alt Hacker NewsAnyone following hundreds of thousands of users is obviously a bot account scraping content. I'd ban them and call it a day.
However, I do love reading about the technical challenge. I think Twitter has a special architecture for celebrities with millions of followers. Given Bluesky is a quasi-clone, I wonder why they did not follow in these footsteps.
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> Given Bluesky is a quasi-clone, I wonder why they did not follow in these footsteps.
There are only six users with over a million followers, and none with two million yet.
I'm sure they'll get there.
Maybe not hundreds of thousands but I'd follow anybody that looks remotely interesting and then primarily use customized feeds. E.g. if I wanna hear about union news, my personal irl network, etc I check that feed
if you want to scrape all the content, that's what the firehose is for, and it's allowed.
the only reason to mass-follow is for spam purposes.
BlueSky has starter packs that allow you to mass follow in the click of a button. You join 10 starter packs in one day, you are following over 1000 people. Sometimes following others is the only way to get people to engage with your content.
Or just enforce a maximum number of followed accounts.
You don't need to follow anyone (or even have an account) to scrape content… Someone following a huge amount of accounts usually wants to get a lot of followers quickly this way through follow-backs.