Raft Consensus with a Minority of Nodes
The article discusses a modification to the Raft consensus protocol that allows progress with fewer than a majority of nodes. This adjustment is based on mathematical principles similar to those found in the card game Spot It! The author explains the importance of overlapping nodes in maintaining consistency and fault tolerance within the Raft framework.
- ▪Raft is a consensus protocol designed to manage a replicated log across a cluster of nodes.
- ▪The protocol requires a majority of nodes to commit changes, ensuring fault tolerance and consistency.
- ▪The modification allows for progress even with a minority of nodes, provided certain constraints are met.
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Record
| Original publisher | Padhye |
| Canonical URL | https://padhye.org/raft-minority/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 08:31:50 -0500 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T13:38:00.837Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-27T13:38:00.837Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Ubbi1PsH6Hqq |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Raft Consensus with a Minority of Nodes By Rohan Padhye (@moarbugs on X) tl;dr — This post describes a (wacky) modification to the Raft consensus protocol such that progress can be made even if fewer than a majority of nodes are actively participating, given some constraints on exactly which minority of nodes are active. The math behind this comes from the same place as the card game Spot It! (Dobble). Raft Consensus Basics Raft is a consensus protocol for managing a replicated log across a cluster of nodes. Its key goals are: (1) maintain a consistent replicated log of state transitions, (2) tolerate node failures, and (3) ensure a single leader coordinates all changes while multiple followers replicate.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Padhye.
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