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When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

(jazco.dev)
768 points cyndunlop | 2 comments | 19 Feb 25 17:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.426s | source
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spoaceman7777 ◴[20 Feb 25 00:36 UTC] No.43109707[source]▶
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

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VWWHFSfQ ◴[20 Feb 25 01:49 UTC] No.43110145[source]▶
> 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?

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peoplepostphew ◴[20 Feb 25 02:05 UTC] No.43110238[source]▶
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.

replies(1): >>43110260 #
VWWHFSfQ ◴[20 Feb 25 02:10 UTC] No.43110260[source]▶
Why are you following 1,200 people? What is the point of your home feed? What are you trying to see?
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1. coldpie ◴[20 Feb 25 14:32 UTC] No.43115103[source]▶
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!
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2. spoaceman7777 ◴[20 Feb 25 20:37 UTC] No.43119827[source]▶
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