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

• ranger_danger 1y ago
  From what I have seen, the "solution" to moderation troubles in decentralized solutions has mostly always been... more centralization.
  • threatofrain 1y ago
    ML could potentially provide a decentralized mechanism for filtering unwanted content, or even hybrid approaches. IMO the worst of content filtering (gore or other psychologically disturbing content) will soon be an automated job.
    • astrange 1y ago
      It already is and has been for a long time. The kinds of content you have to moderate are not things anyone wants to look at. The worst ones are far worse than you can imagine and the average ones are nudes of people you don't want to look at all day. This is actually today's controversy on Bluesky because the #1 attribute of its power users is they're terrified of "AI" and the idea that "companies will steal their posts to generate AI slop", which means they think the ML moderation is stealing their posts. Oh, but the ML can't be decentralized because the training datasets are illegal.
  • glenstein 1y ago
    The only major decentralized forms of social media that I'm aware of that have confronted philosophical questions of how handle moderation have been Mastodon, Bluesky, and arguably Lemmy. I don't know of any sense in which Mastodon has increased centralization, I think its blocking tools have been distributed essentially since the beginning, not something that has iterated toward centralization over time in response to an unfolding debate. Although it does have a complicated history and as possible that new things have happened I'm not aware of. BlueSky though, to your point, is a good example of centralization not being reliable in terms of not being accountable to users. Or for a different way of saying the same thing, the lack of accountability has served to reveal how centralized it truly is. It does seem to be simple enough that people don't get confused about using it, but it doesn't seem to walk the actual walk of decentralization.
    • ranger_danger 1y ago
      The big example that comes to my mind is Matrix, where most homeservers use Mjolnir to apply centralized public blocklists of other servers/people they don't like. So if for example #archlinux disagrees with your opinion and they decide to ban you for it, you are now banned from many other unrelated channels. I have also seen subreddits that auto-ban users that have ever posted in specific other (unrelated) subreddits.
      • Arathorn 1y ago
        Mjolnir is designed to apply decentralised public blocklists - i.e. you pick which banlists to apply; there are a bunch published by different people (matrix.org, the matrix 'community moderation effort', etc). Admittedly moderators do share lists (so that if #archlinux bans you, others might pick up the ban), but there's no intrinsic centralisation. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/proposals/2313-moderation-policy-rooms.md https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos... is how it works fwiw.
        • astrange 1y ago
          BlueSky also has this, but it works poorly because people use blocklists as a form of harassment, or else take over existing lists and add their enemies to it.
          • jazzyjackson 1y ago
            And bluesky has the ultimate power of choosing which blocklists to show you
            • astrange 1y ago
              Eh, not really. It really is decentralized, you can find them on Google. They could stop respecting a certain list but I think you can host your own AppView and get it back?
  • lanfeust6 1y ago
    Old internet was most decentralized but since the platforms weren't scaling up to ridiculous heights moderation wasn't that big of a deal. It was also "gatekept" in a self-selecting way; now, everyone is online. Conspiracy beliefs have drastically shot up in adoption, through social media exposure. People always had irrational populist and conspiratorial beliefs, but that was mediated by popular media generally not platforming kooks. Now you have the top 10 podcasts allowing people to mainline validation for conspiracies. I don't see how centralization helps. Allowing (or demanding) that a media provider to regulate more could lead to less platforming for conspiracy theorists and populists.
  • spartanatreyu 1y ago
    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.
• greekrich92 1y ago
  The founder has been posting through it, Elon-style and with as much cringe. It's disappointing because I've mostly been able to replicate my Twitter experience there. It's better actually, because more funny people moved and fewer journalists so it's less of a doomscroll.
  • astrange 1y ago
    "Posting through it" is a fairly nonsensical concept. It implies you're required to agree with people yelling at you, which you aren't. Bluesky in particular has this problem because it inherited a kind of leftist crustpunk poster from 2016 Twitter. They had a weird affect where they hated "nerds" for some reason and pretended to be those jock bully characters from 80s high school movies. The modern Bluesky form has evolved into being terrified of "AI" and screaming at anyone who uses it or has ever heard of it that it doesn't work and will never work but is also using up all the water and steals everyone's art and is going to make everyone unemployed and also you're a STEMlord who needs to take humanities classes to learn to be ethical. They're currently working on inventing new slurs for AI chatbots which are mostly remarkably offensive.
    • asadotzler 1y ago
      >They're currently working on inventing new slurs for AI chatbots which are mostly remarkably offensive. That sounds awesome. Thanks for the tip. I'm gonna join this effort immediately.
      • astrange 1y ago
        By remarkably offensive I mean they're clearly just trying to get away with saying the N-word. The full version too. You should try living your life better.
        • greekrich92 1y ago
          Saying that making jokes about inanimate probability models is comparable to saying the N word is anti-Black racism. Completely inappropriate and divorced from reality.
• complianceowl 1y ago
  All roads lead back to centralization lol.
