Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
How dare they write for... The Atlantic ! Why are some people like this?
That's the one thing you pick up?
User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality
121–130 of 410 posts
Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality
#122This reminds me of when some NFTs were stolen and OpenSea delisted them. Like yeah, they still exist out there on the blockchain, but when a central authority can gatekeep peoples' ability to view them, how decentralized are they actually?
Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good essay [1] about "Web3" that highlighted a few of these kinds of issues, and I think it applies to anything like Bluesky claiming to be "decentralized" when it's prohibitively difficult to access it any way other than the biggest central service.
Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about atproto; unlike ActivityPub where your home server runs both the application as well as stores your data, atproto is build in the concept that “applications” like BlueSky store your data inside your PDS (Personal Data Store), which may or may not be hosted somewhere else. While anybody can host their own PDS, the public bsky.app instance can and will “block” users by prev…
It's not closed. There just isn't the needed ecosystem of other providers.
Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality
#124[flagged]
This is actually very similar to Bluesky discourse last week, where US protest organizers sent out emails asking people to RSVP and all the activist posters got upset and started lecturing everyone that if you want to go to a protest you must first turn off all your electronics and second make sure nobody else knows you were ever there, or else the police will come get you.
The problem with this is... if you have free speech rights you should use them, not give them up the instant you imagine someone might know you said something.
> I wouldn't be surprised if the founder will be arrested in the near future. Since free speech does not cover harboring violent extremists.
Of course it does (in the US.) You're required to respond to legal process and report CSAM, but you don't have to do pretty much anything proactively.
Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality
#125How can people laugh and make meme at someone else murder ? Like the guy, hate him, but there is something that used to be shared amongst humans, it's that you respect the dead.
That's just empathy. Seems like it's gone to the toilet in some part of the usa or maybe it's just weirdos on internet. Either case it's despicable.
Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality
#126User and content bans are a great way to make money right now as partisans are super gullible
If a platform doesn't ban someone: short it as people say they are cancelling
If a platform does ban someone: also short it as people say they are cancelling
requires a publicly traded platform like Netflix or Disney+ as significant pieces of the parent company's revenue
Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
"he didn't technically break any rules so I won't ban him" has been the death of _many_ social spaces good moderation requires discretion and keeping the users happy, not slavish legalism
That's an argument that proves a lot , given that it kind of implies that a quorum of customers can simply vote other customers off the island.
well... yes? does that not happen regularly on many platforms?
even on a free service, users have some tiny leverage; they can vote with their feet
Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
I wanted to give you (and the website you linked) the benefit of the doubt since with all the accusations they make there is a link in there. I thought it was sources of Jesse actually doing any of this stuff (which he didn't but I am willing to be proven wrong) .. but no. Those links are all just internal info dumps and almost nothing of the accusations on the page is sourced .. at all.
Right, the website lists the accusations with links, but the links seem unrelated to the accusations.
For example, I'd expect "criticizing expert medical and scientific consensus on healthcare for our minors" to link to some kind of article describing what Jesse Singal said about this topic and why it's incorrect, but instead it links to a general page about "healthcare providers serving gender diverse youth" that doesn't even mention anything about the accused person or their writings.
Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality
#129Re: User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
No good will come of a fulsome litigation of Singal but it's fair to say that he doesn't go out of his way to avoid these controversies. Sort of like Fredrik deBoer, he's one of journalism's answers to the concept of edgelordery. People who vocally wish he was less influential would do well to remember how much juice they've been giving him.
> he's one of journalism's answers to the concept of edgelordery either the term "edgelord" means something very different from what it did 10ish years ago or you have a very misinformed understanding about how timid Jesse approaches online conflict. I haven't seen him initiate any form of edgy engagement in forever .. maybe ever.
I followed him long after he was declared persona non grata, sort of uncomfortably agreeing that he was getting dogpiled unfairly (I don't think I agree with him about much, but at the time, it didn't seem like he was saying anything more than a stddev from the media consensus). I don't follow him anymore, after it became very clear that he's steering right into personal conflicts with people, and reciprocating all the weird grudges. I've also had reason to listen to his podcast within the past year (they did an episode covering our local library system), and feel comfortable with the decision to yuck out of paying attention to him.
(Not over the library coverage itself, just over ancillary stuff I heard on the podcast).
I'll put it this way: I had reason to tip our local politics Facebook off to the episode he did, and when I did that, I wrote a paragraph long disclaimer about what he's like. Not because I have any animus towards Singal, but because I didn't want anybody to associate me with some of what he's said.
So yeah, I'd push back on this.
Singal is a lot less interesting a subject (aren't we all exhausted of debating Singal at this point) than whether Bluesky is going to be a viable mainstream competitor to Twitter, and he's interesting to me only in what this drama says about that question.