9 ms·

Why Bluesky Remains the Most Interesting Experiment in Social Media, by Far

101 points by hn_acker 3y ago

laurex 3y ago
What will be very cool will be making it feasible for non-technical folks to easily stand up servers and make federation much more of a dark forest model. I was hoping this was the direction Mozilla would take when they invested in building with Mastadon. Essentially, it should be possible to have social tooling in a Wordpress-like ecosystem where developers can create different modules and plug-ins, where people can charge for hosting, building out instances, etc but the code itself is FOSS, and where we can use decentralized experiments to learn what we actually want as far as social tech goes, not just emulate existing platforms with feeds and vanity metrics.
- 0xEF 3y ago
  I keep seeing people use "dark forest" and I think I may have a different understanding which leaves me wondering "why would you want this to happen?" My take on the dark forest comes from game theory, where nobody is working with complete information (in extreme summary) which sounds like a bad idea if we use it as a social goal. I've always felt like we are currently in the dark forest stage, but the goal should be to get out of it. Perhaps my understanding is flawed? What is your take or how did you intend to use the phrase?
  - derbOac 3y ago
    Not the OP, but their comment and your question got me thinking. Sometimes I get the sense that true decentralization could get people to 90% of how they actually use things like Twitter/X, and federation (including major hubs) gets you to the remaining 10%. What I often see is people following a certain number of people, often those they "know", either in real life or online, supplemented by a smaller number of bigger, more distant sources. Along these lines, what I could see working is something that's like Matrix, but where explicit groups/rooms aren't there, and defined implicitly by social networks. A bridge between something like bluesky and matrix. I think the "dark forest" part comes in with the idea that maybe a certain lack of knowledge is ok, or inevitable, just like the real world, and therefore is an acceptable cost to allow even more truly decentralized systems? I'm just thinking out loud, so maybe I am really off. But I often feel real world social dynamics are some kind of decentralized peer to peer and federated hybrid, and a platform with those characteristics could be successful if it got key elements right.
    - jghn 3y ago
      Would this model support true global search? As in searching across all posts? On twitter that was straightforward as there is a single server. For federated models it requires the search engine to be able to discover everything, not just to what it is connected
      - derbOac 3y ago
        That's a good question. I'm not sure it could support true global search but I don't know... my guess is there'd probably be some probabilistic guarantee but not much beyond that?
  - crq-yml 3y ago
    The dark forest is usually applied as the converse of a panopticon: a society where things are illegible and private as a normal way of conducting one's business, versus one which is maximally surveilled and made legible to a state. There's a very palpable tension and oscillation between these two extremes in everyday life: school is designed in the mode of a panopticon - a place where you are watched and examined for your benefit - while a dimly lot nightclub is more of a forest, a place where you can stay lost in the crowd and it's not clear how attractive you are. Applying the wrong degree of legibility to the situation is not beneficial - for example, schools in many countries have moved away from publicly posting everyone's exam scores to avoid the negative effects of humiliation, while drinking establishments know that they have to kick out creeps that make other customers uncomfortable, so they do monitor things discreetly. Socially speaking, we just did the panopticon online, that was 2010's social media - a moment where you were encouraged to post with your legal name, photograph, job title, age, etc. The dark forest was the thing we had in little niches of the Internet before that, and the thing we might be looking towards again.
    - 0xEF 3y ago
      This is a great comparison to make. I hadn't really considered this before from the privacy standpoint, so this gives me something to chew on. Appreciate it!
alphakilo 3y ago
I think farcaster has a much more interesting future given client diversity and protocol extensions Didn’t see it mentioned in the article surprisingly
- mplewis 3y ago
  I’ve never heard of Farcaster.
  - a_random_canuck 3y ago
    Probably because it’s crypto-based (blockchain) and required a $5 sign up fee to join… so it’s mostly attracted crypto folks.
    - alphakilo 3y ago
      Free with a US phone number Also most of it is off the blockchain, just accounts are on chain
    - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
      .... wouldn't a database be more efficient :-)
      - alphakilo 3y ago
        More efficient at what? A database would not provide the decentralization the farcaster protocol requires
  - alphakilo 3y ago
    Definitely recommend checking it out
ranger207 3y ago
I'm afraid that Bluesky's approach to moderation is one of the worst possible ways to do it. When the internet was first starting to be mass adopted in the 90s, there was optimism that having access to such a huge variety of viewpoints would expand people's horizons. Instead, what seems to have happened is that people could find the group of people that shared their exact viewpoint, and ignore every other viewpoint. Bluesky's "choose your own moderators" approach gives a lot of power to the mods to set those viewpoints and block out anything else. I'm not sure what the solution is to getting people's viewpoints widened again (it's certainly not Twitter or YouTube's approach of throwing controversial content at you and letting you find the people in the comments that explains why your side of the controversy is right and everyone else's is wrong), but this isn't it. Ultimately I see Bluesky's technical aspects as mostly social signalling to the appropriate groups of Twitter power users rather than a fundamental shift in social media.
- 5636588 3y ago
  It's understandable to feel disillusioned by the current state of online discourse. Expecting social media platforms alone to broaden horizons is akin to relying solely on a library's size to educate the illiterate. Perhaps it's time for a more holistic approach to digital literacy and critical thinking, rather than outsourcing the responsibility to tech giants like Bluesky.
- ragebol 3y ago
  If people can choose their own moderators, then they can choose to have one that does allow wiew-broadening content, but eg. presented without conspiracy loonies, hate, violence. Imagine there's a checkmark: "only stuff I agree with". At least it would be explicit that way. Or have a slider of how often am opposing view comes by, so you can control how often you get worked up. One can dream...
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    > without conspiracy loonies The term "conspiracy theory" was invented by the CIA after Kennedy's head exploded shortly after he started to move to withdraw from Vietnam. It was later used on people who didn't buy the Iraq WMD story. It was used on people who suspected mass government spying before Snowden proved them right. Recently it was used for people who thought a US funded biolab experimenting with making bat coronaviruses miles from the epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak was suspicious. You can try to censor untrue things but censoring "conspiracy loonies" means sticking to the mainstream narratives, for that you can go on Reddit and watch CNN.
intended 3y ago
I'm betting, this is how tech firms offload content moderation work in its entirety. Between this, and GenAI (LLMs), the argument for dumping trust and safety onto T&S firms sounds like an inevitability. So I really hope this works. One blind spot that I hadn't thought about was when people share non-consensual content about you. Right now I don't see any recourse for coordination problems that need the whole network to co-operate. As a result, I think that there will always be a force that centralizes networks. Not just because big-brother, but because citizens don't accept some types of behavior, even if you do it in your own home.
KenArrari 3y ago
I think the idea of "decentralized moderation" misses the point of why people ultimately want moderation to begin with. People didn't want to ban Trump from twitter because they didn't want to see him. They didn't want anyone to see him because they didn't want him to galvanize his base. The trick is that he still had the option of going to other websites (that no one uses) but obviously that came at the cost of losing most of his audience. Switching moderators or such won't do that.

