When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

Anyone following hundreds of thousands of users is obviously a bot account scraping content. I'd ban them and call it a day.

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.

You don't need to follow anyone (or even have an account) to scrape content… Someone following a huge amount of accounts usually wants to get a lot of followers quickly this way through follow-backs.

if you want to scrape all the content, that's what the firehose is for, and it's allowed.

the only reason to mass-follow is for spam purposes.

This does assume that scrapers are smart, and often they're really not. They have infrastructure for scraping HTML from webpages at scale and that is the hammer they use for all nails. (e.g. Wikipedia has to fight off scraper traffic despite full archives being available as torrents, etc.)

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).

Maybe not hundreds of thousands but I'd follow anybody that looks remotely interesting and then primarily use customized feeds. E.g. if I wanna hear about union news, my personal irl network, etc I check that feed

Or just enforce a maximum number of followed accounts.

> Given Bluesky is a quasi-clone, I wonder why they did not follow in these footsteps.

There are only six users with over a million followers, and none with two million yet.

I'm sure they'll get there.

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.

I’m skeptical that the people who would complain about that wouldn’t find something else to complain about if you resolved the first complaint. I’d recommend implementing product features that you think are reasonable and accepting the fact that you will get complaints from people who disagree.

100%. I ran a job board where we provided a nice machine readable XML feed of all of our jobs, but we had bots that insisted on using the standard search box. Searching by city using an alphabetized list.

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.

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.

BlueSky has starter packs that allow you to mass follow in the click of a button. You join 10 starter packs in one day, you are following over 1000 people. Sometimes following others is the only way to get people to engage with your content.

Yes, and Starter Packs make this possible.