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

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251–260 of 410 posts

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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fol…

The decentralization problem in BlueSky is not filtering out users, but rather hearing from users that BlueSky has decided to filter out.

Yeah which is why I added the "and platform your buddies" and the "but the people that give them death threats should" bits but they probably were too parenthetical to come across.

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

#252
post #17

I hate to be the one to say it, but...this is why we can't have nice things. At a certain scale, social media tilts humanity in one direction. We can't seem to escape the trajectory of our very nature; it will outcompete any complex system we devise to outwit it.

Maybe its just a filtering problem. I wished musk would have thought about creating semi-permeable bubbles for every milieu, when he bought twitter, where you can switch between feel-good and controversy filters as you wish. Hard lock outs / bans only lead to more polarization.

You seem to have missed that Musk nurturing a cult of mentally ill edgelords is a feature, not a bug. Why would he ever want to shield his users from the made-up ragebait that so successfully radicalized so many of them into joining MAGA?

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

#253
post #237

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…

I do wish there was a community that encouraged thoughtful positivity over negativity (granted I would not "ban" it) and some level of limited posting ... or something like that. It's a pipe dream I know, but on the surface social media could be really cool.

There is, it's almost every successful advertisement-driven social media site. Youtube, reddit, facebook, etc. have all adapted to remove negative and controversial comments and leave positive/advertiser-friendly comments.

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

#254
post #201

One thing about the Fediverse (Mastodon) is that most people aren't on it. As I found with one marketing experiment, this makes it terrible if your goal is to reach as many consumers as possible in a niche. But HN members who aren't mass-marketing could change that, by moving to the Fediverse -- giving it their endorsement, and network effects. https://joinmastodon.org/

> this makes it terrible if your goal is to reach as many consumers as possible in a niche. Amazing. Another great reason to be there as a person trying to interact with other people.

I know, that's a terrible image, and I should be the last person suggesting such an image.

I was mentioning one use case that's a showstopper that much of HN would appreciate, and which forces a lot of the people who attract other people to be on the proprietary platforms.

Of course a risk of making Fediverse become more popular is ruining it for those people who want very small-neighborhood community. And who don't mind that, on any given topic, they're basically stuck with the handful of people who happened to be there, not those who would be most interested.

I'd still like to make Fediverse more welcoming to more people, to get more people on it.

I have an optimistic belief that a more popular Fediverse could be better than any of the commercial alternatives. Though it would become more like them in some ways, as it grows.

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

#255

From what I have seen, the "solution" to moderation troubles in decentralized solutions has mostly always been... more centralization.

Not necessarily.

Centralization eventually ends up with a single entity in charge of everything, which eventually does (or doesn't do) something that causes it's value to collapse.

The real solution here is federalization: A bunch of independent self-govening entities that co-operate with other entities to assist each other in moderation.

A good non-social network example here would be adblockers.

- Each adblocker uses at least one ad tracking list, with most adblockers allowing for multiple lists to be used and a sensible default for their own users to use.

- Each list has it's own moderators that add/update/remove entries on their list based on their own values.

- Adblockers (and their users) can collaborate on requesting changes to lists, resulting in faster reactions to advertising changes on the web, and in turn faster updates passed down to users of those adblockers who participate.

- If an adblocker can't do their job anymore (e.g. their owners/workers can't do their job anymore, the owner sells out, etc...) users can switch to (or create) a new adblocker.

- If a list fails, adblockers can switch to other lists (or create a new one).

No adblocker and no list holds all the power. Adblocking as a whole is strengthened by always having viable alternatives that can be switched to, and methods to quickly create new alternatives if the need arises.

That's the power of federation: the strengths of centralization without the weaknesses.

The social media version of a federated twitter is mastodon. A whole bunch of groups running their own mastodon servers that can interact with each-other as if they were a centralized mastodon website, with similarly aligned servers sharing co-operatively maintained bad-actor lists.

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

#256
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?

It undermines the value of decentralization itself given intermediaries tend to pop up in all of these various platforms and become the dominant way to use them.

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

#257
post #164
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Which ones? Everyone in this thread is afraid to stand on their beliefs and I find that annoying. Just say what you mean! 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…

QED

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

#258
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wish there was a community that encouraged thoughtful positivity over negativity (granted I would not "ban" it) and some level of limited posting ... or something like that. It's a pipe dream I know, but on the surface social media could be really cool.

There is, it's almost every successful advertisement-driven social media site. Youtube, reddit, facebook, etc. have all adapted to remove negative and controversial comments and leave positive/advertiser-friendly comments.

Since Youtube made that change I found its comments much, much more pleasant. Meta made an early decision with Threads to deprioritize political content which they only recently went back on (now it's an opt-out slider I think) which did do a decent job of keeping the network lighter than Twitter but also made the network a bit less intellectual than Twitter or Bluesky.

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

#260

> 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…

"he didn't technically break any rules so I won't ban him" has been the death of _many_ social spaces good moderation requires discretion and keeping the users happy, not slavish legalism

But I guess users also expect that there's freedom of opinions on the platform within the set rules. If users are merely being banned based on their opinion, that doesn't sound like a healthy environment.
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