> Moderation tools fall under the “reach” layer: you take all of that speech, but provide a way to limit the reach of stuff you don’t care to see yourself. Som

> Moderation tools fall under the “reach” layer: you take all of that speech, but provide a way to limit the reach of stuff you don’t care to see yourself. Sometimes, people say that BlueSky is “all about free speech” or “doesn’t do moderation.” This is simply inaccurate. Moderation tooling is encoded into the protocol itself, so that it can work with all content on the network, even non-BlueSky applications. Moreover, it gives you the ability to choose your own moderators, so that you aren’t beholden to anyone else’s choice of moderation or lack thereof. Ah yes, the famous "if you don't want to see this content, just close your eyes" approach to moderation. I know this philosophy is well-liked in Silicon Valley, but I think it's fundamentally flawed: There are legitimate situations in which you want to prevent unrelated other people from talking about a certain thing or acquiring certain content. Classic examples are cybermobbing, doxxing and revenge porn: Two or more people talking about how to hurt a third person, publishing private, unflattering or false information about the person, etc. Removing this information from the victim's feed is completely useless (in fact it likely won't appear in their feed in the first place) as the harm comes from the fact that other people view the content or engage in the discussion. Nevertheless, the harm is real. In a system with traditional moderation, a moderator could stop this kind of behaviour by deleting the posts for everyone and/or banning the perpetrators. None of this is possible in a "just hide the content" system. Shared blocklists or "labels" won't work either as the consumers of the content don't have any motivation to block it - indeed, they want to see the revenge porn. The one who wants to block it is the victim, but it has no power to force everyone to use a particular blocklist. (The whole idea behind this system is to no one can force a blocklist on someone else)