Bluesky’s having a bit of a moderation crisis, which got me thinking about the ways in which the major Twitter clones approach moderation:
#Bluesky has libertarian “free speech at all costs” moderation. #Threads has puritan neoliberal top-down moderation. #Twitter has Nazis-to-the-front anti-moderation. #Mastodon has a server covenant and vote-with-your-feet, accountable community moderation.
The first three are run by tech-bro billionaires. The latter is not. And it shows.
@MikeRiverso "if only someone could have seen this #bluesky mod problem coming - hold on [taps earpiece] - well folks I'm being informed that in fact many, many people predicted this. Maybe we should start listening to them? No? We won't be doing that? Ok, well, back to you, Dave"
@MikeRiverso I contest that voting with your feet is either practical (too hard and you lose too much) or effective in influencing admins. This is a much takes up fallacy, not least by admins and Eugen.
Maybe we can try to choose instances where admins listen, but TBH I have still not seen them take any notice or actively seek the views of their account holders.
Moderation is usually much better here because of who the admins are and why they do this but there's no democracy.
@happyborg yeah, it’s not particularly easy to leave, but it is at least possible. This gives admins some incentive to listen to their users. Better than nothing.
@MikeRiverso Thinking about a couple months ago when Bluesky announce their fancy Hive AI moderation, that was going to solve the problem with minimal human staffing.
@MikeRiverso I honestly think that in the long run the only sustainable models are Threads (I'd call it the corporate 'Disney approach') and Mastodon's (small, approachable, pragmatic). The whole 'ultimate free speech' idea is just always going to devolve into nastyness because the biggest bullies get free reign and take over.
@toon I’ve been thinking this more and more lately. As much as find threads to be a dystopian nightmare in many ways, it’s also light and fun so far. There may be a place on the internet for both Threads as mainstream social networking and Mastodon as a sort of counter-cultural or more Tech-savvy community.
That said, Threads let’s Libs of TikTok hang out on their site and that’s not a good overall sign.
@ummjackson The promise of Bluesky is that it’s eventually supposed to be a decentralized protocol, so o have a feeling they won’t ever aim for a trust and safety team. They think the community can work it out.
@MikeRiverso Moderation is a mix of instance-based (once they enable federation) like Mastodon and user-controlled where you essentially subscribe to block/mute lists and custom feeds.
Once they enable federation, prove it can scale, and become an actual open protocol vs. just a single closed invite instance, it's honestly not too dissimilar than Mastodon, just slightly different tech/architecture.
Right now it's fully centralized and they don't have a T&S person on the team.
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