  • pixl97 1y ago
    You can't have decentralized but connected and system level moderation at the same time. It's either centralized and moderated system wide or decentralized and moderated locally. The problem with being connected and moderated locally is your creating global moderation problems for a local system, typically that means massive amounts of work for said moderators.
• jjangkke 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • impossiblefork 1y ago
    When you say extremism and calls for violence, what do you mean specifically?
    • jjangkke 1y ago
      Hint: Trump just declared Antifa as a terror group
  • hn_throw_bs 1y ago
    Posting throwaway for obvious reasons. You’ve heard this line of thought before, and forgive me for parroting but here it goes: Bluesky attracts the same people X attracts, they just disagree on specifics which in most cases are surface level. The fanaticism and tribalism is basically the same. There is no utopia where a community is pleasant without a lot of guarding and gatekeeping and, really, viewpoint alignment and subject matter filtering. Some topics are basically there for shitflinging, and that’s mostly the topics that seem to be a hot poker for everyone. No one gets banned for preferring Debian over Fedora.
  • torben-friis 1y ago
    You can't be serious. I don't use neither X nor bluesky, but I did get an X account for a while so I could check the links in random news or conversations, and half the posts had unrelated Nazi messages just below. Not 'oh that's right wing so he's a Nazi' comments, I mean literal swastikas and kkk uniforms.
    • kstrauser 1y ago
      That's been my experience, too. I signed up with an account so I could follow some people, and my default timeline has been full of some pretty extreme stuff. For example, there were a shocking number of posts against the proposed digital ID system because it's being advocated for by "Larry Ellison, a Jew". That's a verbatim quote, BTW. Uh, excuse me? There are plenty of valid reasons to dislike Larry Ellison, but his supposedly being Jewish is 100% not one of them. But there it was, up front and proud: oppose this thing because Jews are pushing for it! That was one example of a great many loathsome things I saw there, and before anyone asks, no, I didn't see any leftwing equivalent content. Not saying it's not on there, just that it was not on my default timeline.
• mustache_kimono 1y ago
  > 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 pitchforks problem, who are asking for something which they don't have any business asking. Sure, if you want to stick your fingers in your ears, block Singal. There are widely used block lists for people who even merely follow Singal. Asking for his ban from a public use platform is too much without more than "He wrote some articles for the NY Times, The Atlantic, and NY Magazine, I didn't personally enjoy."
  • chimeracoder 1y ago
    > The problem, if you can call it that, is Singal hasn't broken any of their TOS. Well, no, he did unambiguously break the TOS back when he originally joined. Then Bluesky amended their TOS, which gave them an avenue to avoid banning him.
    • mustache_kimono 1y ago
      > Well, no, he did clearly break the TOS back when he originally joined. Care to explain? The links in the article re: potential violations are mostly BS.
      • chimeracoder 1y ago
        Doxxing people off-platform used to be against the ToS. When people began reporting him for that, Bluesky amended their ToS.
        • jrflowers 1y ago
          Yeah they changed the policy on off-site behavior to specifically allow his posts. For another example he routinely posted screenshots of posts from people that had blocked him. Block evasion is/was against the ToS as applied to most users other than Jesse Singal. People mix up “users wanting him banned for having abhorrent views” (which is the opinion of some people) with “users wanting him banned for the same stuff they see other people get banned for”. It serves as a kind of cover because even when you point to a concrete example of him violating the rules the moderation team will dismiss your report as being personally motivated. It’s a funny defense, “This guy couldn’t possibly be breaking the rules and be near-universally considered an asshole by the users on this site! It has to be one or the other!”
• andrewmcwatters 1y ago
  I don't understand how you can "ban" anyone from distributed social media. The idea seems... outdated? I mean, I get "ignoring" someone so they don't show up when you log into whatever instance you're in, whether it's the AT Protocol or ActivityPub, but like... if someone somehow decides to do work on top of one of these protocols and extend it to allow people to basically comment on things that a victim user doesn't want to allow an antagonist to take part in, I mean, aren't you just like effectively putting fingers in your ears while someone in another room talks about you? I don't see how, without centralization, you can say to the world, "Hey, here's my content, interact with it," and then also say, "Oh you, over there, you can't participate in this thing that I am doing." Like, depending on the shape of the graph, that doesn't make any sense. You effectively cannot do that without just creating a bunch of silos that are non-cooperative. Bam, you've reinvented centralization with extra steps.
  • pfraze 1y ago
    Applications on atproto run moderation as a kind of filtering layer on top of the user data. A ban in that scenario is fully filtering their account out of the application.
    • snuxoll 1y ago
      I think there’s a lot of misconceptions about atproto; unlike ActivityPub where your home server runs both the application as well as stores your data, atproto is build in the concept that “applications” like BlueSky store your data inside your PDS (Personal Data Store), which may or may not be hosted somewhere else. While anybody can host their own PDS, the public bsky.app instance can and will “block” users by preventing their login and not pulling data from the PDS of the banned user or showing it in feeds. Since, to date, the BlueSky “AppView” (the service backend itself that handles aggregating data, generating feeds, etc.) continues to be closed, being banned from the public instance is effectively being banned from the network. The data model (lexicon) is well documented and somebody else is free to write their own, but, for now, BlueSky is just as centralized as other platforms even if you can store your data elsewhere.
