I think it's interesting in obvious ways and risky in some less obvious ones (that have less to do with "O NO BILLIONAIRES" or "O NO LIBERTARIANS" and more to do with placelessness), but we'll see.
I hope good things emerge from/grow on top of this framework.
[I recognize that mentioning this is widely considered to be an invitation to explain capital like I am a tiny baby. You could also not.]
@kissane the placefulness of Mastodon and the extended microblogverse is its greatest flaw IMHO.
Instead of using AP servers as post-office relays for our digital letters, we’ve effectively been moved to live inside the post offices just to make it easier for the servers to send letters on our behalf.
The discussion groups of the threadiverse however do make sense as places we can visit with our independent identities.
I need separation between my place of living and place of discourse.
@erlend I wouldn't say that I'm arguing for the current Mastodon model, exactly. More like I'm trying to take the techno-cultural (sorry) complexes apart so I can try to understand which things are "really there" and which are just emergent phenomena/ v i b e s that sneaked in because of our experiences elsewhere.
@ggpsv I’m arguing that #threadiverse platforms like Lemmy, kbin et.al. is where we should go for place, which will include Mastodon once it implements Groups.
I don’t have any sense of place on Mastodon, as it is chiefly oriented around people. I can’t easily visit Erin’s mas.to or your social.coop.
But root identity provisioning needs to be extricated from all of the above, in favor of the #nomadicidentity which Bluesky has gotten 80% figured out already and working in practice.
@erlend@kissane
Suggestion that folks who have no sense of community on their own instances tend to project this as an assumption onto the rest of the fediverse. I assure you that others of us are experiencing a profound sense of instance-community on the kinds of servers which organize around and foster the community principle
@erlend@kissane Completely disagree. We have a opportunity to create vibrant communities on our instances. Unfortunately most instances see themselves as service providers instead of community builders.
@kissane Its a super interesting idea. Moderation as a filter vs moderation as a core community value. Plus adding in the safety team at bluesky as a legal compliance check.
Moderation is one of the great unsolved problems and it’s good to see different ideas in the space even if I suspect this one assumes positive intent by both parties through the tag system.
@kissane When Bluesky was initially announced it was already mde clear, that Jack sees moderation as a bad, costy thing and tries to shift the load from a platform that earns money to voluntary users doing the work. While the approach is technically interesting, it tries to get rid of responsibility by being able to say that you support nonprofits in doing the formerly underpaid work now. I really think this is one of the mail issues of Bluesky as it shows the main foundation idea.
@leitmedium@kissane Isn't that exactly how Mastodon's moderation works? The server admin either acts as a moderator and/or deputizes others to do so as well, almost always in a volunteer capacity.
That's my exact question too. I still have to dive into Bluesky's full implementation, but it seems like they have an additional layer of an actual trust and safety team, where Mastodon does not.
@kissane@joshwayne@mergesort BlueSky - as a commercial company that is going to earn money from what they build - makes it obvious that they consider a central moderation instance as bad because it is like a "Supreme Court". Which is by itself already a strange way of criticm. What they don't say here is: moderation costs money. Yes, it does. And social network platform hate paying people for this hard job - which is necessary and it is just fair that they do their job on a platform where they also earn money from users generating content. The result is an ecosystem where it is ok to be harassed as you are free to move to another instance. This is just making a bad system worse and selling it as a new technical feature. If BlueSky would finally agree on it's repsonsibility, building a well paid moderation team and then introduce "composable" moderation, yes, that would be fine. As it would be an addon. But this is cost reduction by technical implementation.
When Jack initially announced BlueSky the first (!) point he made was the following:
»First, we’re facing entirely new challenges centralized solutions are struggling to meet. For instance, centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people.«
So he argues that being a responsible company that is obliged to international laws - and it's users - is a "burden on people". Well: the people here is the stakeholders of billion dollar platforms. And that is what BlueSky is the solution, too.
I would have loved to see a blue sky in BlueSky but besides looking nice I mainly see a platform that aims towards deregulation.
@leitmedium@joshwayne@mergesort So, Bluesky has a large and active moderation team: They do platform-style moderation transparency reporting. Paid humans review all reports. That’s what’s actually happening. (Also there are no “instances” to move between.)
