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

Not on any viable investor-funded ones, nope.

> 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 clash there is between people who think they are living in a rule-of-law liberal democratic regime that treats them as respected citizens with free speech rights and are protesting to register disagreement with some policies, and people who think they are living in a fascist state that has declared, and intends to treat, them as domestic terrorists and are protesting to rally opposition.

Naturally, these different premises about the context and intent of protest lead to different conclusions on how best to approach it.

There seem to be a lot of people on Bluesky who don’t think it’s wrong to post reply-spam about their favorite grievances even when it’s entirely off topic. Complaining about Singal is an example. It’s the sort of thing that would be downvoted to oblivion on Hacker News.

For the most part they’re fairly easy to avoid, but reading the replies for popular accounts is a minefield.

This is sort of like email in the old days before the spam filters got good. Bluesky needs better reply-spam filters. Or maybe they already exist somewhere, but it needs better ways to find the good filters?

If that gets fixed then maybe it has a chance to become a more welcoming place.

The guy's whole bit is arguing from some sort of vague sociological perspective against gender affirming care. And pretending that (in the United States of America of all places) teens can just walk up to their doctors super easily and get surgery done somehow.

He presents this issue as a sort of parental-rights-ignoring epidemic, but if you dig into the reality of it all there's a hell of a lot of parental consent, a hell of a lot of checks within the medical establishment about whether to do these things, and of course the person themselves being involved.

Singal is a fellow traveler to people who defend conversion therapy, which is a thing where _kids are sent to a camp to be trained into a different sexuality_. This is shit that's basically banned in many places in Europe, because many believe that those camps are basically child abuse.

So you're looking at a person who has a lot of distrust for the medical establishment, falsely presents the reality of the thing to make it sound like people are walking in for free top surgery the moment they get into middle school[0], and this is stuff that is being cited to add restrictions on other things.

There's this deeply personal thing that a very small segment of the population is trying to deal with. There are medical professionals that have some help (including just of the "talking" variety), some degree of acceptance in pockets of society. And this sort of thing means that people can have a little bit of dignity. And the medical establishment is trying to treat people!

Meanwhile this guy is using his voice to just spread fear around all of this, misrepresenting even really basic things. And to what goal? Again, parental rights are part of the equation in reality! And we're not talking about a sports thing here. So who is Singal out there fighting for?

I kind of don't care what this guy's opinion is on, like, taxes and the role of government in the rest of life. He's going out there writing this kind of stuff so consistently that he's known for it. And I have a very hard time understanding who he is the voice for, except for people who are just against trans people existing in public society.

I don't care about him being banned off of bluesky or whatever. I just want people here to have at least some access to medical care (in various forms) if doctors and parents agree. And his stuff is helping to provide ammo to roll this access back at a legislative level. Serious people should know that what he says doesn't hold up on examination. In the same way that people "know" that Trump just says things that sound emotionally right to him in the moment to prove a point.

[0]: I'm exagerating here but again, in the USA access to medical treatment is not easy!

This is like grasping at a boogeyman web3 straw to make a point.

Concretely, Bluesky has an AppView that takes posts from relays and PDSes, subscribes to moderation labelers, filters posts that have labels which have certain labels, then displays them in the browser. Blacksky is the first independent implementation of relays and other large components of the system.

The default Bluesky AppView subscribes to the Bluesky Moderation labeler which cannot be disabled. No independent AppView has been made which can turn off the Bluesky Moderation labeler. That's all.

I have my concerns over the network, namely DAUs decreasing and community politics, but the tech is largely a matter of time I feel. It's true that the ActivityPub ecosystem has a lot more federation happening but ActivityPub is a much older system (which itself derives from OStatus which originated in 2012-ish.) Mastodon was released in 2016. It's bound to be more federated than Bluesky.