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I guess the question I'm really trying to get at is "What is the worst that hypothetical Usk can do?" I think I have a handle on it for Mastodon; the answer is

by jrm4 3y ago

I guess the question I'm really trying to get at is "What is the worst that hypothetical Usk can do?" I think I have a handle on it for Mastodon; the answer is "not much" or it's going to be pretty hard. While the deeply decentralized nature of Mastodon makes it harder to find a good "feed," it strongly protects against this; he'd literally have to seek out the individual instances and start trying to control them, one by one. But it looks like Bluesky is closer to Twitter (I ain't callin' it X, idgaf) than Mastodon for purposes of what matters to a bad actor. Instances dropping off the map doesn't matter if you have a hand on the control of the relatively centralized recommendation algorithm?

steveklabnik 3y ago
Not your original parent, but my take. > if you have a hand on the control of the relatively centralized recommendation algorithm? There's nothing centralized about it. Anyone can run an algorithm. If you don't like that algorithm, drop that feed, and find a new one. Basically, a big difference between BlueSky and Mastodon is that in BlueSky, almost everything is independent parts you can layer together however you like. Mastodon is based around instances, and so ties a lot of these sorts of choices together for everyone on that instance. On BlueSky, "my instance", that is, where my data is hosted, is separate from the posts that I see, because I can choose to follow whatever feeds I like. My instance is also separate from my personal moderation preferences, which I choose independent of my instance.