I have zero problem with critique of their model, but a lot of the discussion is remarkably decoupled from actual events.
@leitmedium@joshwayne@mergesort The usual next step is to move the goalposts and say “Ah but they won’t moderate in the future and no one can prove they will, because Jack!”
(Which, sure! Maybe they kill off all their central moderation, maybe it’s all a ruse, we can make things up forever. But I have low faith about my ability to parse out futures from inferred intent and even less about most other people’s, so it’s not a mode I find fruitful.)
@kissane@leitmedium@joshwayne@mergesort it's not just Jack though. Their documentation reflects this philosophy in parts too. Maybe they should come out and say it isn't their goal anymore if that is the case?
@vetehinen@leitmedium@joshwayne@mergesort What I’m saying kinda always is that I think it’s more useful to look at what is actually happening than to read philosophical statements and try to work out what systems they would have resulted in if they were building on a frictionless plane.
So I really value “What is the actual system and what does it do” as the soundest basis for trying to understand the (very) near future.
@kissane@joshwayne@mergesort Well, I quoted official statements and documentation, which is what I was studying for quite a while now - in order to understand what BlueSky wants to achieve in the future. If this is not the right type of discussion I am sorry for interrupting. I did not want to be alerting here or shout "Jack!!". All fine.
@leitmedium@joshwayne@mergesort Nah, that second post was me trying to get ahead of the thread's direction, not aimed at you specifically.
I think it's great to look at stated philosophy, just not in isolation, because…
>If BlueSky would finally agree on it's repsonsibility, building a well paid moderation team and then introduce "composable" moderation, yes, that would be fine.
They've also committed to doing kill-switch moderation for illegal content and network abuse (beyond-Bluesky-the-App View + official clients) across everything their relays and PDSes touch on the future ATP network. (This is a lot more central modding than happens on fedi, but still upsets a lot of people because it's less than they want, which is interesting to me.)
> (This is a lot more central modding than happens on fedi, but still upsets a lot of people because it's less than they want, which is interesting to me.)
I also find it interesting, and think it only goes to show the disparity in people's wants when it comes to moderation, which is of course only shows why having a layer of decentralization in moderation is a valuable tool. 😄
@leitmedium@kissane@joshwayne I tried to reread this five times but it's a huge wall of text so I may miss some nuance.
I worked at Twitter on societal health, misinformation, abuse, etc, in the years Twitter was supporting Bluesky.
The project didn't stem purely out of deregulation as much as autonomy. People were neverendingly upset at every content moderation decision, from all sides, an approach that allows individuals to compose their moderation preferences seems worth trying.
@kissane I am still skeptical of tag-based "moderation" if in most cases the outcome of being tagged is that some small subset of people can't see you (but you can still see them).
The fact that even this post admits that in many cases you'll have to fall back to shared, curated blocklists means there isn't much here to protect vulnerable people and communities at scale in the way that even the power of defederation allows on fedi.
@tess Yeah, I think it's a really different toolset, and it's going to produce a very different set of experiences for all kinds of actors—new affordances for protection and for harm, and the ~combinatorics are hard for me to really get a feel for. (Even blocking is meaningfully different on AT than on AP.)
I think there's a lot of thoughtfulness and care on that team and I am also deeply anxious about the whole thing.
@tess It's such an interesting (in the also-anxious sense) moment, too, because a lot of fedi movers express no interest in protecting refuge, and Mastodon (the tooling and the community substrate) has also alienated so many people.
I will say that I can imagine some extremely protective, community-grounded institutions that can be built on AT as it's speced out now that would have a very hard time on present-day fedi—and also about a thousand ways for things to go sideways.
@tess I spent a bunch of last year way down in the details of what happened with Facebook/Meta in Myanmar from roughly 2012-2018, and one of the things I came away with is the depth of hyperlocal expertise that exists within communities but is almost entirely discarded and ignored by the big platforms.
@tess If Myanmar's civil society orgs had been given tools to do/share labeling and run blocklists, they'd still have been at a disadvantage given the resources of their adversaries (who turned out to be, in part, massive Russian-style ops by Myanmar's military, but also scammers and true believers), but I think they'd have had a fighting change at exposing the networks promoting genocide.
