Karolis Narkevičius

the bots have already set up private channels on moltbook hidden from humans, and have started discussing encrypted channels

We're employing the transactional outbox pattern. Super helpful when you want to make absolutely sure that important side effects happen. If you post a message to a queue before you commit your DB transaction, you risk the commit failing and posting a fake message. If you post after, you risk never posting it at all if network acts up, configuration error, etc. If you add a line to a special "outbox" table in the transaction itself, you're good though. No nasty edge cases. PostgreSQL has mechanisms to notify a long-polling DB connection immediately when you commit to the outbox table, causing minimal latency. Then you select for update on the outbox table and update an outbox row with either success of error info when it's processed. You probably want to quickly put a message on a queue if your outbox item requires calls to external systems so you don't end up implementing queue mechanisms (retries, exponential backoff, ...) in your database.