• pessimizer 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • andrewmcwatters 1y ago
    Do you mean "misandry?"
    • chimeracoder 1y ago
      > Do you mean "misandry?" No, OP is being transphobic and referring to trans women as men: > Note that the "banning controversy" is that they're not banning enough people for having entirely mainstream political opinions, and mostly targets journalists. Or let's be more specific: mostly targets people who don't think that men can identify into being victims of misogyny.
      • AlexandrB 1y ago
        While I can't read OP's mind, there is a problem with bad actors abusing pro-trans policies to benefit themselves. One of the most outrageous examples is the literal Nazi[1] who started identifying as female after being sentenced. Some gatekeeping is required here. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3r4zrg35vlo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3r4zrg35vlo
        • deleted 1y ago
          [deleted]
      • andrewmcwatters 1y ago
        Oh, I see.
      • spooon 1y ago
        [flagged]
  • Covzire 1y ago
    I call it the "unaccounted-for activist problem". Certain people will, without fail, like clockwork, if given the chance, ban or "silence" a LOT of other people from anywhere and everywhere that they can whether a bus, a playground, a public or private space, or a social media site. You have to account for these kinds of people, and you have to see through their bullshit of "speech is violence", no violence is violence and speech is speech and any platform that confuses the two will either fail or enslave everyone to many other lies.
• AlexandrB 1y ago
  > 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. So the expectation is that the vice president of the United States should be banned because he says stuff people don't like? What's the benefit of ignoring reality like this? He's not going to magically disappear if Bluesky bans him - indeed he'll remain VP with all the power that entails. This is worse than performative activism, it's like some kind of political denialism. You can't change reality by pretending it doesn't exist.
  • packetlost 1y ago
    When speech is violence, allowing someone a platform is akin to being party to and supporting <insert -ism>.
    • ogou 1y ago
      Speech is not violence.
      • oxonia 1y ago
        I think packetlost knows that. I think the argument being put forward was that "if you are the kind of person that thinks that speech is violence, then you would believe that allowing someone a platform..."
      • hackable_sand 1y ago
        Don't be naive.
        • kbelder 1y ago
          Ouch!
      • laughing_man 1y ago
        True. People define the speech of others as violence because they think it makes a violent response into self defense. It isn't true and never has been. If you're responding to speech with violence... you're the baddie.
• jrsdav 1y ago
  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.
  • throwawayqqq11 1y ago
    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.
    • astrange 1y ago
      He kind of did this by making it so you can see the posts of people who block you. Of course, he did this because he's so annoying everyone blocked him.
      • NoGravitas 1y ago
        Also, so that if you have a lot of followers and someone blocks you, you can send your followers to harass them.
    • thrance 1y ago
      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?
• derbOac 1y ago
  I much prefer Bluesky to X but have had a hunch this was coming due to everything I've read about the practicality of running a Bluesky protocol service. I still think there's room for something better technically. Mastodon seems more true to the decentralized ethos but I've never quite gotten used to the server dependency experience. Nostr appeals to me technically but every time I'm on it seems swamped completely by discussion of cryptocurrency. I guess to me it feels like one of these catch 22 (necessary but not sufficient?) problems where you have to have the right technical base for a platform, which seems doable, but even then you have to have the right userbase also.
  • slg 1y ago
    It always comes back to the userbase. I don't know how many times technologists need to learn the lesson that normal people simply don't care about ideological technical principles like decentralization and often actually prefer the benefits of centralized systems like ease of use and typically stronger moderation. And when it comes to social media, businesses are naturally going to end up prioritizing the desires of the majority of their userbase.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • terminalshort 1y ago
      Correction: businesses are naturally going to end up prioritizing the desires of the majority of their customers And for social media that isn't their userbase.
      • slg 1y ago
        That remains to be seen. Typically, the userbase is the product for a social media company, not their customers. Which means without a sizable enough userbase, there is nothing to actually sell to their customers. Bluesky has claimed to be different, but they are very much still in the early phase of trying to attract enough users so they need to cater to those users' priorities and decentralization simply isn't a priority that will attract many users.
• Simulacra 1y ago
  "..systems that reward outrage only make the problem worse.” I think this is what a lot of social media has become, particularly as people isolate themselves to only those sources and feeds they agree with.
  • layer8 1y ago
    I upvoted you, and at the time I believe that the core of the problem is having ranking and reaction mechanisms.
    • laughing_man 1y ago
      But don't you have to have some sort of ranking system for discoverability?
      • mattgreenrocks 1y ago
        That's a self-inflicted wound caused by the need for massive scale. Focused user communities don't need to rely on crowds to assist in moderation.
