When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

Hmm. Twitter/X appears to do this at quite a low number, as the "Following" tab is incredibly lossy (some users are permanently missing) at only 1,200 followed people.

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

> It's _insanely_ frustrating.

> at only 1,200 followed people.

I follow like, 50 people on bluesky. Who is following 1,200 people? What kind of value do you even get out of your feed?

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?