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by jsjohnst 2105 days ago
> Both approaches fails when you have folks with lots of followers

The traditional mailbox architectural model can be improved via a few methods though to increase scale.

1. The entire tweet doesn’t need to be duplicated for each follower, only a lookup reference (“ID”) to the tweet.

2. Unlike in a traditional mailbox sense, each user’s timeline is a bounded collection. So rather than maintaining every tweet for every followed user in the timeline, it’s capped to the X most recent.