I implore everyone to use something better like Mastodon or maybe minds
if they gave it away (which used to be unfeasible until the digital era) they feel they’re loosing their valuable effort which they’re wont on concentrating, not diluting.
ATProto is designed around accounts that are independent of data host, application, and moderation, all in the name of giving users individual control over these things. It's like if every Mastodon user ran their own server, but without the overhead
Much of the backend is open source as well: https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/tree/main/packages
What is not are the extra services they run to provide a better and faster UX. Even if it was open source, it likely costs 10s of thousands to run per month (they have moved largely to "onprem" hardware instead of the cloud aiui)
> We did a backend rewrite from postgres to scylla and it has a bunch of deployment specific stuff, but is functionally identical to the open source postgres version. Its not really a "v2" in terms of new features, we just made it make use of our hardware really well[1]
No, it's like every Mastodon user used the same server, and all the coordination is done by one server that nobody can replicate.
Bluesky accepted VC money. For a social platform that means its death certificate has already been signed.
What you're ignoring with that framing is that we can use social media that operates outside the VC startup pipeline and doesn't have enshittification baked in from the start.
The interesting next stage for the postgres implementation is to create a sync engine for partial syncs of the network, so that an appview can run affordably. We ran some benches on the current state of the postgres implementation and found we could index 300k users on a $100/mo vps. I think with a couple of weeks of optimization that could reach 1mm users.
Another interesting way to view ATProto is that it could be a collection of headless features and network browsers that leverage those feature providers.
This is nothing like having a single server for every user. Perhaps you are confusing Bluesky (one app) with ATProtocol the shared network? There are already independent servers and apps operating separate from Bluesky
I don't see how ATProto is doing noticeably better than the scenario where a large ActivityPub instance blocks your external account.
I hope Bluesky is able to find a model that works for them AND for consumers. (I do know it's an open protocol, so it'll live on without Bluesky itself! However, as this post shows, it's a lot of work to build on the prototype... so if not them, who? And if someone else, how will they become sustainable?)
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/tree/main/packages...
there are various supporting services written in Go as well
I wasn't aware that AppView v1 was open source, and the most recent info I'm aware of on the topic is https://alice.bsky.sh/post/3laega7icmi2q, https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/2961 and https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/federation-archit..., and everything I've heard about Bluesky was that open source appview is "still coming".
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.
It's really not that hard to find enriching content from all walks of life on Bluesky -- if somebody can't find it, they just suck at the internet.
To be clear, I do have grievances with Bluesky, and I do not have high hopes for its future -- but that's because I personally believe that social media in general is both fatally flawed from the start and detrimental to society, and will never not devolve into ad-riddled or otherwise enshittified services. I am not a Bluesky shill, I'm just here to call out the silly false equivalence with Truthsocial, etc.
Two points of note
1. You can participate in Bluesky without the Bluesky app, so you can remove this requirement by using an alternative app
2. The most blocked account is blocked by around 0.25% of the full network (https://clearsky.app/)
This second point does not account for users banned from Bluesky by Bluesky for breaking the ToS or PDS abuse.
Federated PDS-s (which is probably the closest to what people mean when they say they want to federate on bluesky) would not need to reconstruct timelines if their users use the bsky.app appview.
Uber takes on so much more responsibility of the transaction. Setting price, handling disputes, real time coordination, etc.
If you instead claim that users can always choose to use other 3P relays, then you immediately lose all the nice things that Bluesky is able to do well today (search, discoverability, a “discover” algorithm). Indeed, you fall back to the same old problems that every other decentralized social network has.
Bluesky is just a shittier version of Nostr, except that the people over at Nostr don’t pretend.
Like, sure, they don't need every single one of those 30,000... but they have to have ground teams in every city in the world. Connections with every airport. Connections with almost every restaurant in the world. Customer support and safety (okay I know they don't nail this, but still). They need to pay out drivers in each country. The app needs to work in hundreds of countries, all with different laws, currencies, languages and more. Some places let you pick up anywhere, others require specific locations. And that's not even including marketing, partnerships, HR, finance, etc.
I don't think the employees are the problem with Uber, it's the shareholders. They need to make X back, so that delta is where drivers get squeezed.
