Did you read the remark at the end of my comment? In the practical cases I was exploring, that combinatorial explosion does not happen. It's relaxed in the sense that it is coordination-free.
> A program P is monotonic if for any input sets S,T where S ⊆ T, P(S) ⊆ P(T).
> A program is monotonic if, when you run it on a subset of its inputs, you get a subset of its outputs. As you run it on more data, the set of true things may grow, but it never shrinks.
Yeah, this framework seems powerful.
Something I find interesting is that you can get monotonic (and therefore coordination-free) relaxations of arbitrary problems. In extremis, you can derive a relaxed version P' thus
P'(S) = {<s, P(s)> | s ⊆ S}
and now
P'(S) ⊆ P'(T) if S ⊆ T for _any_ (well defined) P
This seems tautological but in some cases a relaxed version is good enough: it gives you convergence and eventual consistency in a coordination-free setting, at the cost of maybe having to roll back some results. And when it doesn't, it gives you a coherent model of what to make of the situation until coordination yields a definitive answer.
But that was like last week, haven't really put this in practice yet.
In those examples what is being processed are partially-ordered operational logs, but it's essentially the same (just that whenever S ⊆ T there, what you're seeing is an extension of an op log, which is a bit more intuitive).
The case I found more worrisome is you follow someone, they then start using a new domain, and now it seems you're following a different handle (IDK if handles are immutable in Twitter, maybe they are not?).
Maybe BlueSky could offer a registrar that would do steps 1 & 2 for you transparently upon domain purchase.
This sounds a bit like those stories about Kodak having a digital camera before anybody else did, and they just fearfully watched the thing from a distance doing nuthing until someone else brought it to market and ended the party for them.
May be an entirely different thing this time of course. But still...