there are legitimate reasons to grant it to them on a non-sharded basis is another question since a lot of these queries do not scale resources with O(n) even on a centralized server architecture.

From TFA:

> Generally, this can be dealt with via policy and moderation to prevent abusive users from causing outsized load on systems, but these processes take time and can be imperfect.

So it’s a case of the engineers accepting that, however hard they try to moderate, these sorts of cases will crop up and they may as well design their infrastructure to handle them.

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There's nothing wrong with being partisan if you're partisan against fascists who want to destroy democracy and the rule of law.

Funny how you call trump administration fascist. (theoretically its anti fascist but its still bad ,

Taking from the description of the video since this was what immediately ringed when you said trump===fascism

The liberal theory of the rise of Trumpism and its supposed fascistic features is inadequate in both effectively analysing and offering solutions to the present situation. Liberals often personalise or individualise people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, casting them as deviations, as opposed to manifestations of class society. Class analysis suggests that fascism was a unique response to growing anti-capitalist organisations, socialist and/or anarchist, gaining prominence and posing threats to the economic base. The owning class required a mass movement which enveloped otherwise disillusioned people into a political project which had the collectivist, anti-free market appeal that socialist and anarchist organisations had, but nonetheless committed to solidifying and strengthening the economic base and profit motive. In modern America, no such anti-capitalist threat exists. Neoliberalism has created significant disillusionment with mainstream social and political institutions and systems, but this disillusionment hasn’t been captured by anti-capitalist forces, but rather by the populist right. As such, the populist right doesn’t need to give up the economic game, i.e. free markets, deregulation, privatisation, austerity, etc (with the exception of tariffs), but can purely rely on minorities as scapegoats in a constructed culture war, such as immigrants, ‘wokeness’, transgender people, etc. Therefore, capital doesn’t need to be subordinated to the nation-state, like pursued by contemporary fascist governments. Rather, in this ‘inverted’ fascism, capital takes over and exploits the state in a rather oligarchic manner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqdLwkyfLdM

This video is really great , I spent 10 minutes looking for this.

I am not a trump supporter , The title might be a little clickbaity (basically the opposite of what it really is) You might find it really great.

It is one of the best videos I have ever watched on politics.

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

#275
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.

Its so crazy.

Thanks a lot for sharing this link.

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluesky's 'Discover' feed (the default algo feed that you get when you create your account) is based on _likes_, not follows, so if you never like anything you'll get random nonsense. You can try using other algo feeds from here: https://bsky.app/feeds and remove the discover feed, or of course you could just use the chronological one.

But when everything I see is awful, what do I like? I think that's my classic issue with feed style websites

You follow _people_, and ignore the 'Discover' feed, is generally my personal solution to this. YMMV.

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

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There's nothing wrong with being partisan if you're partisan against fascists who want to destroy democracy and the rule of law.

Yup. This is a well-tread philosophical problem: the Paradox of Tolerance. Greater minds have concluded "to protect tolerance, one has to be intolerant of intolerance."

And, as always, bsky is a place of business - it is not a public venue. They can decide not to admit individuals who would threaten their business.

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

#278

I don’t see much call for blusky anymore….

I mean: https://bskycharts.edavis.dev/static/dynazoom.html?cgiurl_gr... Posts/sec are just off record levels.

Record seems to be ~115, while current is ~63, or 55%.

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

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have my own domain already attached, I can point it at any server and my identity on the network remains the same. When you use a *.bsky.social handle, you have not made yourself independent and resilient to arbitrary decision by the org that manages that service

So that's the same as on Mastodon. What's the difference again?

To be fair, with ActivityPub your account is always tied to a given server.

However as you have rightly noticed, the person you are responding to here is being disingenuous. Controlling the account doesn't fix the fundamental issue caused by network effects. An account that can't interact with a large portion of the network is no different than Mastoson in practice.

The Mastodon equivalent would be running your own single user instance which gets defederated by one of the big players.

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

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There's nothing wrong with being partisan if you're partisan against fascists who want to destroy democracy and the rule of law.

Oh fully agreed. But there's a large contingent of folks that are well represented here who think that it's inherently more intelligent to act like/be a centrist, that "both sides have something to offer," which isn't strictly untrue, but in practice especially with American politics just results in mealy-mouthed acceptance of pretty brutal status quos.

Like even left and right in terms of the mainstream here is nonsense. We don't have a left party at all, we have a conservative party, and we have an authoritarian fascist party. As a lefty none of my values are represented at all, I just get to vote each election for the conservative party that doesn't want my friends dead.

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