Initially, it can be funded by selling tools that do analytics or by donations (like Wikipedia).
Lichess, is it bad? It basically solves the whole problem. If well-designed distributed social media site could be something like that. Donations are enough to support one guy at least.
A) Sustainable revenue is a requirement for any company, yes, but the unlimited (above-inflation) growth demanded by most large corporations is absolutely not. Lots and lots of companies operate for a long time without expecting massive growth, raises n' all. MBAs pejoratively call such companies "lifestyle businesses"--as in "just pays for people to live"--but I'd call them "normal, healthy companies".
B) More fundamentally: the idea that a social media network can only be built by a single corporation owned by investors is an omnipresent, yet extremely toxic, assumption. Mastodon represents another extreme end of the capital<->labor spectrum where anyone can contribute to the network at any time with their own instance, but I think Bluesky is a hint of a less-pure--and therefor more feasible--future.
To use the language of my favorite dream, Chomskian Anarcho-Syndicalism: imagine a social media network organized by a democratic non-profit entity akin to the Python or Linux Foundations, that then contracts out work to a hierarchy of smaller, purpose-built teams ("syndicates"), each of which may in turn contract w/ other teams. Each team would have to attract talent and negotiate enough income to pay them sufficiently still, of course, but there would be no team leader to make a surplus profit from the system -- any "surplus" would stay at the non-profit level, and thus necessarily be reinvested back into the product.
In the current system, the reason Bluesky didn't do this off the bat is obvious: no one would loan them startup funds, as ownership investment is the de facto universal way to start up an unproven venture. But we can dream bigger and better, IMHO; both on a smaller scale by building upon already-proven open protocols like AT Proto, and on a larger scale by structuring the state & economy to support this kind of model equally, if not primarily.
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 same queries they would eventually get the exact same results.
Systems like this bring in a lot of control systems theory because they have the potential to oscillate if there is positive feedback (and in search engines that positive feedback comes from the ranker which is looking at which link you clicked and giving it a higher weight) and it is important that they not go crazy. Some of the most interesting, and most subtle, algorithm work was done keeping that system "critically damped" so that it would converge quickly.
Reading this description of how user's timelines are sharded and the same sorts of feedback loops (in this case 'likes' or 'reposts') sounds like a pretty interesting problem space to explore.
In this case I agree though, they're all spammers and/or "clout farmers", or trying to make an account seem more authentic for future scams. They want to generate follow notifications in the hope that some will follow them back (and if they don't, they unfollow again after some interval).
They've intentionally kept a low footprint to keep expenses down, and while income via donation is out of the picture (unless AT Proto grows into a full ecosystem, I suppose?), cosmetics are a tried-and-true model for supporting something that most users use for free, but that some power users spend all day on and want shiny stuff for. They'll probably end up exploring Discord-esque paywalled features for power users as well, which isn't necessarily ideal but is leagues better than getting on the currently-dying vicious cycle of Display Ads, IMO.
Lossy indeed.
Tell me, concretely, how people can choose to continue following me, even though I am banned.
Profile: immibis.bsky.social
yes, the right is full of infighting too as shown by the recent H1B debate, that doesn't contradict my point.
> any social media platform will become an echo chamber if you only choose to follow people that echo your sentiments
bluesky is almost 100% political and almost 100% left-wing. There is literally no one else to follow, at least for now. X still has non-political content, I mainly follow AI, technology and cryptocurrency, and I couldn't find similar content on bluesky.
Seriously? Isn't this the nut of your problem right here?
— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blekko
Perhaps GP has a more interesting answer though.
I always look at how WhatsApp played out as the company. They were the good guys, and didn't want to get acquired. Zuckerberg, almost bankrupt FB at the time giving into all of the ridiculous demands WhatsApp made. No one at WhatsApp thought it was going to happen, until it did and did result in a once-in-a-lifetime transfer of wealth to several hundred employees.
A social media system doesn't need to be perfect at all. It was clear to me from the beginning that Bluesky's feeds aren't very fast, not like they are crazy slow, but if it saves money or effort it's no problem if notifications are delayed 30s.
