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spacecowboy

@spacecowboy17.bsky.social
5.5K followers 62 following 5.2K posts

Interests in ML and social aspects of tech. Building For You feed: foryou.club bsky.app/profile/spacecowboy17.bsky… Hobby project: linklonk.com

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Reposted by spacecowboy
spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
4. Posting/reposting/liking into user defined collections Like a Pinterest board - where you organize your own stuff. People can subscribe to other people's collections. Or follow the person but exclude/mute their specific collections.
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
If you want to get foryou.club/stats programmatically and show it to users of you app then you can use this endpoint: foryou.club/xrpc/club.fo...
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
The meme from Arrested Development: "No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but... but it might work for us"
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
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
A table of experiment results:
Metric	Control	Treatment	Difference	% Change
Users	58,367	57,747	-620	-1.1%
Requests	5,596,792	5,657,823	+61,031	+1.1%
Requests per user	95.89	97.98	+2.09	+2.2%
Total likes	3,304,534	3,427,841	+123,307	+3.7%
Liked % (per request)	21.54%	21.65%	+0.11%	+0.5%
Likes per request	0.5904	0.6059	+0.0155	+2.6%
Total show more	13,386	12,199	-1,187	-8.9%
Total show less	37,337	36,700	-637	-1.7%
User-days	272,775	270,174	-2,601	-1.0%
User-day liked %	66.45%
[65.80%, 66.54%]	66.86%
[66.34%, 66.94%]	+0.41%	+0.6%
[+0.0%, +1.4%]
User-day show more %	0.75%
[0.68%, 0.79%]	0.80%
[0.72%, 0.85%]	+0.05%	+6.7%
[-2.8%, +17.4%]
User-day show less %	2.85%
[2.68%, 2.91%]	2.87%
[2.71%, 2.91%]	+0.02%	+0.7%
[-5.1%, +6.0%]
Requests per user-day	20.52
[19.7436, 20.4654]	20.94
[20.1519, 20.8653]	+0.42	+2.1%
[-0.6%, +4.7%]
Likes per user-day	12.11
[11.5858, 12.1550]	12.69
[12.1086, 12.7420]	+0.57	+4.7%
[+1.0%, +8.3%]
Show more per user-day	0.0491
[0.0336, 0.0625]	0.0452
[0.0357, 0.0527]	-0.0039	-8.0%
[-39.6%, +23.5%]
Show less per user-day	0.1369
[0.1166, 0.1516]	0.1358
[0.1174, 0.1487]	-0.0010	-0.8%
[-19.2%, +17.6%]
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
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...
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
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":
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
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
Output of sudo smartctl -a /dev/nvme0:

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning:                   0x00
Temperature:                        46 Celsius
Available Spare:                    100%
Available Spare Threshold:          10%
Percentage Used:                    28%
Data Units Read:                    922,335,197 [472 TB]
Data Units Written:                 1,159,271,380 [593 TB]
Host Read Commands:                 104,318,282,254
Host Write Commands:                72,627,635,563
Controller Busy Time:               111,581
Power Cycles:                       18
Power On Hours:                     9,033
Unsafe Shutdowns:                   5
Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
Error Information Log Entries:      0
Warning  Comp. Temperature Time:    0
Critical Comp. Temperature Time:    0
Temperature Sensor 1:               68 Celsius
Temperature Sensor 2:               48 Celsius
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Random fact: the number of people who enabled hideFromAlgorithmicRecommendations is 7967
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
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.
Reddit thread:
PosterA: I am more interested in an app that shows posts matching my interests, similar to the Twitter algorithm. Like Bluesky’s Discover or For You, but significantly better.
PosterB: What issues do you have with For You. I understand the Discover feed's issues but spacecowboy's For You feed seems to be pretty good at showing me my interests.
Me: 
I'm curious as well! One thing that is hard to judge is how much better For You would be simply if there was 10x more users on Bluesky - 10x more content that matches your interests and 10x more people who share your interests. That is - is it the algorithm issue or amount of content issue?
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
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.
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
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 graph of daily likes reaching 1 million two days ago
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
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:
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
What do custom feeds like For You look like for permissioned spaces?
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
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...
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
When you complain about discourse you are participating in it. Wait...
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
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...
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
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
Graph of responses per day starting from 350 down to 50. Total 1099 responses.

