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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: 0s | source
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pornel ◴[19 Feb 25 22:25 UTC] No.43108545[source]▶
I wonder why timelines aren't implemented as a hybrid gather-scatter choosing strategy depending on account popularity (a combination of fan-out to followers and a lazy fetch of popular followed accounts when follower's timeline is served).

When you have a celebrity account, instead of fanning out every message to millions of followers' timelines, it would be cheaper to do nothing when the celebrity posts, and later when serving each follower's timeline, fetch the celebrity's posts and merge them into the timeline. When millions of followers do that, it will be cheap read-only fetch from a hot cache.

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ericvolp12 ◴[19 Feb 25 22:37 UTC] No.43108664[source]▶
This is probably what we'll end up with in the long-run. Things have been fast enough without it (aside from this issue) but there's a lot of low-hanging fruit for Timelines architecture updates. We're spread pretty thin from a engineering-hours standpoint atm so there's a lot of intense prioritization going on.
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Xunjin ◴[20 Feb 25 13:25 UTC] No.43114352[source]▶
Just to be clear, you are a Bluesky engineer, right?

off-topic: how has been dealing with the influx of new users after X political/legals problems aftermath? Did you see an increase in toxicity around the network? And how has you (Bluesky moderation) dealing with it.

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ToucanLoucan[dead post] ◴[20 Feb 25 13:51 UTC] No.43114611[source]▶
[flagged]
breakyerself ◴[20 Feb 25 15:43 UTC] No.43116059[source]▶
There's nothing wrong with being partisan if you're partisan against fascists who want to destroy democracy and the rule of law.
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1. ToucanLoucan ◴[20 Feb 25 16:58 UTC] No.43117136{5}[source]▶
Oh fully agreed. But there's a large contingent of folks that are well represented here who think that it's inherently more intelligent to act like/be a centrist, that "both sides have something to offer," which isn't strictly untrue, but in practice especially with American politics just results in mealy-mouthed acceptance of pretty brutal status quos.

Like even left and right in terms of the mainstream here is nonsense. We don't have a left party at all, we have a conservative party, and we have an authoritarian fascist party. As a lefty none of my values are represented at all, I just get to vote each election for the conservative party that doesn't want my friends dead.