101 points by hn_acker 3y ago

What will be very cool will be making it feasible for non-technical folks to easily stand up servers and make federation much more of a dark forest model. I was hoping this was the direction Mozilla would take when they invested in building with Mastadon. Essentially, it should be possible to have social tooling in a Wordpress-like ecosystem where developers can create different modules and plug-ins, where people can charge for hosting, building out instances, etc but the code itself is FOSS, and where we can use decentralized experiments to learn what we actually want as far as social tech goes, not just emulate existing platforms with feeds and vanity metrics.

0xEF 3y ago
I keep seeing people use "dark forest" and I think I may have a different understanding which leaves me wondering "why would you want this to happen?" My take on the dark forest comes from game theory, where nobody is working with complete information (in extreme summary) which sounds like a bad idea if we use it as a social goal. I've always felt like we are currently in the dark forest stage, but the goal should be to get out of it. Perhaps my understanding is flawed? What is your take or how did you intend to use the phrase?
- derbOac 3y ago
  Not the OP, but their comment and your question got me thinking. Sometimes I get the sense that true decentralization could get people to 90% of how they actually use things like Twitter/X, and federation (including major hubs) gets you to the remaining 10%. What I often see is people following a certain number of people, often those they "know", either in real life or online, supplemented by a smaller number of bigger, more distant sources. Along these lines, what I could see working is something that's like Matrix, but where explicit groups/rooms aren't there, and defined implicitly by social networks. A bridge between something like bluesky and matrix. I think the "dark forest" part comes in with the idea that maybe a certain lack of knowledge is ok, or inevitable, just like the real world, and therefore is an acceptable cost to allow even more truly decentralized systems? I'm just thinking out loud, so maybe I am really off. But I often feel real world social dynamics are some kind of decentralized peer to peer and federated hybrid, and a platform with those characteristics could be successful if it got key elements right.
  - jghn 3y ago
    Would this model support true global search? As in searching across all posts? On twitter that was straightforward as there is a single server. For federated models it requires the search engine to be able to discover everything, not just to what it is connected
    - derbOac 3y ago
      That's a good question. I'm not sure it could support true global search but I don't know... my guess is there'd probably be some probabilistic guarantee but not much beyond that?
- crq-yml 3y ago
  The dark forest is usually applied as the converse of a panopticon: a society where things are illegible and private as a normal way of conducting one's business, versus one which is maximally surveilled and made legible to a state. There's a very palpable tension and oscillation between these two extremes in everyday life: school is designed in the mode of a panopticon - a place where you are watched and examined for your benefit - while a dimly lot nightclub is more of a forest, a place where you can stay lost in the crowd and it's not clear how attractive you are. Applying the wrong degree of legibility to the situation is not beneficial - for example, schools in many countries have moved away from publicly posting everyone's exam scores to avoid the negative effects of humiliation, while drinking establishments know that they have to kick out creeps that make other customers uncomfortable, so they do monitor things discreetly. Socially speaking, we just did the panopticon online, that was 2010's social media - a moment where you were encouraged to post with your legal name, photograph, job title, age, etc. The dark forest was the thing we had in little niches of the Internet before that, and the thing we might be looking towards again.
  - 0xEF 3y ago
    This is a great comparison to make. I hadn't really considered this before from the privacy standpoint, so this gives me something to chew on. Appreciate it!

