When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

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 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.

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

there are a lot of interesting people on twitter

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 user ("I never see Friend X's posts because they're drowned out by the interesting stuff posted by the other 1199 people I follow")? It's tough!

> What are you trying to see?

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

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.)

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