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I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky

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141–150 of 294 posts

Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky

#141
post #66
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also trying to stay positive. In that spirit, I really enjoy: 1. The very good documentation this early in the project! This is not common. 2. The very rapid response developer team that does it live! Once the combination of surprisingly rapid membership growth + no blocks blew up and it became an urgent moderation feature, they had blocks within weeks despite the technically challenging task due to the kind of f…

I don't want to sound cynical but all the things you describe are mostly early stage nimble startups with goos teams. As they grow quality erodes.

Email still works, spam and all.

Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky

#142
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it'd be better to just not have any blocking/muting built into such a system at all. If User A doesn't want to see posts from User B, that's fine. User A can have his client filter them out locally, prior to when they'd otherwise be displayed. Nobody else has to know this is happening. I don't think that User A should be permitted to prevent User B from replying to User A's posts, which in turn prevents User C…

The problem is when B comes across a A post and reposts it to B’s followers with a call to action to harass A. If you don’t give A the ability to avoid this by influencing A’s presence on B’s feed, A will quit the platform entirely, and B will have been rewarded (with engagement) and incentivized to stir up mobs in the future. It creates a toxic environment. Blocking is an effective speed bump to this happening!

The solution is unique and quite simple: require A to explicitly list the people they want to share with. It is the public broadcasting which is the root cause of this problem.

Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky

#143
post #139
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong user safety features are at odds with a federated protocol. IMHO federation is a mistake.

Federation is great when properly applied. Email is an example of federation done right. But federated social media is a mistake. Not because it is federated, but because all social media is a mistake.

> Email is an example of federation done right.

That's where you lost me.

Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky

#144
post #130
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is when B comes across a A post and reposts it to B’s followers with a call to action to harass A. If you don’t give A the ability to avoid this by influencing A’s presence on B’s feed, A will quit the platform entirely, and B will have been rewarded (with engagement) and incentivized to stir up mobs in the future. It creates a toxic environment. Blocking is an effective speed bump to this happening!

Strong user safety features are at odds with a federated protocol. IMHO federation is a mistake.

Federation is the only viable choice unless you want to submit to a central power. If you want strong safety, you shouldn't be broadcasting publicly into the aether.

Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky

#146
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm writing a fairly basic social media app, right now. The target demographic is very security/privacy-sensitive, so we have discussions about stuff like this, all the time. If you block someone, they have no idea, except that you disappear from their radar. Even that, only came about, after a long discussion. Before, blocking someone simply meant that we could not see them, but they could see us. My location is som…

> Even when it is visible, it is "fuzzed," so that the location anyone (other than you) can see, is a random one, within a 10Km square. I hope the implementation of this isn't that I can start sampling your location repeatedly and average them out to find out where you live?

Oh, sure, but it would take a while. The system is not Fort Knox. If someone wants to find one of the members that badly, then there are actually easier ways, outside of the system.

If we decide that it is a concern, I already know how I'd deal with it. I would add a "governor," to slow the process down. Depending on how the location is updated, that could be enough to render it worthless. People can't even see the "fuzzed" locations, unless they are registered members of the community. The locator would have to go through a registered account, and those don't come too easily.

However, if someone is that concerned, they would either hide their location entirely, or not join the community. The app is all about people finding each other.

Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky

#147
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is when B comes across a A post and reposts it to B’s followers with a call to action to harass A. If you don’t give A the ability to avoid this by influencing A’s presence on B’s feed, A will quit the platform entirely, and B will have been rewarded (with engagement) and incentivized to stir up mobs in the future. It creates a toxic environment. Blocking is an effective speed bump to this happening!

The solution is unique and quite simple: require A to explicitly list the people they want to share with. It is the public broadcasting which is the root cause of this problem.

Accounts with big following would not want to do this as they want max reach. In twitter, you block and in blue sky you block, the blocked user knows right away in both cases. No need for a solution

Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky

#148
post #46

Given that Bluesky makes it this easy to download data, it's quite alarming that the graph of who blocks & mutes who is fully public and easy to extract into a database: https://atproto.com/lexicons/app-bsky-graph#appbskygraphgetb... On Twitter, blocking a toxic user does not notify them - while they can query the block status of one profile at a time, they can never get a full list of people who block them. But it w…

The blocked user would know most of the time if they were active in viewing the account that blocked. It’s not a problem, or that they’d eventually know.

Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky

#149
post #46

Given that Bluesky makes it this easy to download data, it's quite alarming that the graph of who blocks & mutes who is fully public and easy to extract into a database: https://atproto.com/lexicons/app-bsky-graph#appbskygraphgetb... On Twitter, blocking a toxic user does not notify them - while they can query the block status of one profile at a time, they can never get a full list of people who block them. But it w…

I'm writing a fairly basic social media app, right now. The target demographic is very security/privacy-sensitive, so we have discussions about stuff like this, all the time. If you block someone, they have no idea, except that you disappear from their radar. Even that, only came about, after a long discussion. Before, blocking someone simply meant that we could not see them, but they could see us. My location is som…

Of course you have an idea who blocked, in twitter if you block someone they can’t see your content when you visit their profile. The mute on the other hand just filters from timeline

Re: I downloaded all 1.6M posts on Bluesky

#150
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH I haven't paid much attention to it, but as somebody who was already using Mastodon as their primary social network for years before Musk took over, I'm not sure I understand what niche BlueSky is even supposed to fill that ActivityPub/Fediverse doesn't already fill. It just seems like a bunch of guys who got ousted from their jobs trying to invent a new commercial social network. And one of the things that needs…

I'm especially interested in what their new protocol offers that ActivityPub doesn't. There are more protocols than just ActivityPub, like Zot6 which focuses a lot more on nomadic identity than ActivityPub does. I'd love to know what it is that makes BlueSky's protocol better and therefore worth adding. Because if it doesn't do anything that other protocols already do, then what's the point?

Well, if it offers anything like increased speed and more useable searching thst’s good enough for me.
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