alphakilo 3y ago

I think farcaster has a much more interesting future given client diversity and protocol extensions Didn’t see it mentioned in the article surprisingly

mplewis 3y ago
I’ve never heard of Farcaster.
- a_random_canuck 3y ago
  Probably because it’s crypto-based (blockchain) and required a $5 sign up fee to join… so it’s mostly attracted crypto folks.
  - alphakilo 3y ago
    Free with a US phone number Also most of it is off the blockchain, just accounts are on chain
  - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    .... wouldn't a database be more efficient :-)
    - alphakilo 3y ago
      More efficient at what? A database would not provide the decentralization the farcaster protocol requires
- alphakilo 3y ago
  Definitely recommend checking it out

ranger207 3y ago

I'm afraid that Bluesky's approach to moderation is one of the worst possible ways to do it. When the internet was first starting to be mass adopted in the 90s, there was optimism that having access to such a huge variety of viewpoints would expand people's horizons. Instead, what seems to have happened is that people could find the group of people that shared their exact viewpoint, and ignore every other viewpoint. Bluesky's "choose your own moderators" approach gives a lot of power to the mods to set those viewpoints and block out anything else. I'm not sure what the solution is to getting people's viewpoints widened again (it's certainly not Twitter or YouTube's approach of throwing controversial content at you and letting you find the people in the comments that explains why your side of the controversy is right and everyone else's is wrong), but this isn't it. Ultimately I see Bluesky's technical aspects as mostly social signalling to the appropriate groups of Twitter power users rather than a fundamental shift in social media.

5636588 3y ago
It's understandable to feel disillusioned by the current state of online discourse. Expecting social media platforms alone to broaden horizons is akin to relying solely on a library's size to educate the illiterate. Perhaps it's time for a more holistic approach to digital literacy and critical thinking, rather than outsourcing the responsibility to tech giants like Bluesky.
ragebol 3y ago
If people can choose their own moderators, then they can choose to have one that does allow wiew-broadening content, but eg. presented without conspiracy loonies, hate, violence. Imagine there's a checkmark: "only stuff I agree with". At least it would be explicit that way. Or have a slider of how often am opposing view comes by, so you can control how often you get worked up. One can dream...
- willcipriano 3y ago
  > without conspiracy loonies The term "conspiracy theory" was invented by the CIA after Kennedy's head exploded shortly after he started to move to withdraw from Vietnam. It was later used on people who didn't buy the Iraq WMD story. It was used on people who suspected mass government spying before Snowden proved them right. Recently it was used for people who thought a US funded biolab experimenting with making bat coronaviruses miles from the epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak was suspicious. You can try to censor untrue things but censoring "conspiracy loonies" means sticking to the mainstream narratives, for that you can go on Reddit and watch CNN.

intended 3y ago

I'm betting, this is how tech firms offload content moderation work in its entirety. Between this, and GenAI (LLMs), the argument for dumping trust and safety onto T&S firms sounds like an inevitability. So I really hope this works. One blind spot that I hadn't thought about was when people share non-consensual content about you. Right now I don't see any recourse for coordination problems that need the whole network to co-operate. As a result, I think that there will always be a force that centralizes networks. Not just because big-brother, but because citizens don't accept some types of behavior, even if you do it in your own home.

KenArrari 3y ago

I think the idea of "decentralized moderation" misses the point of why people ultimately want moderation to begin with. People didn't want to ban Trump from twitter because they didn't want to see him. They didn't want anyone to see him because they didn't want him to galvanize his base. The trick is that he still had the option of going to other websites (that no one uses) but obviously that came at the cost of losing most of his audience. Switching moderators or such won't do that.