The lossy timeline solution basically means you skip updating the feed for some people who are above the number of reasonable followers. I get that
Seeing them get 96% improvements is insane, does that mean they have a ton of users following an unreasonable number of people or do they just have a very low number for reasonable followers. I doubt it's the latter since that would mean a lot of people would be missing updates.
How is it possible to get such massive improvements when you're only skipping a presumably small % of people per new post?
EDIT: nvm, I rethought about it, the issue is that a single user with millions of follows will constantly be written to which will slow down the fanout service when a celebrity makes a post since you're going through many db pages.