This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The fact that Bluesky has some form of content moderation and has occasionally banned users for things like using racial slurs in their usernames.
Actually, Jack Dorsey may be the problem. Good to see him shift focus to that "free speech", pro-cryptocurrency platform Nostr. I see it like a containment zone for the worst people.
I think that it's hard to find a level of content control that everyone is happy with. I'd favor fewer restrictions.
But that's one thing that's nice about the Threadiverse model -- it's federated. You can have one set of restrictions on one instance, and another on another.
Beehaw has pretty good conversation. I enjoy my discussions on their communities. They have a pretty upbeat mood. It also has an extremely low bar for defederation -- it's defederated with even lemmy.world. I don't like that, would not use that as my home instance.
My home instance is lemmy.today. The admin there is aiming for not defederating with anyone. I like that. But...not everyone wants that.
Point is, there can be multiple levels of content moderation on the Threadiverse, both at the instance and community level, and people who have different preferences can have the level of moderation that they want. Some people take a free-speech-absolutist position. Others want a safe space. Some people don't want pornography on their forums. Some people only want certain types of pornography. Some people take issue with certain types of political radicalism. Some people want to associate with Threads users, and others do not.
I think that that's maybe the best of all worlds.
I agree, I have accounts on different lemmy servers depending on what slice of fedi I want to expose myself to.
He looks like if Peter Dinklage had a baby with John Krasinski
He looks like a child wearing a fake beard while standing on another child's shoulders in a trenchcoat
"I went to the bluesky board meeting today, I did a business!"
I can see it
Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. … But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it. That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company.”
This is the same problem that all these "free speech platforms" keep running into. Some people will abuse free speech - if nothing else, I think everyone can agree spam is a type of abusive speech. But the difference between abusive speech and ordinary speech isn't a sharp line, and the definitions of "abuse" will vary. So there needs to be some mechanism or rules for deciding what that line is. But all the people that create these platforms instead wanna pretend that line doesn't exist, so they don't create a means of determining it. So then "abuse" becomes whatever the users demand and/or the decisionmakers decide it is. Which is exactly the same as having no free speech to begin with.
Which is why I applaud Bluesky’s innovative approach to moderation. It’s truly decentralized and decoupled from the server you’re signed up to.
what
Bluesky has moderation accounts you can follow like regular accounts that basically flag or hide posts according to how you configure them. This differs from the Fedi model where your chosen instance dictates what you see. There is the standard account that every user follows by default, but even that can be configured to your liking. And if you don’t want it on, you can disable it and follow a different account that moderates content to your liking.
I, for once, don’t like seeing insects, something that shouldn’t be moderated because there are valid reasons for posting pictures of insects. On Bluesky, I can follow a moderation account for phobias and have it hide any pictures I wouldn’t wanna see.
Thanks to that, Bluesky is more flexible IMO and requires me to do less for more. Unlike the fediverse where I have to maintain my own filter lists which don’t always work when pictures get posted without alt text or keywords found in the filter list.
That...actually sounds cool? So why is this considered a mistake?
Because Jack Dorsey is obsessed with the same "free speech absolutism" that Elon Musk is, and he's butter that people don't want to be shown Nazi propaganda, hate speech, and all that other shit on his platforms.
Dorsey is an idiot, just like Musk. Don't let their money fool you.
I don’t know, don’t ask me. People always find stupid shit to be outraged about, but this one is really not it tbh. I personally love it and hope the Fediverse adopts something similar to it or even just reuses the same open source code for these labeling accounts (as they’re called over there), albeit adapted to the ActivityPub protocol.
So why is this considered a mistake?
I imagine that much granularity fucks with their efforts to introduce ads.
They've designed their platform so that you can outsource different aspects to different servers. So you can choose a moderator who curates your experience and that's a different person from who hosts your data, which may be different to who sorts and determines the 'top posts'.
🤡
Well that’s a TL;dr if I ever saw one
He looks like he's ready to start working on a manifesto, just gotta let the hair grow out more to match the beard
Real John Mcafee vibes
"Social media and it's consequences have been a disaster for the human race."
"I lit another fire and it also burned!" -Jack
Not coincidentally, Dorsey still has about $1 billion of his personal wealth invested in the company now known as X
HAD. Had a billion dollars...
Maybe he started with 5 or 10 billion dollars left in the company!
