Almost exactly six months after Twitter got taken over by a petulant edge lord, people seem to be done with grieving the communities this disrupted and connections they lost, and are ready, eager even, to jump head-first into another toxic relationship. This time with BlueSky.
ActivityPub has a over 20k different independent instances, mostly federating with one another. BlueSky has one, and if you try to set up an independent one, it won’t federate.
I mean, I’d laugh, but it’s not even funny.
You are confusing content warnings (not exposing others to potentially triggering content you post) with moderation (making it hard to harass users). These are two very different things.
Yes, and the current owners have no economic incentive to change that. It’s a project backed by financial investors, which means they’ll want to get back as much money as possible as soon as possible.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not some “venture capital bashing”. It’s their full right to earn their money back and do with their companies whatever they want. If I were a financial investor, I did the same (what is ignored in many discussions on this is the fact that the vast majority of VC investments fail due to their high-risk nature, but that’s a different story). I just argue that if you want a distributed and/or decentralised system, you likely need a different kind of funding and a more decentralized form of decision making.
Their initial funding came from twitter, but twitter doesn’t own it. The BlueSky Public Benefit LLC is owned by the founding team, many of whom have been working on decentralized protocols (SecureScuttlebutt, IPFS, Hypercore, XMPP, among others) since before Mastodon was a thing. The entire purpose of their company is to build the protocol, not their instance of it. Running the first instance is just a way to bootstrap the protocol.
After reading atproto.com do you still think accounts that currently exist on bsky.app won’t soon be able to migrate to another (including a self-hosted) PDS?
After reading atproto.com I still think it won’t matter, because secondary centralization will happen in the “reach” layer. That’s where the power in the system will be. As explored pretty in-depth in the blogpost that started this whole thread.
After reading this site (btw, they appear to be using Cloudflare for their decentralized service) it doesn’t change anything. They indeed “may soon be able to migrate”, may “federate soon”, and all that, but it simply isn’t. It is a centralized service, and they promise once again that this time everything will really be better.
I’m guessing you still haven’t read this post I linked to? Here is the first paragraph:
It’s a little surprising that the person you’re linking to managed to install and operate their own Personal Data Server without reading enough of the BlueSky website to see that federation isn’t turned on yet!
Why should they be different? If a user neglects to label their own post, shouldn’t other people be able to label it? (And shouldn’t the reader be able to decide who’s labels to give what importance to?)
I do hope I will eat my words as far as moderation on BlueSky is concerned. I do doubt I will, though.
Until federation is turned on they don’t get to call BlueSky a decentralized/federated social network. And until an actually decentralized DID is used, they don’t get to call it a decentralized protocol. And until they actually implement some features related to moderation and fighting harassment, they don’t get to claim they care about moderation — they cared enough about “free speech” to design a whole protocol around it, so I believe I am quite correct to say that moderation is an afterthought in BlueSky.
All of this is basically “trust us, this time we will not screw people over” coming from a Twitter-funded startup started by Jack Dorsey. I don’t believe they deserve the benefit of the doubt.
It’s not about labeling, it’s about protecting people using a given network from malicious/harassing behaviour. That is always contextual. Putting a label on a post doesn’t mean much, it loses a lot of the context. Saying “you’re not welcome in this community” after reviewing of a broader context (multiple posts etc) is a much more effective way to do this.
You’re also completely missing the point that it’s not just about “whose content I see” but also about “who sees my posts”. As I wrote in the blogpost:
Anyway, we won’t agree. I rarely find common ground with free-speech-maximalists. I see fedi admins and moderators as people helping protect and nurture their communities, you see them as “hostage-holders”. We might as well stop here.