Let's imagine something like this: instead of writing to every user's timeline, it is written once for each shard containing at least one follower. This caps the fan-out at write time to hundreds of shards. At read time, getting the content for a given users reads that hot slice and filters actual followers. It definitely has more load but
- the read is still colocated inside the shard, so latency remains low
- for mega-followers the page will not see older entries anyway
There are of course other considerations, but I'm curious about what the load for something like that would look like (and I don't have the data nor infrastructure to test it)
Wikipedia isn't a threat to anyone, they just have to generate enough capital to exist.
Not op, but chiming in. There's a lot of content regarding aquatics and home automation (separate topics). I avoid the politics stuff entirely, and much of the crypto stuff on X tends to be promoting scams and rug-pulls.
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 good.
There are only six users with over a million followers, and none with two million yet.
I'm sure they'll get there.
While I'm fine with the solution, the wording of this sentence led me to believe that the solution was going to be imperfect chronology, not dropped posts in your feed.
Think about other ad-supported sites. If you're an engineer working on an ad-supported product, the perfect consistency you strive for in your code is not the product. The product is the sum of all of the content the user sees. And the costs of the tradeoffs you make are paid for by ads.
Am I willing to see 10x more ads for perfect consistency? Definitely not.
There are obviously other ways of doing it (doing the timeline propagation in a batch job, fanning out the reads rather than the writes), but they've got their own problems. Probably worse ones.
I'm not seeing that handle resolve in the normal places. Do you have the DID? You should use a custom domain so that you can control the the reference and lookup.
You can run your own PDS and manage complete account lifecycle
I (unwisely) tried to purchase an Icelandair ticket via the Chase travel portal. I would get a reservation number, go buy seats on Icelandair's website, and a few days later the entire reservation would vanish into the ether. Rinse and repeat 3x.
I can't remember the exact verbiage, but basically tickets can be "reserved" and "booked". One means the ticket is allocated, and one means the ticket is actually paid for. I eventually sat on the phone with an executive support person as they booked the ticket and got it all the way through. It turns out Chase reserves a ticket on an airline but as an SLA of ~3 days to actually pay for the ticket. Icelandair's requires a ticket to be paid with in 24 hours, so it was timing out.
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)
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.
"In the case of timelines, each “page” of followers is 10,000 users large and each “page” must be fanned out before we fetch the next page. This means that our slowest writes will hold up the fetching and Fanout of the next page."
Basically means that they block on each page, process all the items on the page, and then move on to the next page. Why wouldn't you rather decouple page fetcher and the processing of the pages?
A page fetching activity should be able to continuously keep fetching further set of followers one after another and should not wait for each of the items in the page to be updated to continue.
Something that comes to mind would be to have a fetcher component that fetches pages, stores each page in S3 and publishes the metadata (content) and the S3 location to a queue (SQS) that can be consumed by timeline publishers which can scale independently based on load. You can control the concurrency in this system much better, and you could also partition based on the shards with another system like Kafka by utilizing the shards as keys in the queue to even "slow down" the work without having to effectively drop tweets from timelines (timelines are eventually consistent regardless).
I feel like I'm missing something and there's a valid reason to do it this way.
However, my understanding is that airlines have much more sophisticated per-flight and per-passenger models that calculate the predicted no-show factor based on the historical rates for that particular route (e.g. you're more likely to get more no-shows in business class flying from NYC to SF compared to holiday travelers with a reservation on the Florida Keys)
I can't imagine spending hundreds of dollars and just not showing up.
I wholeheartledly disagree. People build things all the time for things other than profit. In fact, most of the greatest things ever built were a loss for those who built them.
Dignity is the best motivator. Profit only supercedes dignity when dignity is not on offer.
There's a tradeoff here between batch size and concurrency, but perhaps they've already benchmarked it and "single-threaded" batches of 10k writes performed best.
Side note: His employer is the biggest client of a major European airline.
You said it was different from Mastodon, but how is this different from Mastodon?
https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mik...
> That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that’s truly decentralized. It’s another app. It’s another app that’s just kind of following in Twitter’s footsteps, but for a different part of the population.
> Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That’s not what I wanted, that’s not what I intended to help create.
Geographic search to was the most expensive thing they could have done and no matter what we did we couldn’t get them to use the XML feed.
