Live data from Hacker News

When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

jazco.dev

281–290 of 315 posts

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

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've stood up machines for this before I did not know they had a name, and I worked at the mouse company and my parking spot was two over from a J. Beibe'rs spot. So now we have Slashdot effect, HN hug, and its not Clarkson its... Stephen Fry effect? Maybe can be Cross-Discipline - there's a term for when lots of UK turns their kettles on at the same time. I should make a blog post to record all the ones I can rememb…

TV Pickup aka the Half Time Kettle Effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_pickup

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have heard it much more aptly described as “enforcing the social contract”.

You agree to uphold the contract of tolerance with everyone that participates. If someone refuses to uphold the contract with others who do, then you have no obligation to uphold the contract with that individual.

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

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

Yeah, there was a short spike directly after the US elections, but, ignoring that, post rates are stable to somewhat rising.

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

#284
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.

Given enough time, you'll end up with a lot of legitimate users who follow a huge number of accounts but rarely interact with more than a handful, similar to how many long-time YouTubers have a very high subscriber:viewer ratio (that is, they have way more subscribers than you would expect given their average view count), and there's nothing inherently suspicious about it. People lose access to their accounts, make new accounts, die, get bored, or otherwise stop watching the content but never bother unsubscribing because the algorithm recognized this and stopped recommending the channel's uploads to them.

Bluesky doesn't have this problem yet because it's so young, so the outsized follow counts are mostly going to be from doomscrollers and outright malicious users, but even if it was exclusively malicious users, there is no perfect algorithm to identify them, much less do so before they start causing performance problems. Under those constraints, it makes sense to limit the potential blast radius and keep the site more usable for everyone.

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

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First you made incorrect and misleading statements. Then when I point it out you try to rhetorically shift blame on to me. To answer your misleading and irrelevant question, I have never been banned by Bluesky. What did you do to get banned on Mastodon? Do you understand that "moderation" and "banned for violating the ToS" are one and the same? ATProto is not any better than ActivityPub (ie Mastodon) regarding the im…

I was using the indeterminate "you" for a hypothetical question, one that gets asked often > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ATProto moderation is technically and fundamentally different from ActivityPub: https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-mod…

The question remains misleading and irrelevant whether it was addressed to me or the room at large.

I am well aware that ATProto makes improvements to both account migration and end user moderation. Those are of course good things in my view. As previously stated I have noting against ATProto.

This entire subthread started because I responded to your claim that "It's like if every Mastodon user ran their own server". That is highly misleading at best, outright wrong at worst. It is only equivalent to that scenario if every ATProto user manages their own account as well as every single other required service, at which point you might as well just have run your own Mastodon instance as it likely would have been both simpler and less resource intensive.

The reality is that this is never expected to happen. ATProto is expected to be like Mastodon, with the improvements that you can share a single account between multiple servers and there are tools to apply additional filtering so that you don't have to see (as much of) things you don't like. Those are certainly welcome improvements but they do nothing to address the outsized effects on censorship that large nodes have in federated networks.

Purely in theory, you could simultaneously use a single account with a full set of politically correct ATProto services (such as Bluesky) and a competing set of politically incorrect ones operated by someone else. However, if history is anything to go off of then this will quickly get you banned by either one or both of the operators. Merely interacting with those guilty of wrongthink has always been an easy way to get kicked off of a surprisingly large number of Mastodon servers.

Even supposing that the above doesn't happen to get you banned by either node, the potential still remains that it could. Whether or not a large node chooses to exercise its outsized influence doesn't change the fact that it possesses it. ATProto doesn't fix that.

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

#286

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.

I understand why some people vote for some parties and why they’re “voting on inflation” or “right to abortion” but I guess, for me, keeping checks and balances and democracy is the one value above ALL for me.

In the span of human history, not a lot of countries and civilizations have lasted long, marked by constant instability and uncertainty for the future. We have a boring and imperfect political system created by our founding fathers but at least it’s been stable for nearly 250 years. A lot of people have tried standing up their own political system… most fail and everyone suffers. Even the founding fathers completely failed once first.

I know times are tough now but, in the context of history, they can be much worse and I rather not lose what good we currently do have.

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

#287
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…

> and later when serving each follower's timeline, fetch the celebrity's posts and merge them into the timeline I think then you still have the 'weird user who follows hundreds of thousands of people' problem, just at read time instead of write time. It's unclear that this is _better_, though, yeah, caching might help. But if you follow every celeb on Bluesky (and I guarantee you this user exists) you'd be looking at…

> I suppose you could just throw up your hands and say "not doing that", and just skip most or all of the celebs for problem users

Random sampling? It's not as though the user needs thousands of posts returned for a single fetch. Scrolling down and seeing some stuff that's not in chronological order seems like an acceptable tradeoff.

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

#288
post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I understand why some people vote for some parties and why they’re “voting on inflation” or “right to abortion” but I guess, for me, keeping checks and balances and democracy is the one value above ALL for me. In the span of human history, not a lot of countries and civilizations have lasted long, marked by constant instability and uncertainty for the future. We have a boring and imperfect political system created by…

> we got 250 years so far without imploding

We may have arguably recovered from it, but we rather famously did not get 250 years without the union violently fragmenting. (Our best record on that is right around 160, currently.)

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

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1200 people is really nothing, specially if you have a job tangentially related to social media (for example journalists). It's really simple, you are not the same type of user. You have 50 "acquaintances", they have 1200 "sources". The article is talking about people who have following/follower counts in the millions. Those are dozens of writes per second in one feed and a fannout of potentially millions. Someone wi…

Why are you following 1,200 people? What is the point of your home feed? What are you trying to see?

> What are you trying to see?

A scrollable feed of accounts that post interesting (to me) content.

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

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the profit motive. It's funded by venture capital, so it has to grow at all costs (check) and then cash out.

Twitter didn't start doing it (the pay-for-attention model) until 17 years after it was founded, so, I mean, bsky will probably be okay for a _while_.

Alternative reading: It took 17 years for venture capitalists to figure out the pay-for-attention model, at which point they immediately applied it to everything they could.
Post reply on HN