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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

#141

Post by jrm4 »

Mastodon is the right model. I keep saying this and I keep being surprised that it isn't more obvious to most. It's the right model because it's essentially the same model as email. Yes, there is TONS of "human" work to be done to change people's minds on this, but STRUCTURALLY it's the only one that can handle things correctly.

I always found what Bluesky was "optimizing" for to be a stupid goal, and inherently a bad idea -- namely "the ability to keep your everything permanent."

That's EXACTLY what brings MORE danger to centralization. I get that losing an identity on a thing sucks BUT WE'VE ALREADY DEALT WITH THIS WITH EMAIL, and more over the ability to lose/destroy/start over -- like with email -- is a FEATURE as much as it is a bug.

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

#142

Post by flutas »

hitekker wrote: post #132
tptacek wrote: post #58

You know what they say, when you're explaining that you don't really wish death upon the CEO of the niche social network platform on which you depend, you're losing.

That’s a good observation about position. For those curious, the original (and arguably representative) Bluesky user said: > “I want to be extremely clear I was not making a death threat or inciting violence,” he told me, saying that he had sent 12 separate examples of other people posting the same Kirk image as a reaction meme. “I don’t wish death on Jay, I wish for her and her team to grow a conscience. I disagree…

which is leaving out the full context, they specificly cited the alt-text of the image, not the image itself.

The email, verbatim read:

> A reply with an image; alt text reads:

> 'Charlie Kirk sitting in a white T-shirt that says "Freedom." A negative consequence follows!

[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/aliafonzy.blacksky.app/post/3m2jm7u...

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

#143

Post by Karrot_Kream »

I definitely have my concerns over the decreasing DAUs on the platform and the crabby, toxic community that has come to really define Bluesky these days but I don't think the tech is the problem. For folks who keep pointing at Mastodon, remember that ActivityPub's predecessor OStatus originates from 2012 and Mastodon itself was kicked off in 2016. Mastodon is 9 years old at this point. Bluesky is only a few years old.

In AP land, for better or for worse microblogging is dominated by the ad-hoc set of standards that Mastodon pioneered, and too much of the community just treats AP as "HTTP+REST JSON APIs for social" and ignores the semantic components that AP can use to interoperate.

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

#144

Post by jazzyjackson »

EA-3167 wrote: post #84
tptacek wrote: post #58

You know what they say, when you're explaining that you don't really wish death upon the CEO of the niche social network platform on which you depend, you're losing.

I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them. The format is the problem. The medium is the problem. Poorly moderated groups of anonymous people voidscreaming as some “this will be monetized once we hit critical mass” exercise is the problem. I believe that eventually people will sort ours…

100% it doesn't make any sense to expect different behavior out of the same format just because you make slightly different promises about what the rules will be

Bluesky has been drama central since the beginning, consisting mostly of people who thought Twitter wasn't censoring enough (or censoring the wrong people), the free speech crowd came later and, well, tested the waters and found transphobic speech was in fact not free, and that despite distributed promises, the town wasn't big enough for the two parties to coexist

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

#145

Post by [deleted] »

EA-3167 wrote: post #84
tptacek wrote: post #58

You know what they say, when you're explaining that you don't really wish death upon the CEO of the niche social network platform on which you depend, you're losing.

I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them. The format is the problem. The medium is the problem. Poorly moderated groups of anonymous people voidscreaming as some “this will be monetized once we hit critical mass” exercise is the problem. I believe that eventually people will sort ours…

[deleted]

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

#146

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

huhkerrf wrote: post #24
mustache_kimono wrote: post #7

> 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…

It's worse than that, as the linked TC article links to an explanation of his ban-worthy views that, if applied to everyone, would lean to a ban of probably 85% of the US. (Purposefully not referencing them here. The question is not whether those views are right, it's whether those are mainstream.) Bluesky has a problem of its user base demanding purity, and it will 100% be the death of it.

> Bluesky has a problem of its user base demanding purity, and it will 100% be the death of it.

Yup.

As someone who describes themselves as Leftist, I wanted to enjoy Blue Sky, but the purity tests are insane.

To give a concrete example, I was called a Nazi for owning a Tesla Model 3. The fact that I bought the car 6 years ago, long before Elon Musk made his hard-right turn, was irrelevant. They literally expected me to sell the car and take a huge financial loss (Since I need a car and would then need to buy a new one, and the trade-in value of my M3P is shit) just to virtue signal.

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

#147

Post by JuniperMesos »

lkey wrote: post #104
huhkerrf wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that, as the linked TC article links to an explanation of his ban-worthy views that, if applied to everyone, would lean to a ban of probably 85% of the US. (Purposefully not referencing them here. The question is not whether those views are right, it's whether those are mainstream.) Bluesky has a problem of its user base demanding purity, and it will 100% be the death of it.

Facebook and Twitter no longer bother with moderation, do you think the experience on those platforms is better or worse than 5 years ago? It used to be common sense to immediately ban creeps of all stripes, especially the obvious ones. Singal certainly qualifies. Putting aside the super annoying 'just asking questions' vitriol that he publishes to national papers, his pdf-file chat log stuff alone would warrant an i…

> Facebook and Twitter no longer bother with moderation, do you think the experience on those platforms is better or worse than 5 years ago? > It used to be common sense to immediately ban creeps of all stripes, especially the obvious ones. Singal certainly qualifies.

The experience on these platforms is somewhat better than it was five years ago, because the people making moderation decisions for these platforms have been largely replaced by people who are less prone to banning people because someone who dislikes their political speech labels them a creep. There are still serious moderation issues on these platforms, but yeah compared to five years ago there is somewhat more freedom to speak without risking getting arbitrarily banned, and a wider range of topics being talked about.

> Putting aside the super annoying 'just asking questions' vitriol that he publishes to national papers, his pdf-file chat log stuff alone would warrant an instant perma from me without a second thought.

You should be able to perma-ban anyone you want from your own feed for any reason. If it is possible for you to make the platform ban Singal (or anyone else) in a way that affects anyone other than ypu, then that platform is not meaningfully decentralized. I've occasionally read articles by Singal but I don't follow his output closely and don't have a strong opinion about him one way or the other. I should still be able to read what he posts even if you think it is not worth reading.

> Relatedly, I'm very very tired of the 4chan/crypto/ai gas-leak that has enshittified everything, aren't you?

I don't think 4chan, cryptocurrency, or AI have much to do with each other, nor that online discussion related to to these phenomena in some way universally constitutes enshittification or not.

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

#150

Post by whistlestop »

snuxoll wrote: post #89
pfraze wrote: post #37

Earlier 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…

https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3m2fjnh5hpc2f

Would projects like this one, which pulls only a subset of Bluesky data straight from the firehose, and can be processed as the end user pleases, help mitigate this limitation?

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