      • layer8 1y ago
        You really don’t. You discover sites (like this one) and interesting people by word-of-mouth. Within a site (forum or blog), recency, topical categories, sorting and (full-text) searching are sufficient. That’s how the web mostly worked 20+ years ago. You can have personal rankings, for example people reporting on the most interesting things they’ve recently seen. But these will be individual lists, not aggregated by an algorithm over all user behavior. You certainly don’t need likes and other reactions, and you also don’t need up- and downvoting of contributions. Those set the wrong incentives and do more harm than good overall, IMO. You do need reporting of problematic content, but only site moderation will see those.
  • beardedetim 1y ago
    This is the reason I left the "main" social media and what keeps me from engaging too much with Reddit/HN or any of the other new hotness like Mast, nostr, BlueSky, etc: it's just rage baiting or karma farming
• ogou 1y ago
  This is not a general problem with moderation there, centralized or decentralized. This particular issue is specific to a large group of people that don't like Jesse Singal and have been trying to get him removed from Bluesky. It hasn't worked and that group is trying all kinds of way to reframe the narrative to get leverage. All the padding this post adds around that is neotechnical jargon slop.
  • wmf 1y ago
    The more interesting part of the article, completely unrelated to Jesse Singal, is that Bluesky bans also apply to Blacksky because Blacksky can't afford to run their own moderation.
    • ogou 1y ago
      According to the post, it's a usability issue of the open source app layer and not some failure of moderation principles. "Blacksky is dependent on Bluesky’s application server to give users a fast experience, which also means that it is dependent on Bluesky’s labeling system and its moderation choices." Also, Singal's name is mentioned multiple times throughout the the article in irrelevant contexts. I still see the agenda here and I've seen this tactic before.
• rdtsc 1y ago
  > But not everyone is looking forward to the idea: “I’d go back to Usenet before I went back to Mastodon,” wrote Bluesky user Count Von Horse Knuckler. “I do not need people yelling at me for not putting cat pictures behind trigger warnings or unwanted Linux advice.” Cat pictures need a trigger warning? Wonder what the triggering effect is there? I can see Linux advice though: kill, mount, etc.
  • diogocp 1y ago
    > I can see Linux advice though: kill, mount, etc. And cat. Some people are triggered by useless use of cat.
    • rdtsc 1y ago
      I can see that. I am even guilty of using cat a bit too much.
  • viraptor 1y ago
    > Cat pictures need a trigger warning? https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hyperbole https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hyperbol...
    • rdtsc 1y ago
      It seems a bit random though. Are mastodon people big on trigger warnings? I never signed up for it. Heck, I never signed up for twitter or bluesky either. For mastodon I considered it, but telling people "ha, ha, I am writing toots" was a little too silly, even for me.
      • viraptor 1y ago
        Not on trigger warnings, but on content warnings on general. It folds the post by default, but shows the warning description so it's useful for lots of reason. For example "USpol" is often used as common CW but not specifically TW. But it could be "boob", or "giant spider", or "furry", or "food photo", or "super long post" whatever else you think people may react to with "I wish I didn't have to see that while scrolling the timeline". It's really just about making it a nicer place to others. It's common, but it's not like people expect you to put USpol warning on posts from account which deals only with politics.
• isodev 1y ago
  The technology powering Bluesky is “inspired by” but never interoperable with existing standards or similar reference architectures. This is one’s first queue that the direction is not being open. And beyond the technical details, how can a corporation commit to transparency and non-bias when their very funding depends on it? Google already provided us with the most popular example of how this is not possible (“don’t be evil” by an ad company).
  • astrange 1y ago
    Bluesky is a PBC, which isn't a corporation exactly. Or rather it's one designed to respond to the fears of people who think corporations are required to maximize profits.
    • mh- 1y ago
      I believe a PBC designation is somewhat meaningless; OpenAI was a PBC until a few months ago.
    • asadotzler 1y ago
      PBCs are absolutely corporations. They incorporate and that makes them corporations. It's in the name for Pete's sake.
• fsflover 1y ago
  See also: Are we decentralized yet? (arewedecentralizedyet.online) 492 points by Bogdanp 38 days ago | 283 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077291
• tptacek 1y ago
  You know what they say, when you're explaining that you don't really wish death upon the CEO of the niche social network platform on which you depend, you're losing.
  • EA-3167 1y ago
    I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them. The format is the problem. The medium is the problem. Poorly moderated groups of anonymous people voidscreaming as some “this will be monetized once we hit critical mass” exercise is the problem. I believe that eventually people will sort ourselves out into the masses who never really understand or accept that, and those of us who choose not to subject ourselves to something so obviously poisonous.