The power law shape of the graph is very cool to see even for such small numbers.
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
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.
For You users / minute graph with the values dropping from 700 to 400 during the outage.
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
It looks like the outage is slowly recovering?
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Reposted by spacecowboy
spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
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?
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Trying out another idea to make For You more balanced with respect to your past likes.
blog.foryou.club
Re-balancing For You
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
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
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Reposted by spacecowboy
spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
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
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 09/08/2026
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?
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
I want to do some user research. Is a "cup of coffee" the most universal measure of value? Or is there anything better?
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
This is why we have "For You Rewind": bsky.app/profile/spac...
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
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.
foryou.club
Sign in - For You Stats
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Reposted by spacecowboy
Orchid Hollowheart ⏳🐉 @hollowheart.memoria.moe · 10/07/2026
Friends don't let friends use the Discover feed.
Do you see THIS SHIT?! *picture of the discover feed* Throw it in the *unpin feed* and replace it with THE ONE TRUE SHORT KING *picture of For You with a crown drawn on it*
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
For You is down because the hosting provider (OVH) seems to have issues.
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
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 "cold-start" screenshot of For You: a list of interest-posts that new users are encouraged to like to get started.
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
The change is live! Thanks @samuel.fm for getting it in and fixing the unit test! @devingaffney.com @aendra.com
For You with the pinned welcome post marked as pinned.
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Reposted by spacecowboy
spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
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.
bsky.app
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
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...
github.com
Propagate skeletonReasonPin from custom feed generators by spacecowboy37 · Pull Request #5163 · bluesky-social/atproto
When a feed generator returns app.bsky.feed.defs#skeletonReasonPin as the reason for a skeleton item, the AppView silently drops it. The skeletonFromFeedGen function in getFeed.ts only maps skeleto...
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Ok, Bluesky does not pass the user's selected interests to custom feeds like For You. But what if For You has it's own interest picker - show a list of canned posts that name an interest: - art - gaming - tech - atproto ...
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
For You will be down for ~20-60 minutes - I will be upgrading my computer's ram from 96GB to 192GB. I've been hitting uncomfortably high memory usage levels (90%+) and it is time to bite the bullet. I bought an identical kit a year ago and the new kit is exactly 7x more expensive.
A new 96GB DDR5 RAM kit"glances" output with 96GB of RAM being 91% used
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
It is easy to assume that everyone who follows you has already heard about For You. I wrote a tool to get the % of your followers who have opened For You at least once. For me it is 85% - and all I talk about is For You 🤔 Reply if you want to see your result.
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Reposted by spacecowboy
spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 16/06/2026
It is a well known fact that most hard-core blueskyers use the For You feed: bsky.app/profile/spac...
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
Have you accidentally pressed "show less like this" when you meant "more like this"? Or liked a post that you feel ruined your For You? You can now correct that in foryou.club/profile You can delete your "show more/less" and likes there.
A screenshot showing the list of likes on foryou.club/profile/likesA screenshot of the profile page with links to see your past interactions
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
For You seems stuck. Looking what's wrong...
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
You can let others view your For You feed: 1. Open foryou.club/profile 2. Press "create peek link" 3. Copy the link and share it with others They would: 1. Open the link and confirm that they want to turn their For You feed into yours 2. Open For You and see what you see until they decide to stop
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
Launched an improvement to how "show less like this" works in For You. Results from the A/B test: - 7.3% fewer people press "show less" on a given day - 15.5% fewer "show less" interactions Details below 🧵
A screenshot with A/B test metrics
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
So close
For You feed with 49999 likes
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
How about this - you create a For You "peek" link which other people can use to temporarily turn their For You into your For You. They get to see how you curated your feed.
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 06/06/2026
A business model idea for Bluesky: charge people money for a non-lossy Following feed.
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 01/06/2026
Some more data from the For You perspective. This graph uses the date of the first and the last visit of the For You feed users. This is a bit different from Patrick's analysis.
A graph of per-quarter user numbers of For You.
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
If you use a self-hosted PDS then the For You feed was not working very well for you most (or some?) of the time. The issue had to do with the authorization token that For You gets from the Bluesky's AppView. For self-hosted PDS users the token has the "aud" value set to "did:web:api.bsky.app" ...
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 31/05/2026
If your non-Following feeds (For You, Discover) are stuck showing you content in one language then check whether you have Content Languages setting set to that language. To fix it and see content without the language filtering: 1. Go to Settings > Languages 2. Uncheck all "Content Languages"
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
The For You feed crashed because my system ran out of 96GB of RAM. I have been running it at close to full capacity.
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
A high signal-to-noise interview. Some behind the scenes on FAIR at Meta youtu.be/ngBraLDqzdI
youtu.be
Yann LeCun on What Comes After LLMs
YouTube video by Unsupervised Learning: With Jacob Effron
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spacecowboy @spacecowboy17.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
@danabra.mov this is related to your curation vs ranking idea
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