On a related note, I am pretty confident that one of the main reasons the WWW succeeded where previous attempts failed was that it very specifically allowed 404s.
When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
291–300 of 315 posts
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blekko was gone by the time I learned about it. Recently (past few years) I emailed someone who worked on Blekko to get his opinion on a search engine concept I still have yet to start. His advice was to not bother competing with Google (obviously) LOL! I don’t know if anyone’s embarked on a P2P search engine but that’s essentially my concept. Anyhoo, thanks for the inspiration!
Darknet Lantern is a decentralized searchable directory . It's probably not going to take off, but it could inspire something else. Servers spider other servers with the same software, and synchronized their data.
Yup, directory services are a lot easier to do peer-to-peer. Pinboard.in is a good shared directory (sort of Yahoo! without the editorial). They can yield excellent quality when you're searching for something that someone has 'indexed' with them, but poor recall when it comes to the set of all possible answers.
Doing it peer to peer without editorial allows sites to 'get into' the index easily which has its own plusses and minuses.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#293Earlier 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…
Trump refusing to accept the 2020 election results should've been the line for many voters, but sadly it wasn't. And the potential crimes he and some of his allies may have committed while trying to overturn it will now never be prosecuted.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#294Earlier 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.
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 individ…
I find communist analysis tiresome, especially when in this case the populist right under Trump seems to be motivated in part by anti-free market ideas. The communist kneejerk reaction to every single situation is "this can be explained by class analysis". It's them trying to shoehorn their pet theory into everything.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#295I 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…
This is probably what we'll end up with in the long-run. Things have been fast enough without it (aside from this issue) but there's a lot of low-hanging fruit for Timelines architecture updates. We're spread pretty thin from a engineering-hours standpoint atm so there's a lot of intense prioritization going on.
Maybe this would be helpful:http://daslab.seas.harvard.edu/datacalculator/
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I like that, it's less paradoxical, and likely easier to explain to people with less developed critical thinking skills.
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#297Earlier 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?
They're all people that I know, and 98% of them are mutuals. I regularly go through my list of accounts I'm following every 5-6 months, and get rid of people who have disconnected from me, have gone inactive, or I don't really know.
I think the part you're missing here is that there are certain parts of twitter where the density of interconnection is really high, so you'll know people because you see them in the comments of a lot of threads, or through retweets.
It's really not that hard to end up knowing 1,000+ people if you engage with a group or "corner" of twitter. Even moreso if it's multiple corners. (Like, AI, but also just frens, but also a little political corner, people from specific cities, etc.)
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you following 1,200 people? What is the point of your home feed? What are you trying to see?
You are on the verge of discovering why non-chronological timelines exist :) It's not hard to imagine that there are 1200 people posting at least one thing a week that you would find interesting. The trouble is, if they also post 100 things that are not interesting, how does the software surface the interesting stuff without drowning you in the non-interesting stuff? How do you do that in a way that feels fair to the…
Personally, I always use chronological. I like to be able to hop on, and mingle with whatever percent of people are online and posting at any particular time.
Replying to people right after they post is how you actually get to have conversations with people, and get to know them well, imo
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Exactly. Tolerance is an opt-in protection. If you don't opt-in by exercising it yourself, you don't get the benefits.
Or, as a meme: YA_GOTTA_GIVE!.gif
Re: When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines
#300So, 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?
I think the 'law of large numbers' says that it's very unlikely for you to follow 4k and have _none_ of them posting. You could artificially construct a counter-example by finding 4k open but silent accounts, but that's silly.
The other workaround is: follow everyone. Write some code to get what you want out of the jetstream event feed. https://docs.bsky.app/blog/jetstream