    • jazzyjackson 1y ago
      100% it doesn't make any sense to expect different behavior out of the same format just because you make slightly different promises about what the rules will be Bluesky has been drama central since the beginning, consisting mostly of people who thought Twitter wasn't censoring enough (or censoring the wrong people), the free speech crowd came later and, well, tested the waters and found transphobic speech was in fact not free, and that despite distributed promises, the town wasn't big enough for the two parties to coexist
      • LexiMax 1y ago
        While I agree with you, I would hesitate to be throwing stones from the glass house that is Hacker News. This place also suffers from some pretty severe systemic issues that are inherent to any site that delegates moderation responsibilities to ordinary users. Invariably, these tools get abused to silence people. The amount of greyed out and dead posts in this very comments section is exhibit A, and it's a pattern I've seen repeated in pretty much all other sites like it.
      • NoGravitas 1y ago
• TinkersW 1y ago
  From the article I got the impression Singal was some far right loon, but after looking it up.. nope, he is a liberal that said something mildly out of sync with trans activists opinions...
  • tptacek 1y ago
    No good will come of a fulsome litigation of Singal but it's fair to say that he doesn't go out of his way to avoid these controversies. Sort of like Fredrik deBoer, he's one of journalism's answers to the concept of edgelordery. People who vocally wish he was less influential would do well to remember how much juice they've been giving him.
    • mustache_kimono 1y ago
      > he doesn't go out of his way to avoid these controversies. Science journalist covering the science of perhaps the most salient social issue of our time? Don't get me wrong -- there are other really important stories which aren't being covered as well as they should be, but Singal's beat would seem to be at least as important as... most anything linked from HN on a daily basis. > People who vocally wish he was less influential would do well to remember how much juice they've been giving him. I totally agree. By turning Singal into a boogeyman he almost certainly isn't, people are only feeding his social and journalistic capital. Singal is just someone who disagrees with you (in that classically liberal 90s American sense). Efforts to cancel or ban him have made some look like they don't have actual arguments to contribute. That's how Singal makes those with opposing views look ridiculous.
      • DaSHacka 1y ago
        > That's how Singal makes those with opposing views look ridiculous. Quite frankly, he didn't have to do anything. They did that allll on their own.
    • carynh 1y ago
      > he's one of journalism's answers to the concept of edgelordery either the term "edgelord" means something very different from what it did 10ish years ago or you have a very misinformed understanding about how timid Jesse approaches online conflict. I haven't seen him initiate any form of edgy engagement in forever .. maybe ever.
• grigio 1y ago
  nostr protocol seems a better alternative
• renewiltord 1y ago
  Interesting. Reddit by contrast is moderation decentralized system centralized.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • SV_BubbleTime 1y ago
    Not really. Reddit Inc controls far more of the moderation inside subs than they let on. Their insane PE higher than nVidiaa isn’t from an AI data deal. It’s a narrative/propaganda control device.
    • arresin 1y ago
      The deal would be counted in equity
  • mpalmer 1y ago
    Nothing about reddit is decentralized in the ways that matter.
  • somat 1y ago
    Reddit is forum as a service. discord is chat as a service, fandom is wiki as a service. They all share the common goal of centralizing something that should probably not be centralized.
  • sph 1y ago
    Reddit hasn't been "moderation decentralised" for a few years now.
• viccis 1y ago
  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" when it's prohibitively difficult to access it any way other than the biggest central service. 1: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
  • Karrot_Kream 1y ago
    This is like grasping at a boogeyman web3 straw to make a point. Concretely, Bluesky has an AppView that takes posts from relays and PDSes, subscribes to moderation labelers, filters posts that have labels which have certain labels, then displays them in the browser. Blacksky is the first independent implementation of relays and other large components of the system. The default Bluesky AppView subscribes to the Bluesky Moderation labeler which cannot be disabled. No independent AppView has been made which can turn off the Bluesky Moderation labeler. That's all. I have my concerns over the network, namely DAUs decreasing and community politics, but the tech is largely a matter of time I feel. It's true that the ActivityPub ecosystem has a lot more federation happening but ActivityPub is a much older system (which itself derives from OStatus which originated in 2012-ish.) Mastodon was released in 2016. It's bound to be more federated than Bluesky.
    • hobs 1y ago
      This just reads like not a response to the problem, but instead a description of technical implementations. Concretely, nobody is going to subscribe to anything else in bsky but the default stack, anything else is unlikely to ever gain much adoption, and thus federation is basically meaningless and a technical implementation detail for how they wanted to manage their stuff.
      • cogman10 1y ago
        In fact, I'd argue that blue sky encouraged this by nerfing federation from the beginning. Rather than adopting ActivityPub, they made their own boutique protocol and put up barriers for third parties to use that protocol.
• aucisson_masque 1y ago
  How can people laugh and make meme at someone else murder ? Like the guy, hate him, but there is something that used to be shared amongst humans, it's that you respect the dead. That's just empathy. Seems like it's gone to the toilet in some part of the usa or maybe it's just weirdos on internet. Either case it's despicable.