I even tried returning a link to the feed when we detected a bot. No dice. They just kept working around the bot detection.
Msg 1: I hate ___insert_controversal_person_category_here___
Msg 2: Is the kind of statement that really sets me off
Msg 1 has a very different meaning if you don't see Msg 2.
There are other ways to monetize search (look at Kagi for example) than advertising. Blekko missed that window though. (too early, Google needed to get a crappy as it is today to make the value of a spam free search engine desirable)
A big contributor to this feeling is their default "Discover" feed being very mediocre. "Less of this" and "more of this" do not seem to impact what it gives you, neither do what you like, respond to, follow, or who you block. Some days it's entirely cat pictures, other days it's entirely politics (my suggested accounts to follow are 100% of the time in this category). Finding the good content is very difficult, and the handful of accounts I follow are largely accounts I had to manually search for or was given a direct link to somewhere else, which would never have come up naturally. And to try to fix it, I took the advice to use the block feature, er, liberally, and I think it made the problem worse.
I even wouldn't mind the politics being in the feed if it didn't show me the exact same things repeated again and again. I get that determining if two posts are too similar is difficult, but it could at least not show me the same image again and again and again...
I've found https://bsky.app/profile/skyfeed.xyz/feed/discover to be a slightly better version of the Discover feed, but it's a lot less dynamic.
Long ago, I worked for a dating site. Our CTO at the time was a "guest of honor" who was brought in by a family friend who was working in the marketing at the time. The CTO was a university professor who took on a job as a courtesy (he didn't need the money nor fame, he had enough of both, and actually liked teaching).
But he instituted a lot of experimental practices in the company. S.a. switching roles every now and then (anyone in the company could apply for a different role except administration and try themselves wearing a different hat), or having company-wide discussions of problems where employees would have to prepare a presentation on their current work (that was very unusual at the time, but the practice became more institutional in larger companies afterwards).
Once he announced a contest for the problem he was trying to solve. Since we were building a dating site, the obvious problem was matching. The problem was that the more properties there were to match on, the longer it would take (beside other problems that is). So, the program was punishing site users who took time to fill out the questionnaires as well as they could and favored the "slackers".
I didn't have any bright ideas on how to optimize the matching / search for matches. So, ironically, I asked "what if we just threw away properties beyond certain threshold randomly?" I was surprised that my idea received any traction at all. And the answer was along the lines of "that would definitely work, but I wouldn't know how to explain this behavior to the users". Which, at the time, I took to be yet another eccentricity of the old man... but hey, the idea stuck with me for a long time!
Also, (for other readers), I'm a huge fan of Kagi. Highly recommended.
https://aws.amazon.com/builders-library/workload-isolation-u...
The basic idea is to assign each user to multiple shards, decreasing the changes of another user sharing all their shards with the badly behaving user.
Fixing this issue as described in the article makes sense, but if they did shuffle sharding in the first place it would cover any new issues without effecting many other users.
Then you are missing the point. I am asking how much censorship power the largest node in the network has.
If being blocked by the largest provider means 95% of users can't see me anymore then the situation is strictly worse than Mastodon vs ActivityPub-at-large.
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 when serving each follower's timeline, fetch the celebrity's posts and merge them into the timeline. When millions of followers do that, it will be cheap read-only fetch from a hot cache.
(And the same for the inverse hybrid strategy of quarantining the writes of highly followed users and handling their fan-out at read time. A neat optimization, and maybe even absolutely once you have accounts with 100M followers. But the vast majority of posts would still be handled via the original strategy.)
Instead, you can drastically speed up performance if you are able to store data for each timeline somewhat contiguously on disk.
The slack just gets moved. Airlines oversell by about 8 percent. All systems need some slack in them. Isn't that kinda Bob's Law or something?
I must admit, I had some trouble following the author's transition from "celebrity" with many followers to "bot" with many follows. While I assume the work done for a celebrity to scatter a bunch of posts would be symmetric to the work done for a commensurate bot to gather a bunch of posts, I had the impression that the author was introducing an entirely different concept in "Lossy Timelines."
It's insanely frustrating.
