I'm betting on ATProto

I think that Larry's mostly kidding and it's not really some implied threat of violence in person. Just that we're better at politeness and restraint in person because we see a real human in front of us instead of something abstract on a screen.

Bluesky has all the things that made Twitter a cesspool: a small character limit (300 is still too small) and virality stats (likes/retweets). Its only saving grace right now is that it's itty bitty; if it ever achieved scale it would have the same core problems. Which is to say, if you're betting on ATProto, try a Bluesky w/o those things.

But, more to the point, this stuff is just Usenet where the users are the newsgroups. But that's not the basis for a community unless the user's famous. What you want is something like forums (Reddit) where people with common interests come together. Anything else is like, hyperindividualistic and isolating.

It occurred to me that "Twitter is Usenet where individual users are the topics" is peak Millennial. Dunno what I'm gonna do with that one.

I do think I should have the technical means to mark you down, not for a block, but to have a public or private note on file that you seem to have quite the axe to grind. Are uninterested in exploring possible value or upside, that you are anti-exploratory. Are biased to using fear and doubt to deny value, to raise up anti-value. To note, imho, that you cannot present a nuanced discussion on topics. The polemicized warning.

I think social media lacks these abilities to generate meaningful signal and review, and I think atproto begins to open a door to trying new things, to endless human exploration of how we do do the noosphere, how we interlink, after decades of it all being tightly controlled by big companies.

I'm way less interested in bans. I'm very interested in new ways to help us appraise and consider who we are engaging with. The labellers on Bluesky are just a start, are some initial heads-up visibility not to block but to give heads-up visibility into what content we are consuming, giving us great indicators like stechlab-labels offers. We have had so few improvements of visibility across the social sphere and atproto opens the door to networking any manner of content, of which moderation/appraisal is but a part. https://bsky.app/profile/stechlab-labels.bsky.social

There probably are ways to have as bad a time as you are saying on Bluesky. But I don't see that, don't know what you are talking about, and don't see the tensions like that. Yeah, it's social media and yeah people will have all manners of demands and insistences, but in my experience that doesn't have the vitality, isn't popular, and everyone's much more interested in having adult nuanced conversations, in finding multiple perspectives.

And I think largely I'm only semi interested in what Bluesky / atproto is today. I deeply enjoy connecting with amazing people, building incredible open data connected experiences. But I'm so keenly interested in anything that opens the door to enabling grass roots bottom up new social networking systems to spawn and grow and expand. I think most atproto fans would say similar, and I've heard the Bluesky devs themselves say, this protocol is just one go at trying to open the door to giving humanity its own chance outside big tech at building connected social systems.

For now, Atmospheric Computing is by far the best chance humanity has to improve and iterate, as I see it. https://www.pfrazee.com/blog/atmospheric-computing

(Are you sure you're not looking at number of bots kicked out in those numbers?)

> Some of the most toxic conversations I've seen were on Mastodon.

> If there's a healthy future for socializing on the internet, I think it will happen in small communities.

I think that is why I still trust Mastodon/ActivityPub a lot more than Bluesky/ATProto. Mastodon at least provides the tools for small communities. Big instances still exist. Pile ons and drive-bys are still possible. But also Mastodon has plenty of small instances including many one-person instances. Even out of the box small instances are smaller overall traffic among the great river of ActivityPub. But also forks like Hometown exist for adding extra, simple "picket fences" around small communities. A "complete" view of ActivityPub is intentionally hard to get. By comparison, ATProto seems to me overfocused on the Relay system as a grand centralizing data bus and missing pieces of a conversation seen as much more of a bug rather than a feature (of ActivityPub).

I also think the future is healthier in the hands of smaller communities. I can teach someone how to effectively use Mastodon for small communities across an almost nice spectrum of "insular" with useful options on both sides from strangers tolerated to strangers mostly unwelcome (though that starts to lead away from Mastodon and back towards classic forum software). I don't see how to do anything like that with Bluesky and a lot of the design decisions of ATProto seem intentionally to try to avoid small communities.

All of them are optional and can be disable at the instance-wide level, in addition to some of them having account level opt outs.

They also are still generally bound to an instance's own horizon: there's no global "trending feed" (and it would be really hard to create one), these optional "algorithmic" tools still differ from instance to instance based on what that instance follows and its trading relationship to its neighbors.