I recently learned that this even has a name - the "glass cliff"

That's an important question. Projects like https://open-assistant.io have been attempting to use crowdsourced volunteer labor for that kind of tuning

when we added "what's hot," there wasn't a lot of people or activity and our chief concern was that the app would feel like a ghost town. we figured, okay easy fix, toss in a temporary algorithm while we wrap the real system. so we threw in this thing which was anything with N likes (we chose 5)

Hello it's me your good friend Amazon S3

The URL always returns my DID, so it shouldn't work for other folks https://s3.amazonaws.com/xrpc/com.atproto.identity.resolveHandle

Annoyingly @bsky.app currently has a bug for me where it always returns an error when I try to add a link preview, so I had to manually attach an image to this post instead of letting the social media card do its thing!

Yes, on Mastodon it is. I run my own server instance. No-one can take that away from me.

I think they need to capture everything pretty precisely - they can explain code written in Python for example, which is very whitespace sensitive

Mainly it's avoiding having a single company that everything depends on. That's what drew me to Mastodon: I wanted a short-form content publishing service that was guaranteed to be immune from being bought and ruined by some billionaire

That was true back during pre-Elon Twitter, but it feels like the goals have somewhat changed now