Hopefully you're adjusting the lossy-ness weighting and cut-off by whether a user is active at any particular time? Because, otherwise, applying this rule, if the cap is set too low, is a very bad UX in my experience x_x
Airlines are far from perfect. They overbook flights and sometimes have to ask people leave and pay them for the inconvenience. My wife and I once got $1000 a piece and a hotel and food voucher to volunteer to take a flight the next day on a layover in Atlanta.
As far as your particular situation, the number one rule of using a third party portal to book flights or hotels is - don’t.
I understand that Iceland Air is not a transfer partner of Chase. But even in that case, I would just wait to use my points until I could use a transfer partner.
On the earning side if paying cash, the difference between 2x/3x points when booking directly and 5x when going through the portal just isn’t worth the risk.
Once you go public, then you have investor pressure and can be subject to activist investors unless the founder has controlling interests like in the case of Meta and Google.
[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.
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 with 1200 followers, if everyone actually posts once a day (most people do not) gets... a rate of 0.138 writes per second.
They should be background noise, irrelevant to the discussion. That level of work is within reasonable expectation. What they're pointing out is that Twitter is aggressively anti-perfectionist for no good technical reason - so there must be a business reason for it.
The "reasonable limit" is likely set based on experimentation, and thus on how much people post on average and the load it generates (so the real number is unlikely to be exactly "2000", IMHO).
If you follow a lot of people, how likely it is that their posting pattern is so different from the average? The more people you follow, the less likely that is.
So while you can end up in such situation in theory, it would need to be a very unusual (and rare) case.
Do I feel better taken care of if I can just take the following morning's flight at no additional cost or hassle, or if I now need to contact someone at Amex Global Business Travel, have them try to get me on a flight, have another expense, potentially not be able to get on the next flight or the one after that, etc.
* when I travelled to a single city with 20+ colleagues for several years, our nightly hotel rate was less than quarter of published rate. I don't think we got anything like that on Airlines, but nevertheless, bulk gets discounts.
* I forget details but between specific frequent cities which had hourly flights, we had full flexibility and we used this all the time. So we might catch a flight hour earlier if there was one available, or hour later if need be than booked.
Basically to everybody's point, business travel is very different than vacation travel and intuition from once a year personal trip don't apply.
ATProto is young compared to the alternatives, give the network time to build out an ecosystem and the resilience we need.
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
I like your example it is very interesting. If I get to work on (or even hear someone in my team is working on) such interesting problems and I can hear about it, I get happy.
Interesting problems are rare because like a house you might talk about brick vs. Timber frame once, but you'll talk about cleaning the house every week!
* Yes of course there are negotiated discounts for major corporations- but full flexibility is still far more expensive than restricted tickets, just like business is still far more expensive than economy.
* Most airlines offer guaranteed same-day changes, or at least priority standby, to high-status loyalty members (which most consultants are) so buying full-flex tickets to get an hour earlier/later flexibility is redundant - basically, paying for a benefit you already have.
(Although I don't understand the "non-celebrity" part of your comment -- the timeline contains (pointers to) posts from whoever someone follows, and doesn't care who those people are.)
I don’t know if anyone’s embarked on a P2P search engine but that’s essentially my concept. Anyhoo, thanks for the inspiration!
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 impact of network effects on moderation. The "big few" retain their outsized influence with both protocols, at least as far as I am aware. If there is a technical misunderstanding about this on my part then do please point it out.
Moreover, the current situation is significantly worse on ATProto because the vast majority of the network currently relies on a single provider.
To be clear, I am not opposed to ATProto. I am only opposed to inaccurate technical comparisons.
And that just pays to keep the lights on at the colocation center. If you're paying off the development costs (30 - 50 developers over 2 - 3 years) and the cost of an office somewhere. You'll want at least double that revenue or you'll go broke before you break even.
Ideally you are the 'go to' place for people looking to buy something as those queries make money. People researching Douglas Fairbanks for a high school essay consume queries but don't generate ad revenue.
It isn't for the faint of heart.
Maybe they've figured out that enabling their employees to stay a few extra hours without worry to finish a deal is worth it.
I own DDIA but after a few chapters of how database work behind the scenes, I begin to fall asleep. I have trouble understanding how to apply the knowledge to my work but this seems like a useful thing with a more clear application.
