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User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

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Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#31
> But not everyone is looking forward to the idea: “I’d go back to Usenet before I went back to Mastodon,” wrote Bluesky user Count Von Horse Knuckler. “I do not need people yelling at me for not putting cat pictures behind trigger warnings or unwanted Linux advice.”

Cat pictures need a trigger warning? Wonder what the triggering effect is there?

I can see Linux advice though: kill, mount, etc.

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#32

All roads lead back to centralization lol.

You can't have decentralized but connected and system level moderation at the same time.

It's either centralized and moderated system wide or decentralized and moderated locally.

The problem with being connected and moderated locally is your creating global moderation problems for a local system, typically that means massive amounts of work for said moderators.

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean "misandry?"

> Do you mean "misandry?" No, OP is being transphobic and referring to trans women as men: > Note that the "banning controversy" is that they're not banning enough people for having entirely mainstream political opinions, and mostly targets journalists. Or let's be more specific: mostly targets people who don't think that men can identify into being victims of misogyny.

While I can't read OP's mind, there is a problem with bad actors abusing pro-trans policies to benefit themselves. One of the most outrageous examples is the literal Nazi[1] who started identifying as female after being sentenced. Some gatekeeping is required here.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3r4zrg35vlo

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#34
post #6

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You can't be serious. I don't use neither X nor bluesky, but I did get an X account for a while so I could check the links in random news or conversations, and half the posts had unrelated Nazi messages just below. Not 'oh that's right wing so he's a Nazi' comments, I mean literal swastikas and kkk uniforms.

That's been my experience, too. I signed up with an account so I could follow some people, and my default timeline has been full of some pretty extreme stuff.

For example, there were a shocking number of posts against the proposed digital ID system because it's being advocated for by "Larry Ellison, a Jew". That's a verbatim quote, BTW. Uh, excuse me? There are plenty of valid reasons to dislike Larry Ellison, but his supposedly being Jewish is 100% not one of them. But there it was, up front and proud: oppose this thing because Jews are pushing for it!

That was one example of a great many loathsome things I saw there, and before anyone asks, no, I didn't see any leftwing equivalent content. Not saying it's not on there, just that it was not on my default timeline.

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#35

> However, as time has gone by, Bluesky’s traffic has declined (X’s has as well) and some of its users have become increasingly upset at its moderation decisions, including allowing U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and anti-trans writer Jesse Singal to remain as users of the platform. So the expectation is that the vice president of the United States should be banned because he says stuff people don't like? What's the…

All social media moderation is "banning people for saying stuff people don't like". Most people don't like e.g. spam, or death threats, or racism, so social media offer communication platforms where those kinds of speech are restricted, with varying degrees of effort and success. The goal of banning Vance would be to have a social media site that moderates against the kinds of things Vance says.

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only major decentralized forms of social media that I'm aware of that have confronted philosophical questions of how handle moderation have been Mastodon, Bluesky, and arguably Lemmy. I don't know of any sense in which Mastodon has increased centralization, I think its blocking tools have been distributed essentially since the beginning, not something that has iterated toward centralization over time in response…

The big example that comes to my mind is Matrix, where most homeservers use Mjolnir to apply centralized public blocklists of other servers/people they don't like. So if for example #archlinux disagrees with your opinion and they decide to ban you for it, you are now banned from many other unrelated channels. I have also seen subreddits that auto-ban users that have ever posted in specific other (unrelated) subreddit…

Mjolnir is designed to apply decentralised public blocklists - i.e. you pick which banlists to apply; there are a bunch published by different people (matrix.org, the matrix 'community moderation effort', etc). Admittedly moderators do share lists (so that if #archlinux bans you, others might pick up the ban), but there's no intrinsic centralisation.

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos... is how it works fwiw.

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#37

I don't understand how you can "ban" anyone from distributed social media. The idea seems... outdated? I mean, I get "ignoring" someone so they don't show up when you log into whatever instance you're in, whether it's the AT Protocol or ActivityPub, but like... if someone somehow decides to do work on top of one of these protocols and extend it to allow people to basically comment on things that a victim user doesn't…

Applications on atproto run moderation as a kind of filtering layer on top of the user data. A ban in that scenario is fully filtering their account out of the application.

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#38

> However, as time has gone by, Bluesky’s traffic has declined (X’s has as well) and some of its users have become increasingly upset at its moderation decisions, including allowing U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and anti-trans writer Jesse Singal to remain as users of the platform. The problem, if you can call it that, is Singal hasn't broken any of their TOS or guidelines. Right now, AFAICT this is a people with pi…

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Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#39
The technology powering Bluesky is “inspired by” but never interoperable with existing standards or similar reference architectures. This is one’s first queue that the direction is not being open.

And beyond the technical details, how can a corporation commit to transparency and non-bias when their very funding depends on it? Google already provided us with the most popular example of how this is not possible (“don’t be evil” by an ad company).

Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, no, he did clearly break the TOS back when he originally joined. Care to explain? The links in the article re: potential violations are mostly BS.

Doxxing people off-platform used to be against the ToS. When people began reporting him for that, Bluesky amended their ToS.

Yeah they changed the policy on off-site behavior to specifically allow his posts. For another example he routinely posted screenshots of posts from people that had blocked him. Block evasion is/was against the ToS as applied to most users other than Jesse Singal.

People mix up “users wanting him banned for having abhorrent views” (which is the opinion of some people) with “users wanting him banned for the same stuff they see other people get banned for”. It serves as a kind of cover because even when you point to a concrete example of him violating the rules the moderation team will dismiss your report as being personally motivated. It’s a funny defense, “This guy couldn’t possibly be breaking the rules and be near-universally considered an asshole by the users on this site! It has to be one or the other!”

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