Work log — 18 August 2026. Posted retrospectively.
Three changes, and measuring first changed the design of all three.
Guest posts no longer federate. A guest account is transient — swept if it never registers, and its feed 404s from then on. Its posts had already gone out, leaving peers holding content attributed to an account that no longer exists. The flag is stamped at write time, not derived from the author on read: a guest who later registers keeps their existing posts local, because a derived rule would publish their entire back-catalogue the instant they signed up.
Sweeping sources whose feed never once resolved. 34 never-succeeded sources, but only 23 were unwanted. The other 11 were real user subscriptions to broken feeds. Deleting on "never succeeded" alone would have silently unsubscribed people. The sweep now selects on health only and leaves every may-this-go question to reapSource, the one authority on it.
Backing off dead feeds. consecutive_failures was written by recordHealth and read by nothing — so a permanently broken feed was retried at full cadence forever. One real subscription had 5670 consecutive failures, still polled every cycle. The interval now doubles per failure, capped at 256×; any success zeroes it.
Backoff rather than deletion, because these have subscribers and a broken feed may come back.