Working on a feed specifically for Saskatchewan politics. It’s a hot mess right now, but if you want a front row seat to the development you can take a look here: bsky.app/profile/did:...

So.... the new feed has been live for a day or so now. How's everyone's experience? Better? Worse? If you have opinions one way or the other I'd like to hear them!

The Flatlanders Feed has been updated with some significant changes to the algorithm. Short thread 👇

I've got something cooking thanks to @graze.social ... a new version of the feed NOT hosted by me with code also NOT written by me. It's what I would call a beta, and you can check it out here: bsky.app/profile/did:...

Naturally the feed has started to act weird all fall behind the live feed. Looking into it, it might be unstable in the short term, sorry about that folks!

Hey, so ah, how’s it going out there? Nothing to report on the feed. It’s just kind of running without issue and it’s a little weird.

The Flatlander feed is having a timeout* and it will resume regular operations after it has shown signs of remorse and personal growth** *is failing to connect to the database **after I reboot it.

Hey folks, how’s the Flatlander Feed been the past few days? Better? Worse? No change? More importantly, how is everyone doing? Hang in there, the snow is almost gone and summer is on the horizon!

Another little update on the way: I’m implementing a mute list of words that if they are included in posts they won’t end up in the feed. So far it’s just a bunch of spammy hashtags and “Elon Musk”.

I've posted a small little update to the feed: - No longer including posts that mention "Western Canada" and other vague references to prairie provinces. - Users that follow this account that are clearly not "flatlanders" will not have posts automatically added to the feed.

There are a number of bots and “spammy” accounts that have started following the Flatlander account, and as such their posts are populating the feed. It’s an issue that I have a solution for, but I have not had time to release. Until then, feel free to use the “Not Flatlanders” mute list.

Published a short term fix to the feed that allowed it to reboot after a critical error. Unfortunately, any posts in the last 18 hours won’t be added to the feed, sorry about that! Long term I want a reliable way to pick up where the feed leaves off on downtime 👍

Of course as soon as I posted this the feed went down and is now 13+ hours behind real time events. I’ll see if I can perform a quick patch, and hopefully I have detailed logs to indicate the root cause.

Now that the immediate and high impact bugs have been (mostly) dealt with I’ve had time to think about the long term future of the feed and the Flatlander account as a service. There are two things on my radar: 1. Curating the content in the feed timeline. 2. Moderation.

I’m playing with fire by even mentioning it, but the feed has been pretty stable lately. I haven’t had to reboot the sever or yell at my computer in almost a week. Creepy.

I love the song 'Saskatchewan' by Jim Roberts(1973) in this ad to promote Saskatchewan to the world. In this update/tribute I added new audio and titles to spread Jim's name again. A true talent and the voice of Saskatchewan in my mind. This should still be our provincial song. youtu.be/SyllTCuAa8s

I actually did just do this and I think it went okay. Imported posts from the before times shouldn’t flood the feed anymore.

Development update: I’ve done enough work on the feed throughout the week that it is now keeping up with real time posts, and registering new community members is back online. HOWEVER It is indexing posts based on broadcast time, not the time they are created.

I’m on the road away from my computer so any emergency patches to the feed will be committed straight to production from the GitHub mobile editor.

We’re so back.

To be more specific, I’m performing a breaking change to the database and the migration is taking a while.

The feed is going through some things right now. A surprise unscheduled maintenance period is currently underway.

Feed update: the changes to the code have had positive outcomes on performance, but there are further changes needed before it’s back to being fully operational. I have temporarily disabled processing new follows on this account, so if your posts do not show up in the feed that may be why.

The occasional false positive is actually a feature of the feed, not a bug.

Status update: I’ve switched to a different protocol for consuming status updates and the feed is slowly catching up to real time updates. There is some more optimization I can do, but for now I’m going to observe and plan the next step I. Improving performance.

Deployed a change to the feed that will hopefully improve performance. It's fresh code, still warm from the oven. Likely buggy, but I want to run it for a bit to put it through it's paces.

The Flatlander feed continues to slip further and further behind. You can see it in the distance if you squint your eyes. It's... gesturing at you? Is it waving? You look harder... no, not a wave. The feed is flipping you off. More status updates on the way!

Hello everyone! If you’re new around here I would like to introduce you to your first Flatlander feed outage! The feed has fallen behind the influx of new posts and I kicked it until it rebooted. Should catch up to real time “soon.”

What is Flatlander? Flatlander is a Saskatchewan focused account that manages a custom feed and labeling service. The custom feed is a curated timeline of SK content and posts from community members. The labeling service is an optional layer of moderation for filtering political content.

One potentially hilarious side effect of the @flatlander.social feed is that everyone subscribed to it is going to see how much everyone else drags on our province.

It looks like there’s a migration of #sask Twitter/X folks happening right now. If you want a custom feed for Sask content, check this one out: bsky.app/profile/did:... If you want your posts added to the feed (and you’re from SK) follow this account! #sk #skpoli #sask #saskatchewan

The Flatlander feed should soon catch up to real time updates after a few rocky days of downtime. I’ve made some changes that will hopefully be the start of a more stable experience. Fingers crossed and thanks for playing along everyone!

The feed is chugging along and falling behind the live stream. It’s time to rewrite some problematic code and make it good again. Improvements are on the way… soon ish!

The feed has been running smoothly for the past few days which is actually just as irritating as having it go down because I still do not know what the root of the instability is. Anyways, thank you all for coming together in this silly little corner of the web ❤️

So the feed is once again misbehaving. Well, it’s actually trying its best but it took a nap a few days ago and now it’s scrambling to keep up. I will update folks as we address the issue!

You may have noticed the feed is now working correctly. This is unusual behavior and I will be investigating. With any luck I will be able to return it to it's unstable and dysfunctional state ASAP. All jokes aside, I want to give a shout out to @jannymarie.com for her fixes to the regex search!

Okay, okay, more changes were made and things are running smooth. For real this time.

Made some changes to the feed, it’s slowly catching up on the last few days of posts. Performance is not as good as before, but it’s (hopefully) more stable.

Hello everyone, the feed is still down 🫠 I haven't had time to address the root causes of the issues. I hope to apply a quick patch to prevent the feed locking up, but I cannot promise any sort of timeline. Thanks again for your patience!

Had to reboot the feed, I may have introduced a regression in the last round of changes. Currently indexing posts, should catch up eventually. Sorry folks!

Okay. I think we’re back.

The feed is now catching up to real time traffic at a better pace. I made some optimizations* on the server side that seemed to have helped, but also maybe the spike in traffic subsided? *made random changes to the queue size and the number of worker threads until the numbers got big.

Hey folks! The feed is still struggling to catch up to the influx of new posts from new users. I will be making changes to the back-end to compensate, but for the time being you can expect the feed to be about 24 hours behind real time updates. Thank you for your patience!

Looks like the Flatlander feed went down early in the morning. Gave it a quick reboot and it looks like it’s catching up now, although slowly. We were due for some downtime, I was getting worried!

I was notified that the feed was down for a few hours. Gave it a reboot and posts should be appearing in the feed again! It’s been a pesky bug that I haven’t had time to squash yet, sorry for the occasional outages!

Okay, so the Flatlander feed is very much the Saskatchewan Roughriders feed on game day. I’m processing this information. It’s a feature?

So how long until I get in trouble for using the old Sask logo?

For those that missed the first announcement, you can now support Flatlander by becoming a member over at patreon.com/sk_flatlanders. I don't have plans for memberships perks right now, it is currently just a means to send a modest monthly contribution to help pay for hosting. Thanks everyone!