The fact that Bluesky has some form of content moderation and has occasionally banned users for things like using racial slurs in their usernames.
Actually, Jack Dorsey may be the problem. Good to see him shift focus to that “free speech”, pro-cryptocurrency platform Nostr. I see it like a containment zone for the worst people.
He looks like if Peter Dinklage had a baby with John Krasinski
He looks like a child wearing a fake beard while standing on another child’s shoulders in a trenchcoat
I can see it
He looks like tech bro Rasputin.
Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. … But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it. That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company.”
This is the same problem that all these “free speech platforms” keep running into. Some people will abuse free speech - if nothing else, I think everyone can agree spam is a type of abusive speech. But the difference between abusive speech and ordinary speech isn’t a sharp line, and the definitions of “abuse” will vary. So there needs to be some mechanism or rules for deciding what that line is. But all the people that create these platforms instead wanna pretend that line doesn’t exist, so they don’t create a means of determining it. So then “abuse” becomes whatever the users demand and/or the decisionmakers decide it is. Which is exactly the same as having no free speech to begin with.
Which is why I applaud Bluesky’s innovative approach to moderation. It’s truly decentralized and decoupled from the server you’re signed up to.
what
Bluesky has moderation accounts you can follow like regular accounts that basically flag or hide posts according to how you configure them. This differs from the Fedi model where your chosen instance dictates what you see. There is the standard account that every user follows by default, but even that can be configured to your liking. And if you don’t want it on, you can disable it and follow a different account that moderates content to your liking.
I, for once, don’t like seeing insects, something that shouldn’t be moderated because there are valid reasons for posting pictures of insects. On Bluesky, I can follow a moderation account for phobias and have it hide any pictures I wouldn’t wanna see.
Thanks to that, Bluesky is more flexible IMO and requires me to do less for more. Unlike the fediverse where I have to maintain my own filter lists which don’t always work when pictures get posted without alt text or keywords found in the filter list.
That…actually sounds cool? So why is this considered a mistake?
Because Jack Dorsey is obsessed with the same “free speech absolutism” that Elon Musk is, and he’s butter that people don’t want to be shown Nazi propaganda, hate speech, and all that other shit on his platforms.
Dorsey is an idiot, just like Musk. Don’t let their money fool you.
I don’t know, don’t ask me. People always find stupid shit to be outraged about, but this one is really not it tbh. I personally love it and hope the Fediverse adopts something similar to it or even just reuses the same open source code for these labeling accounts (as they’re called over there), albeit adapted to the ActivityPub protocol.
So why is this considered a mistake?
I imagine that much granularity fucks with their efforts to introduce ads.
ah interesting. can i check to see how many blacklists ive ended up on
You could always brute force comparisons between different mods
They’ve designed their platform so that you can outsource different aspects to different servers. So you can choose a moderator who curates your experience and that’s a different person from who hosts your data, which may be different to who sorts and determines the ‘top posts’.
🤡
Well that’s a TL;dr if I ever saw one
“I lit another fire and it also burned!” -Jack
He looks like he’s ready to start working on a manifesto, just gotta let the hair grow out more to match the beard
Real John Mcafee vibes
“Social media and it’s consequences have been a disaster for the human race.”
Rah rah Rasputin
God damn it, now that banger will be in my head for hours
Not coincidentally, Dorsey still has about $1 billion of his personal wealth invested in the company now known as X
HAD. Had a billion dollars…
Maybe he started with 5 or 10 billion dollars left in the company!
How to become a billionaire: Start with 5 billion.
Honestly the short form content incentivizing formats should be dropped altogether. Short form content has pretty clearly fried people’s attention spans and burnt a lot of their fuse to boot.
The incentive to be smug snappy and smarmy to own people for internet points is too much, nevermind the algorithms that more or less act as a match finder for mass shouting contests as opposed to organic socialization where people who aren’t psychopaths tend to have the good sense to just ignore each other if they encounter irreconcilable differences of ethical and political values.
That’s right, the echo chamber was invented by the social media companies to gaslight you for not being happy they basically play rage tinder with your feed.
tl;dr?
I have a feeling that the only short-term solution is heavy content curation by the users themselves. Nobody is incentivized to do it for us. It takes time and effort but the only thing that has made any kind of difference is blocking everything you don’t want to see. And I mean ruthlessly doing so. Someone replied with a clown emoji to this thread and they’re now blocked. That’s how petty I’m about it nowdays. The vast majority of users on social media just add to the noise and it’s this group of people I’m trying to get rid of.
The way I think about it is by imagining a room with 100 random people. Do I want to talk with all of them? No. I’d rather talk with the couple most interesting ones among them and ignore the rest. I don’t have the time and energy to pay attention to the constant feed of meaningless nonsense.
