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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

#191

Post by tshaddox »

viccis wrote: post #122

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…

There are plenty of criticisms of Web3, but this doesn't seems like a particularly valid one. What could the people who designed the relevant blockchains and smart contracts have done differently to prevent one marketplace from becoming dominant?

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

#192

Post by didibus »

hobs wrote: post #167
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This just reads like not a response to the problem, but instead a description of technical implementations. 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 have to disagree a little.

You might be right simply that no one actual cares about any of this, and 99% of people don't care at all who gets banned or censored and who doesn't. And they'd all just stick around to the one place where everyone else is and that's that.

But this is an argument against the idea that people care or don't.

Assuming people do care, then Bluesky is the first protocol attempt that could actually work, because it lets you move your existing account freely to any alternatives easily, and because it also allows you to control your own recommendation algorithms.

If people don't care, than, people don't care, and that's that.

But if people do care, you need to achieve the above behavior, and that becomes a technical challenge that tech can solve.

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

#193

Post by Karrot_Kream »

hobs wrote: post #167
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This just reads like not a response to the problem, but instead a description of technical implementations. 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.

Why wouldn't they? You join the platform, make friends with folks who say stuff like "Vance and Singal shouldn't be here but the people that give them death threats should", then they tell you to hop onto "Cleansky" which has its own Appview that filters out Vance, Singal, and platforms your buddies. You don't need to make a new account or anything.

The default experience just needs to be good enough. Beyond that folks with strong opinions will filter into moderation communities that offer them the curation they want. That's the technical side of this at least. There's larger problems around community culture but unrelated to tech.

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

#194

Post by lkey »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #147
lkey wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

4chan has changed the way that discourse happens online, and it has definitely leaked to X at the very least. Incel lingo especially, you might even use it yourself being completely unaware. I'd call it as a style of reactionary discourse, where the most 'controversial/engaging' thing is elevated and 'ironic' nihilism is the default viewpoint. This is now fully automated, but it needn't be forever so. These companies would do well to learn how to enter the post-exponential phase of their life-cycle.

crypto (and gambling I suppose these days) is a barometer of the advertising/fake user space. There's a fundamentally different vibe to a site trying to trick the gullible into getting 'free' crypto from musk and a site trying to sell you 75% off crocs at Target. You are free to disagree.

AI is the source of a huge wave deeply inauthentic and frankly boring/weird content. This reduces the signal/noise ratio, and thus the perceived value of any website. Again, your are free to disagree, but to me this is all symptomatic of cyclical autophagy.

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

#196

Post by greekrich92 »

astrange wrote: post #98
greekrich92 wrote: post #3

The founder has been posting through it, Elon-style and with as much cringe. It's disappointing because I've mostly been able to replicate my Twitter experience there. It's better actually, because more funny people moved and fewer journalists so it's less of a doomscroll.

"Posting through it" is a fairly nonsensical concept. It implies you're required to agree with people yelling at you, which you aren't. Bluesky in particular has this problem because it inherited a kind of leftist crustpunk poster from 2016 Twitter. They had a weird affect where they hated "nerds" for some reason and pretended to be those jock bully characters from 80s high school movies. The modern Bluesky form has…

Slurs for AI? Maybe take to heart the idea that the Humanities are useful in that you don't end up having thoughts like this if you've studied them.

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

#197

Post by bjourne »

jrm4 wrote: post #141

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 ba…

Right, but email is really not all that great, neither on a practical nor technical level. 99.99% of all users doesn't run their own mail server so in practice it is not decentralized. I would guesstimate that 50% or more of all mail traffic is handled by Google, MS, Apple, and a few outer mega corps. And for most people Facebook, Slack, and WhatsApp are way more convenient communication methods than email.

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

#198

Post by neilv »

> While the ATProto system has been criticized as overly complicated compared to the ActivityPub system that powers the Fediverse, it has one key feature that ActivityPub lacks: the ability to transfer servers while keeping all of your followers and posts.

FWIW, it looks like Mastodon software has some features for moving servers, including bringing your followers, but not your posts:

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

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

#199

Post by [deleted] »

mustache_kimono wrote: post #163
rtpg wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. 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 v…

[deleted]

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

#200

Post by theossuary »

mustache_kimono wrote: post #163
rtpg wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. 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 v…

It should be a matter of right. My parents mutilated me as a child because they denied me healthcare. We should not allow parents to deny their children healthcare which leads to their permanent disfiguration. That's disgusting.

If you think it'd be wrong to force a cis kid to be trans, then it's also wrong to force a trans kid to be cis.

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