161–170 of 410 posts
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BlueSky also has this, but it works poorly because people use blocklists as a form of harassment, or else take over existing lists and add their enemies to it.
And bluesky has the ultimate power of choosing which blocklists to show you
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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?
Theoretically they could maintain that filtering only occurs on the client level but they've made the choice to exclude banned users from the firehouse so their moderation choices effect everyone
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> 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. You should see some of the background evidence on this. NY Times did a podcast series not long ago, which covered the controversy, called The Protocol: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-protocol/id1817731... It was about how the so called Dutch Protocol re: g…
I am going to re-insist on the idea that parental consent is going to play a big role in practice in US healthcare practices, if only for financial reasons. I have very little patience for the idea that access is easy. Perhaps there is a debate to be had on treatment protocols, but I generally feel like, for something that covers such a small segment of the population, the default is to err towards letting that debat…
Oh agreed. If, for no other reason, that is how the politics, even on the American Left, are now. A few years ago, people were talking about gender affirming care as a matter of right for the children. Singal, among others, changed that conversation.
> I have very little patience for the idea that access is easy.
Agreed, but I think you may have misconstrued Singal's point. He's not saying it's too easy, he's saying there is not enough preliminary psychiatric care like the treatment protocol dictated in the Netherlands.
> Perhaps there is a debate to be had on treatment protocols, but I generally feel like, for something that covers such a small segment of the population, the default is to err towards letting that debate happen in professional circles.
Um. Those professional circles like HN's professional circles need to be open to the air every now and then. Like -- what if we allowed Peter Thiel and his circle of founders, raised on Heinlein novels and sugary soda, to dictate tech policy in the US? Some people are just too weirdly close to a thing. We actually do need the wisdom that normies can offer.
Specifically, re: this topic, four European countries, who have a much more experience than Americans do with this care, have recently implemented more restrictive approaches to care. See: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/06/us-europe-transgend...
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Even better: the only “evidence” of Singal’s “anti-trans” views are that his work has been quoted by anti-trans politicians and activists. This is an absolute ridiculous bar to have. Anyone who follows him would be hard-pressed to describe him as “anti-trans” unless you think anything less than a full throated endorsement of self ID and medical transition interventions for minors is “anti-trans”.
> unless you think anything less than a full throated endorsement That is absolutely how some of the more "passionate" activist types have been for the past 5+ years on a number of social topics, not just trans.
First though, a clarifying question, do you think the civil-rights movement, as it existed in history, was 'too passionate'?
If not, in what specific way is the current 'activist' movement worse than those movements of our recent past?
Which civil rights organization has gone too far recently and what is the preferred middle ground that you do accept?
> 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.”
But I'm suspicious because:
1. That doesn't appear to be a valid Bluesky handle and,
2. Even if it's a pseudonym-- which is understandable-- how could there possibly be a former usenet graybeard who didn't love trafficking in unwanted Linux advice?
Edit: clarifications
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…
Bluesky is a PBC, which isn't a corporation exactly. Or rather it's one designed to respond to the fears of people who think corporations are required to maximize profits.
This 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…
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 Blues…
Concretely, nobody is going to subscribe to anything else in bsky but the default stack, anything else is unlikely to ever gain much adoption, and thus federation is basically meaningless and a technical implementation detail for how they wanted to manage their stuff.
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…
While that’s much preferable to Twitter in 2025 (and the right)… it’s not encouraging as for the future of, frankly everything.
Interesting. Reddit by contrast is moderation decentralized system centralized.
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Not on any viable investor-funded ones, nope.
even billion dollar corporations like cloudflare (with a "free speech absolutist" CEO) absolutely do drop unpopular customers due to user pressure