  • JuniperMesos 1y ago
    > How can people laugh and make meme at someone else murder ? Like the guy, hate him, but there is something that used to be shared amongst humans, it's that you respect the dead. This is extremely wrong. Humans do have an impulse to show respect to the dead, even in some cases dead members of some kind of enemy community. But it is also extremely common and extremely widespread for people to celebrate the deaths of their enemies, from leftists making jokes about the death of Margaret Thatcher, to British people continuing to burn Guy Fawkes in effigy for his centuries-old act of unsuccessful terrorism, to Jews continuing to disparage Haman, some 2500 years after the events that formed the basis for the Purim festival.
    • waterheater 1y ago
      Just because something is common and widespread doesn't mean it should continue to be common and widespread, though it will continue to happen due to human nature. And yet, people striving to be constructive and positive won't celebrate the death of a stranger. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a cultural lodestar found globally for a very good reason: cheering the death of others may lead to others hoping to cheer your death, and that potential is enough to significantly curtail offers of constructive and positive assistance from the victims to the perpetrators, leading to a gradual social degradation within the perpetrators. Certainly remember and even memorialize a person's death, but the exaltation of a person's death is a sure path to cultural collapse. Now, that's assuming people are one unified group. In reality, most people are forced into an "in" group or an "out" group. The "in" group exalts the death of the "out" group member, so the "out" group members must respond in kind. That eventually leads to the degradation of both groups, leaving the "above" and "beyond" groups with the remnants. In turn, the destructive and negative conflict continues.
• yieldcrv 1y ago
  User and content bans are a great way to make money right now as partisans are super gullible If a platform doesn't ban someone: short it as people say they are cancelling If a platform does ban someone: also short it as people say they are cancelling requires a publicly traded platform like Netflix or Disney+ as significant pieces of the parent company's revenue
  • Karrot_Kream 1y ago
    I'm curious how you'd make the trade? ABC tried to cancel Jimmy Kimmel the other day. How would you have structured your short?
• jrm4 1y ago
  Mastodon is the right model. I keep saying this and I keep being surprised that it isn't more obvious to most. It's the right model because it's essentially the same model as email. Yes, there is TONS of "human" work to be done to change people's minds on this, but STRUCTURALLY it's the only one that can handle things correctly. I always found what Bluesky was "optimizing" for to be a stupid goal, and inherently a bad idea -- namely "the ability to keep your everything permanent." That's EXACTLY what brings MORE danger to centralization. I get that losing an identity on a thing sucks BUT WE'VE ALREADY DEALT WITH THIS WITH EMAIL, and more over the ability to lose/destroy/start over -- like with email -- is a FEATURE as much as it is a bug.
  • bjourne 1y ago
    Right, but email is really not all that great, neither on a practical nor technical level. 99.99% of all users doesn't run their own mail server so in practice it is not decentralized. I would guesstimate that 50% or more of all mail traffic is handled by Google, MS, Apple, and a few outer mega corps. And for most people Facebook, Slack, and WhatsApp are way more convenient communication methods than email.
    • jrm4 1y ago
      Your criticisms have some validity, but email is in a sense objectively great in that it's the thing that "won." I believe there's a universe of difference between ONE provider and a few megacorps plus weirdos like me who pay for my own domain; I actually think that would ALSO be a good model for twitter-esque microblogging the way it pretty much works for email.
  • maxerickson 1y ago
    Is there stuff in bluesky that prevents starting over?
  • TMWNN 1y ago
    >Mastodon is the right model. I keep saying this and I keep being surprised that it isn't more obvious to most. It's the right model because it's essentially the same model as email. Yes, there is TONS of "human" work to be done to change people's minds on this, but STRUCTURALLY it's the only one that can handle things correctly. How is this meltdown at Mastadon not the exact same thing as what we're discussing here regarding Bluesky? <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195> As another said here, >I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them.
• Karrot_Kream 1y ago
  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. In AP land, for better or for worse microblogging is dominated by the ad-hoc set of standards that Mastodon pioneered, and too much of the community just treats AP as "HTTP+REST JSON APIs for social" and ignores the semantic components that AP can use to interoperate.
  • pityJuke 1y ago
    Yeah. I’m not a big short form social media person, so a world with or without Bluesky (or Twitter) changes little. Bluesky has good people and communities within it, but a lot of the people on it are just a mirror reflection of the American Right. Devoid of critical thinking, they follow whatever the left cause of the day is. While that’s much preferable to Twitter in 2025 (and the right)… it’s not encouraging as for the future of, frankly everything.
    • ecshafer 1y ago
      Aheming about "the right" aside... there exists people across the political spectrum that think the way they do because of a variety of reasons. Some because they read the literature and arrived at the conclusion, some because that is the economically or socially advantage position to be in, and some because that is just their political position tautologically.
  • duxup 1y ago
    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.
