Last week I ran an A/B test in For You where the treatment arm had a higher penalty for popular items and items with more paths leading to them were boosted more. Statistically significant results: 0.6% more users liked at least something on a given day 4.7% more likes per user

I'm not nitpicking on @gruber.foo but clearly atproto needs more evangelizing, education, marketing if tech people like Gruber don't get things like this right: - uses "username@bsky.app" instead of "username.bsky.social" - refers to the domain name as the identity instead of just being a handle...

AT Protocol Developers@atproto.com · 2w ago

How is the emerging post-platforms internet like the early days of blogging? @gruber.foo sat down with @jimray.bsky.team to go long on this question, with a few other digressions along the way. atproto.com/off-protocol...

PSA: you can find out which of your likes caused For You to show any given post at foryou.club/explain Just enter the post URL and hit "Explain":

For the last 6 months this drive was used exclusively for serving the For You feed Some stats: - 28% of wear - good thing I've set up daily backup to hdd - ~600TB written - 472TB read - weird that it is less than writes

spacecowboy@spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 7mo ago

For You will be down for ~1-2 hours as I replace the system drive. The Kingston NV2 drive has been freezing up the computer - often for a minute at a time and sometimes indefinitely until a manual restart. I'm replacing it with a Samsung 990 Pro, which should be more stable.

Random fact: the number of people who enabled hideFromAlgorithmicRecommendations is 7967

Hmm, spelling it out actually makes it easy to test out the opposite - what if Bluesky was 2x smaller, how much worse would For You become? To do that I just need to make For You only pay attention to the posts authored by users and liked by users with even hash values of the DID. Thanos style.

I'm setting up backup for the For You database and I'm trying to do a restore from the backup on the hard-drive to the nvme. This eats up all disk IO and makes the feed super slow. I should get it back up in 20 minutes.

Sarama Burwani @ 7.56@saramaburwani.bsky.social · 4w ago

@spacecowboy17.bsky.social you've probably heard this already from a bunch of others, but For You is frozen up, is everything OK?

For You users are liking 1 million posts a day - crazy! There are ~20M likes per day, which makes For You account for 5% of it.

A common misconception about Bluesky is that it "has no algorithm". In fact it has many algorithms - custom feeds. You can choose which one to use. What does it look like? You can replace the built-in fyp called Discover with a custom For You that runs on my gaming pc in 23 seconds:

What do custom feeds like For You look like for permissioned spaces?

I finally looked into why the For You sqlite db file has been growing to be quite large - 589GB. To prevent the unlimited growth I regularly delete likes older than 90 days. The size of the "ratings" table should be stable (there are ~20M likeds per day). Turns out another source of growth is...

When you complain about discourse you are participating in it. Wait...

Ahh, For You is returning errors because Bluesky added another ip address from which to make requests (38.142.8.130) and I need to give it a higher QPS limit in nginx. I wonder why nobody mentioned this yet...

I showed this survey post to For You users over the last 9 days. 1099 people submitted their response. Thanks everyone who participated and replied to the post with more details! I will spend some time analyzing the numbers and will publish the results on blog.foryou.club

For You Feed@foryou.club · 2mo ago

Hi For You users! Please help me figure out what a 🔋Turbo version of For You would be worth to you. It works twice as hard to find the best posts. Answer one question in cups of coffee. Zero cups is a real answer. You get a month of 🔋Turbo either way: foryou.club/turbo

It looks like we are back for real this time. Curious to read the postmortem. Here is the shape of the outage from the perspective of the For You feed. There were a couple of recovery spikes. Jetstream was also down and recovered a bit after the app started working again.

It looks like the outage is slowly recovering?

I'm thinking of how For You could help the cold-start problem for new posters here. If nobody has liked your posts yet then you would not show up on For You. I think there could be a mechanism that helps people get discovered by the right audience and that is resilient to gaming/abuse. Ideas?

Trying out another idea to make For You more balanced with respect to your past likes.

Re-balancing For You

blog.foryou.club

For You but cross-lexicon: find people who liked the same Bluesky posts as you and show you what they: - liked on standard.site - starred on tangled - rsvp'ed on atmo.rsvp - saved on semble.so - listened to on teal.fm - etc

anna 🍉☀️⛵@anna.germnetwork.com · last mo.

just for fun can we all brainstorm moonshot ways to get people onto the atmosphere

Thanks everyone for the ideas! I'll go with "🔋Turbo" This mode will be part of user research - I will run a survey among For You users on how much they would value a For You feed that works extra hard. Please help me beta-test the survey: foryou.club/turbo

Suppose there is a version or a mode of For You that works twice as hard to find good posts. 1. What would you name it? 2. What emoji would go well with it?

I want to do some user research. Is a "cup of coffee" the most universal measure of value? Or is there anything better?

This is why we have "For You Rewind": bsky.app/profile/spac...

Sim Sim SalaBOOM!!@simsimsalab00m.bsky.social · 2mo ago

sees awesome art in my for you feed accidentally hits refresh

If you in the same boat as @scoiattolo.mountainherder.xyz and wish you could stop seeing someone's posts in For You then now you can! Got to foryou.club/profile/mutes and add accounts that you don't want to see specifically in For You.

Scoiattolo@scarnecchia.net · 3mo ago

I wish "For you" had a slightly stronger variant of "show less like this" which is "don't show me this user in this feed". Like there are a few people I don't want to block, but I just don't want time in my daily driver feed.

Friends don't let friends use the Discover feed.

For You is down because the hosting provider (OVH) seems to have issues.

For You now onboards new users with a curated list of interest posts to like. It's an upgrade over: "go like some posts elsewhere and come back".

The change is live! Thanks @samuel.fm for getting it in and fixing the unit test! @devingaffney.com @aendra.com

spacecowboy@spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Custom feeds can mark some posts as pinned. For You uses it for system messages like "Welcome to the feed" and such. But AppView ignores that flag when it hydrates the feed and the client app does not know which posts should be displayed as pinned. This should fix it: github.com/bluesky-soci...

Created an account that lists each interest as a separate post: @picker.foryou.club Help seed it by liking the interest posts that match what you use Bluesky for. When new users join and like one of those interests you will become one of the curators of their For You feed.

Custom feeds can mark some posts as pinned. For You uses it for system messages like "Welcome to the feed" and such. But AppView ignores that flag when it hydrates the feed and the client app does not know which posts should be displayed as pinned. This should fix it: github.com/bluesky-soci...