When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

I'm a bit confused.

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.

> does that mean they have a ton of users following an unreasonable number of people

Look at the accounts of OnlyFans models, crypto influencers, etc. They follow thousands or even tens of thousands of accounts in the hope that we will follow them in return.

I don't see that accommodating this behavior is prosocial or technically desirable.

Can you think of a use case?

All sorts of bots want this sort of access, but whether there are legitimate reasons to grant it to them on a non-sharded basis is another question since a lot of these queries do not scale resources with O(n) even on a centralized server architecture.