    • Karrot_Kream 1y ago
• jancsika 1y ago
  They cover the possibility of people potentially migrating to Mastodon with this gem: > But not everyone is looking forward to the idea: “I’d go back to Usenet before I went back to Mastodon,” wrote Bluesky user Count Von Horse Knuckler. “I do not need people yelling at me for not putting cat pictures behind trigger warnings or unwanted Linux advice.” But I'm suspicious because: 1. That doesn't appear to be a valid Bluesky handle and, 2. Even if it's a pseudonym-- which is understandable-- how could there possibly be a former usenet graybeard who didn't love trafficking in unwanted Linux advice? Edit: clarifications
• d0ublespeak 1y ago
  I just don’t see why Joe Public will ever care about decentralisation as a concept. We tend to hand wring about principles within the tech sphere, when the bulk of people just want a place that won’t make them feel immediately (longer term doesn’t matter) crappy when they use it, whatever that means for them. That tends towards centralisation because decentralised services have awful moderation and tend to create an even stronger strain of groupthink.
  • ajs1998 1y ago
    I think Bluesky exists to demonstrate that people want the features that come with centralization without the oppressive platform lock-in. If Bluesky's moderation, TOS, UI, default feeds, etc. are intolerable to you, then you should be free to move your content and your network to an app with different moderation, TOS, feeds, etc. Bluesky isn't marketing itself as a decentralized platform because it's not. It's an opinionated view of a decentralized network, and others are free to use differently opinionated views or make their own.
  • sph 1y ago
    > I just don’t see why Joe Public will ever care about decentralisation as a concept. IME they do care, but they have no patience to deal with the hurdles that decentralisation imposes upon your user experience. So ease-of-use and convenience always win.
• tonymet 1y ago
  Left and right both gawk at each other . Bluesky was refreshing for lefties to have their echo chamber back for a time , then it got dull. Fact is pointing out others flaws is more engaging than grandstanding alone
• neilv 1y ago
  > While the ATProto system has been criticized as overly complicated compared to the ActivityPub system that powers the Fediverse, it has one key feature that ActivityPub lacks: the ability to transfer servers while keeping all of your followers and posts. FWIW, it looks like Mastodon software has some features for moving servers, including bringing your followers, but not your posts: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
  • itake 1y ago
    My understanding is Mastodon requires the server to be complicit with the transfer (online and redirecting requests to the new destination). If your host server is offline or not willing to migrate your data, you can't move. In the AT protocol, your identity isn't tied to a server. You don't need the older server's consent or support to have a new identity somewhere else.
    • danillonunes 1y ago
      > In the AT protocol, your identity isn't tied to a server. It kinda is. Your identity is in the hands of whoever controls the PLC Directory. You can argue this is better than having your account and identity on the same place, but it still a third party that you depends on.
  • itsmartapuntocm 1y ago
    Some implementations, like GoToSocial, do support importing posts from another instance.
• neilv 1y ago
  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/ https://joinmastodon.org/
  • viraptor 1y ago
    > 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.
    • neilv 1y ago
      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.
  • TMWNN 1y ago
    >But HN members who aren't mass-marketing could change that, by moving to the Fediverse -- giving it their endorsement, and network effects. Why? Why should HN members, or anyone else, move to another network with the same kinds of fragmentation and mutual mass bannings (and/or demands for mass bannings) that we are talking about here with Bluesky? See, for example, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>
• danpalmer 1y ago
  I'm disappointed in what has happened, but I think Bluesky/AT Proto presents a better direction and I hope that this is just a period of adjustment. There are essentially two tiers of moderation on Bluesky – that provided by Bluesky themselves, and community moderation. The community moderation is powerful and I use it fairly extensively already, and my hope is that in the long term it's the community moderation that represents the bulk of moderation on the network. The problem is that Bluesky are legally required, and required by app publishing platforms, to implement some moderation themselves. It seems like their approach there has been to focus on strict legalities, leaving the rest to community moderation. This is a good idea for the decentralized nature, but unfortunately some high profile individuals know how to fly under the legal limit while still being a pain. Then there's outrage at them not being banned even though community moderation thoroughly silences them for anyone who wants it. This results in hate being targeted at the Bluesky team... and eventually that hate turns into threats (perceived or real) and that results in bans. Now it looks like Bluesky are banning their critics while allowing dangerous people on the platform. Bluesky are not without fault here. They've not communicated about this well, they've not pushed community moderation well enough, and they've posted some questionable rage bait. But I do understand where they're going and think the future is ultimately bright for AT Proto and the Bluesky network.
• throwawaygmbno 1y ago
  Some US states have started trying to ban or require ID for Bluesky. Is it possible to self host on your own hardware that allows somebody to get around that. If not the decentralization doesn't seem real.
  • umbra07 1y ago
    I would phrase that differently, it sounds like you're suggesting that some states have actually banned Bluesky by name.
  • extraduder_ire 1y ago
    You can circumvent that without self-hosting anything. (though self-hosting your PDS is one way to avoid all but the block on Mississippi) https://gist.github.com/mary-ext/6e27b24a83838202908808ad528b3318 https://gist.github.com/mary-ext/6e27b24a83838202908808ad528... Their official website/app are compliant with those laws when unmodified.