Or they can just haul you forcefully from the flight you paid for:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_Express_passenger_...
I know "search is hard" in the general sense but context is lacking (not a lot of details online from ex-search teams). It's always been apparent to me that you must have some other high-grossing product if you want to get into search or video, if only to pay for the servers.
Thank you for providing your context!
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 people would be missing updates.
How is it possible to get such massive improvements when you're only skipping a presumably small % of people per new post?
EDIT: nvm, I rethought about it, the issue is that a single user with millions of follows will constantly be written to which will slow down the fanout service when a celebrity makes a post since you're going through many db pages.
The goal isn't to eliminate flexibility, it's understanding probabilities. If fully-flexible/refundable flights are 3x the fare of restricted, then in aggregate, the company could have a chunk of consultants throw out their original reservations and rebook later flights, and still save money. Yes- sometimes consultants need to stay longer than planned, but in an age of prioritizing "work-life balance," most consultants are encouraged to stick to their schedule and get back home when originally planned.
The „reasonable limit“ is likely set to account for such an effect, but I am wondering if a per-user limit based on the activity of the accounts one follows will be an improvement on this approach.
> Seeing them get 96% improvements is insane
TFA is talking about P99 tail latencies. It does not sound too insane to reduce tail latencies by extraordinary margins. Remember, it's just reshaping of latency distribution. In this case pathological cases get dropped.
And as stated elsewhere, the majority of consultants are relatively junior people whose role has nothing to do with negotiating contracts.
> 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-moderati...
Indeed:
> This means each user gets their own Timeline partition, randomly distributed among shards of our horizontally scalable database (ScyllaDB), replicated across multiple shards for high availability
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.
- 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.
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.
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 remember.
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 fetching and merging _thousands_ of timelines (again, 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).
Given the nature of the service, making read predictably cheap and writes potentially expensive (which seems to be the way they've gone) seems like a defensible practice.
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.
I've found a workaround, though – click back into the DDG search box at the top of the page and hit enter. This then returns the original search results.
off-topic: how has been dealing with the influx of new users after X political/legals problems aftermath? Did you see an increase in toxicity around the network? And how has you (Bluesky moderation) dealing with it.
I'm not trying to be pedantic but this is table stakes stuff. I know we're supposed to shy away from saying things like this but compared to the other engineering that airlines have to do, this is easy. It costs - at most, including wages - a few tens of thousands of dollars yearly to come up with these figures. It's a fraction of the salary of one United Airlines BA.[0] This cost might go up if one of the senior developers convinces their boss that this needs to be a machine learning model but unless they're resume pumping it's going to be at most PCA and a regression.
This is not a team of people working for months on this one thing.
[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/job-listing/analyst-revenue-manage...
The current solution is for everyone to use the same few relays, which is basically a polite nod to Bluesky's architecture. The long-term solution is—well it involves a lot of relay hint dropping and a reliance on Japanese levels of acuity when it comes to picking up on hints (among clinets). But (a) it's proving extreme slow going and (b) it only aims to mitigate the "global as relates to me" problem.
Posts/sec are just off record levels.
Frankly, if I get 16 years out of Bluesky before having to move onto the next one, I can live with that. Social networks _die_; it has always been so. USENET, livejournal, Tumblr, twitter... nothing lasts forever.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Thanks a lot for sharing this link.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
A scrollable feed of accounts that post interesting (to me) content.
Doing it peer to peer without editorial allows sites to 'get into' the index easily which has its own plusses and minuses.
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.)
Replying to people right after they post is how you actually get to have conversations with people, and get to know them well, imo
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
2020: > More than 158 million votes were cast in the election
So 3 millions of Democrats suddenly decided to not go out to vote "to save democracy" against "fascism"?
I saw many people close to me not bother voting because they didn’t enjoy Biden’s presidency, despite voting for him in 2020.
So, I find that FAR more likely as a reason than supposed election fraud.
It’s not like it’s a new idea; dating sites have been trying it since the 90s. But it, ah, a _bad_ model; it is why any popular post on Twitter is now drowned in irrelevant replies from idiot blueticks. It’s a reasonable rule of thumb that, if you have to pay to have your posts amplified, they’re probably not good enough for anyone to want to read them.
