When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

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.

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.

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.

There's nothing wrong with being partisan if you're partisan against fascists who want to destroy democracy and the rule of law.

I understand why some people vote for some parties and why they’re “voting on inflation” or “right to abortion” but I guess, for me, keeping checks and balances and democracy is the one value above ALL for me.

In the span of human history, not a lot of countries and civilizations have lasted long, marked by constant instability and uncertainty for the future. We have a boring and imperfect political system created by our founding fathers but at least it’s been stable for nearly 250 years. A lot of people have tried standing up their own political system… most fail and everyone suffers. Even the founding fathers completely failed once first.

I know times are tough now but, in the context of history, they can be much worse and I rather not lose what good we currently do have.

Trump refusing to accept the 2020 election results should've been the line for many voters, but sadly it wasn't. And the potential crimes he and some of his allies may have committed while trying to overturn it will now never be prosecuted.

2024: > More than 155 million people cast ballots in the 2024 presidential election. It's second only in U.S. history to the 2020 election. Turnout in 2024 represented 63.9% of eligible voters, the second-highest percentage in the last 100 years, according to the University of Florida Election Lab. The only year that beat it – again – was 2020 when universal mail-in voting was more widely available.

2020: > More than 158 million votes were cast in the election

So 3 millions of Democrats suddenly decided to not go out to vote "to save democracy" against "fascism"?

The simpler and much more likely answer, my friend, is that people didn’t vote from a combination of disillusionment, assuming Kamala would win, and likewise factors.

I saw many people close to me not bother voting because they didn’t enjoy Biden’s presidency, despite voting for him in 2020.

So, I find that FAR more likely as a reason than supposed election fraud.