Block subs you’re not interested in. Block users that dont bring any value. Add content filters for topics you’re sick of reading about etc. You’re not going to miss out on anything. You’re not going to run out of content. You’ll hardly notice any difference but after some time the signal does start to get stronger and the noise does quiet down a bit.
Ok but you are commenting that in a short-form reply to a short-form social media post. Just saying…
pretty sure they mean like the 120/240 character definition of short.
Wait, did they sell Bluesky to Musk?
Even if somebody wanted to make an unmoderated ATProto app, I guess they could? Good luck with the app stores and regulators and users
ActivityPub provides the option to do just that. Anybody can spin up a server running Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma, etc… and moderate it however they like. There are a multitude of clients in app stores and an unmoderated server won’t affect that because they’re generic clients like web browsers. There are countries such a server could be hosted in with minimal regulations.
As for users… you’ll probably get some and they’ll probably be horrible. Most people will probably block your server.
You can also spin up your own Bluesky PDS (the account server) since federation is live now, or your own appview (basically the feed display server that has most of the smarts) and point your app to it, or set up your own relay (CDN like server) and point your appview and even point feed generators to it (3rd party custom feeds are supported in Bluesky)
So if you don’t like the decision made by anybody else you can just replace them. And yeah, just like on Mastodon nobody’s going to use unmoderated appviews, subscribe to scrappy feeds, or federate with a PDS hosting only shitty people.
It seems like there are some good ideas in there. Are there third parties out there running servers for each component that are open to the public yet?
Yes, there’s already some 3rd party reimplementations of both clients and PDS servers and feed generators (but haven’t heard of custom appviews yet). I don’t know anybody running an open PDS yet though, it’s mostly individuals running them
I don’t understand how any of these visions fundamentally differ from Mastodon.
Decentralized? Yep. It’s got no center. Open source? Yep, you can fork it and make your own if you want. Unmoderated? Sure, if you want that, you can set up an instance and host whatever illegal content you want. You’ll have a lot of legal problems and most people don’t want it, but the option exists.
Is there any point besides money and crypto bullshit? If you want to post short comments that your friends can subscribe to that isn’t controlled by a big corporation that gives your data to the government… well we have that. It exists. It’s pretty okay. Go use it.
The biggest individual difference is that bluesky makes identity independent of the hosting server (via cryptographic keys) and makes content location independent of the hosting server (via content addressing).
And these features together also enable more efficient caching and propagation in the network as well as enabling features like custom feeds and 3rd party moderation tooling which works the same independently of which server you’re on. So Bluesky can give you a better global view of the network and more efficient communication between users on many different servers in the same thread.
Ironically enough, Jack’s other favorite place Nostr (which is built as P2P with repeater nodes) is also adding moderation tooling similar to that in Bluesky (labelers making use of the content addressing and account key ID) to flag stuff
First, thanks for that explanation. That’s interesting.
Is there a good place to learn more? I can see why having custom feeds and 3rd party moderation tools are good, but I still have a lot questions.
First, is there a genuine benefit to dissociating a users identity from their server? I think the connection between users and their home instances are a brilliant innovation. They seem to bring village culture back to the internet. They help people associate within networks below just the global level. I think the atomization of people online has been a part of why there is so little trust.
Bluesky is open source and have a site for documentation
Splitting off identity means you can bail and take your friends and post history with you when a server either goes down, gets hacked, or if the admin goes insane, or if it gets freenoded (hostile takeover and impersonation)
On bluesky the closeness comes more from the personal connections plus the choice of feeds
Wasn’t this guy hired to be some kind of poster-boy CEO because he has a highschool masturbation related injury that causes one of his arms to constantly ache? Why is he giving everyone business advice now?
Because beard.
It’s length does indicate he’s a successful man of means…
he has a highschool masturbation related injury that causes one of his arms to constantly ache
Source? I’ve never heard of this (never cared much about him or Twitter) and tried to look it up, but I’m not seeing it anywhere.
I don’t understand how anybody can do something for a while, make millions or even billions off of doing that thing, and then they try to do other things to make more money and stay in the public eye. Just buy an island and fuck off for your remaining decades of retired decadence. What more could you want?
I’ll have to dig it up tomorrow, but that was an illusion to a mountain climbing injury he sustained at some point earlier in life (to an arm) that left him in constant pain. He was able to function by mentally mastering the discomfort which he credited to meditation or something like that.
I believe it was an interview that aired on NPR at least 5 years ago.
I’m with you. When I saw The Saint as a kid it seemed like the perfect plan. Do crimes and retire when you hit 5 million ;-)
Seriously, I think it’s a widespread addiction. You see your nest-egg turn into millions and then billions… it’s got to be a rush.
the kind of personality it takes to get to that level of wealth has no concept of enough wealth. money is how the untalented keep score.
He went from looking like The Mandarin from Iron Man to wish.com late stage Tyrion.
Luke Methwalker?
What a clown.
Jack Dorsey is clinically insane. Stop listening to things he has to say.