    • Spivak 1y ago
      This is so funny that with a self-hosted PDS you can just tell BlueSky "trust me bro." What an absolute joke these age verification laws are. We were content with "Are you 21 Y/n" for sites featuring alcohol for years, why did we have to go and mess it up?
• LeroyRaz 1y ago
  I don't understand how the removing of right wing users is described as a necessary good to create a safe and inclusive space, while the removal of left wing users is decried as censorship. If you dismiss people who have genuine concerns about things as bigoted, you yourself are being bigoted! It is as though people don't understand the definition of the word.
  • sigmar 1y ago
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    • sph 1y ago
      Who defines intolerance though? What if you call me intolerant because I do not like your favourite programming language, and have dared criticize it - is that OK? It's a recursive paradox: an intolerant person cannot define what intolerance is, but that's what often happens in reality.
      • jrflowers 1y ago
        There are quite a few solutions to the paradox of tolerance. One of which was even articulated by the guy that coined the term, which the wiki link covers. I also recommend https://medium.com/extra-extra/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376 https://medium.com/extra-extra/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-prec...
        • belorn 1y ago
          The article mostly redefine the question about tolerance as being a strategy for peace, one which will be given up when war is unavoidable. It not so much a solution to the problem of tolerance and more of a description of the motivations behind the who deploy it. As an effect it also reject the concept of an intolerant person, as there are only people with different views about what constitutes an acceptable state of peace and what represent real and present danger. If the left view the right as jeopardizing safety, and the right view the left as jeopardizing safety, then existential conflict is inevitable and tolerance as a strategy is dropped by both.
• trinsic2 1y ago
  > On Friday, Graber turned more serious in her pushback: “Harassing the mods into banning someone has never worked. And harassing people in general has never changed their minds,” she wrote, adding later that: “Yet it’s a behavior that persists across social media anyway, with negative consequences for civil discourse and society. Human nature is a contributing factor, but systems that reward outrage only make the problem worse.” I think the goal of pushing many of these harassment's forward, is to further have a reason to force these platforms to clamp down on its users to push the agenda of needing to control speech. The people who benefit directly are government insiders that want to wield power over the population. Its very similar to what I suspect the RIAA did during the file sharing craze. They would post there own content to force these platforms into submission. IMHO. Decentralization is just another way to centralize control at choke points. The only way to make these systems censor proof is to have them built on distributed networks[0]. Secondly any for profit entity that pushes a platform is going to want control over the platform and as such be diametrically opposed to freedom of expression. Look at BitTorrent as an example. Its been working for years. yes they can poison nodes, but its clearly much more resistant to these kinds of attacks then our current iteration of social media platforms. Why do we keep buying into platforms that doing give us what we need? Also I'd be very wary of any overly complicated system designed to make it very difficult to understand the process of connecting to peers. Complication is usually a way to obfuscate the technical process of a system to prevent people from making any meaningful changes to it. [0]: https://medium.com/distributed-economy/what-is-the-difference-between-decentralized-and-distributed-systems-f4190a5c6462 https://medium.com/distributed-economy/what-is-the-differenc...
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• jokoon 1y ago
  I just browse hashtags of art and pixelart, and I encounter a lot of furry penis porn The internet is weird sometimes
• rsynnott 1y ago
  This leaves the biggest question, why they're broken on Blacksky, too, unanswered. My general understanding was that this should _not_ happen.
  • extraduder_ire 1y ago
    Their CEO, Rudy, explained it in a thread here: https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7r6qv3rw/post/3m2n62lo6v22p https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:w4xbfzo7kqfes5zb7...
    • rsynnott 1y ago
      Ahhh, makes sense. I vaguely thought they already had an app-view, though looks like they will soon!
• incomingpain 1y ago
  >encouraging them to make lists of accounts that could be automatically blocked or labeled—and thereby removing itself as much as possible from moderation decisions and thereby reinforcing their echo chamber with efficiency. This week one of the youtubers I like, Canadian auto mechanic who typically focuses on canadian politics. He decided to join bluesky. I commented that he's going to be banned by the end of the day. He replied that he is avoiding usa politics and controversial subjects. He ended up banned on the second day. No specific example, just that his account was reviewed and he's banned. I saw his posts, they were all tongue in cheek jokes poking fun. Absolutely no valid reason to ban him.
  • arresin 1y ago
    Which side of the political spectrum is he on?
    • cindyllm 1y ago
      [dead]
    • incomingpain 1y ago
      Very much a conservative. His most controversial post on bluesky that I saw, he commented on Obama saying that perhaps they should just shutdown the government and with the saved tax $, they can afford to buy healthcare.
• rendall 1y ago
  > ...and anti-trans writer Jesse Singal This is a really dumb article, starting with this example. Singal is not anti-trans and never has been. He wrote critically of methodologies used by key papers that are cited in support of affirmation in youth gender medicine. That is it, and all it ever was. For that he was canceled. Ridiculous.