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When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

(jazco.dev)
768 points cyndunlop | 1 comments | 19 Feb 25 17:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.237s | source
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jadbox ◴[20 Feb 25 00:31 UTC] No.43109670[source]▶
So, 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?
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1. imrehg ◴[20 Feb 25 02:09 UTC] No.43110258[source]▶
This feels like an edge case.

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.