Honestly the short form content incentivizing formats should be dropped altogether. Short form content has pretty clearly fried people's attention spans and burnt a lot of their fuse to boot.
The incentive to be smug snappy and smarmy to own people for internet points is too much, nevermind the algorithms that more or less act as a match finder for mass shouting contests as opposed to organic socialization where people who aren't psychopaths tend to have the good sense to just ignore each other if they encounter irreconcilable differences of ethical and political values.
That's right, the echo chamber was invented by the social media companies to gaslight you for not being happy they basically play rage tinder with your feed.
tl;dr?
I don't think there's actually any evidence that short-form content reduces people's attention spans.
I think short form video specifically is pretty bad (in high volume)
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1298361/full
Even if somebody wanted to make an unmoderated ATProto app, I guess they could? Good luck with the app stores and regulators and users
ActivityPub provides the option to do just that. Anybody can spin up a server running Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma, etc... and moderate it however they like. There are a multitude of clients in app stores and an unmoderated server won't affect that because they're generic clients like web browsers. There are countries such a server could be hosted in with minimal regulations.
As for users... you'll probably get some and they'll probably be horrible. Most people will probably block your server.
You can also spin up your own Bluesky PDS (the account server) since federation is live now, or your own appview (basically the feed display server that has most of the smarts) and point your app to it, or set up your own relay (CDN like server) and point your appview and even point feed generators to it (3rd party custom feeds are supported in Bluesky)
So if you don't like the decision made by anybody else you can just replace them. And yeah, just like on Mastodon nobody's going to use unmoderated appviews, subscribe to scrappy feeds, or federate with a PDS hosting only shitty people.
Wait, did they sell Bluesky to Musk?
Wasn’t this guy hired to be some kind of poster-boy CEO because he has a highschool masturbation related injury that causes one of his arms to constantly ache? Why is he giving everyone business advice now?
Because beard.
It’s length does indicate he’s a successful man of means…
he has a highschool masturbation related injury that causes one of his arms to constantly ache
Source? I've never heard of this (never cared much about him or Twitter) and tried to look it up, but I'm not seeing it anywhere.
I don't understand how anybody can do something for a while, make millions or even billions off of doing that thing, and then they try to do other things to make more money and stay in the public eye. Just buy an island and fuck off for your remaining decades of retired decadence. What more could you want?
I don't understand how any of these visions fundamentally differ from Mastodon.
Decentralized? Yep. It's got no center. Open source? Yep, you can fork it and make your own if you want. Unmoderated? Sure, if you want that, you can set up an instance and host whatever illegal content you want. You'll have a lot of legal problems and most people don't want it, but the option exists.
Is there any point besides money and crypto bullshit? If you want to post short comments that your friends can subscribe to that isn't controlled by a big corporation that gives your data to the government... well we have that. It exists. It's pretty okay. Go use it.
The biggest individual difference is that bluesky makes identity independent of the hosting server (via cryptographic keys) and makes content location independent of the hosting server (via content addressing).
And these features together also enable more efficient caching and propagation in the network as well as enabling features like custom feeds and 3rd party moderation tooling which works the same independently of which server you're on. So Bluesky can give you a better global view of the network and more efficient communication between users on many different servers in the same thread.
Ironically enough, Jack's other favorite place Nostr (which is built as P2P with repeater nodes) is also adding moderation tooling similar to that in Bluesky (labelers making use of the content addressing and account key ID) to flag stuff
He went from looking like The Mandarin from Iron Man to wish.com late stage Tyrion.
What a clown.
Jack Dorsey is clinically insane. Stop listening to things he has to say.
Biggest mistake he made was allow Twitter to be sold to an idiot
Wait, people hate him now. I remember people loving him in the Twitter years. What happened?
Bluesky is pretty fun and I'm glad he's not there shitting it up anymore. I've only seen one nutsack on there so far.
Bluesky hasn't been hyper-commoditized yet. I don't see ads everywhere. I don't have bots jamming ׺°”˜”°º× 🎀 𝒫𝓊𝓈𝓈𝓎 𝐼𝓃 𝐵𝒾♡ 🎀 ׺°”˜”°º× into my feed. I'm not being spammed with "We noticed you haven't joined our premium service yet, but for $8/mo we'll stop showing you this message!" annoyance marketing.
But I've got no doubt its coming. It just hasn't hit that Twitter-level critical mass of users, such that enshittification turns a profit rather than curbing adoption.