@tess So I think there are ways in which decoupling hosting from mods is useful—a lot of the cultural expertise lies with people who can't also be technical infrastructure, and mod services that float across hosting silos can be accessible to a lot more people.
(The situation in Myanmar flipped after the coup, and now a central problem is evading government surveillance, which needs different tools.)
But I'm hoping that the most useful things from Bksy's experiments make it to fedi. 3/3
@kissane I guess maybe the ability to identify people engaging in genocidal rhetoric is useful, but if the network as a whole isn't willing or able to shut those voices down or hide them from their target audience, the stochastic terrorism (or in this case, outright genocide) still happens.
Closer to home, I think the example you use is LoTT. Raichik comes onto your platform; what do you do?
@tess I think decentralized networks are what we're going to be living with, is the thing. They're here and the central platforms desperately want out of the game of dealing with all of the big liabilities.
So if I take that as a given, then identifying, say, covert coordinated genocidal campaigns and communicating that out to humans and offering protective interventions is actually the whole ballgame. (Mastodon hosts all kinds of horrors, too, they're just shunned by mainstream coalitions.)
@tess I guess in a world where the central platforms haven't been such a gigantic failure at this stuff, I might think we should really fight to preserve them, but I have completely lost my faith in that platform structure. (Meta actively accelerated all the worst harms in Myanmar despite knowing about them. LoTT is all over the place.)
@kissane in other words the Bluesky approach seems to see moderation as a function of taste, while (at least some of) fedi correctly sees it as a function of safety.
@kissane yeah, I understand you have a much deeper academic understanding of all of this than I do, though I've been in the socmed trenches since before the Usenet Meow Wars so I have a ... well, you could say I have a lot of anecdata to draw from.
@tess Oh I mean I don't have an academic understanding of it, really.
I'm trying so hard rn to find frames that make sense of the culture/patterns side of this stuff, because I need the feel for it—and I kinda have that for fedi but not for AT. A lot of it is just experience in all those trenches, as you say—as someone who makes or exists in those landscapes—which is why I trust my doubts, and yours.
@tess I can read a dozen technical papers and still be no closer to being able to understand the future implications with my social brain, so I'm REACHING 🌬️
@kissane I think that's the problem - the solution isn't to be found in technical papers at all, but sociological and anthropological ones.
We're soo entrenched in the culture of tech that sometimes we forget that the systems we build to facilitate social interaction are the telephones, the urban planning, and a few of the laws, not the entire basis for the social structure that grows on top of them.
@tess I fully agree that tech is never complete solution but I do believe that the technical affordances we make/embrace do have real shaping effects on what we can do as humans on top of our technologies. And also what people can do to us. It would be better to get the worst people out of power, but until then…
That's kind of my whole bet in this phase of my life—working on the design of technology is probably my best lever for trying to improve the odds of communal survival. :/
I was saying here the other day that the deliberate separation of moderation from server sounds like clean design in theory, but in practice I wonder if that just means the entire network ends up hosted at the lowest cost provider because servers have nothing to differentiate on/no “identity”. Is that what you’re thinking about with placelessness?
@luis_in_brief@kissane What is the issue with not tethering identity to a server? I do think the unbundling of the services makes sense from a cost and operations perspective. It also makes sense that everything is not defaulted onto bsky, currently that’s how it is but it just further entrenches everything onto a central company. It will make more sense when there’s more platforms built upon the protocol thus creating less reliance upon bsky
@luis_in_brief you did not answer my question. The incentive is that everyone has different views of moderation. Everyone here criticises Meta yet bsky is attempting a different approach and that’s still an issue. The biggest issue with centralised moderation is the lack of consideration for culture, language, laws etc thus leading to moderating with a broad brush or moderation based on personal views which is the fedi model. Both are dangerous and not based in fairness nor true considerations. This allows people to utilise services that more align with their views, cultures, language etc and they can choose multiple services as no single service will cover all needs.
@damon I was trying to understand better before answering, but if you want the half-baked answer:
Mastodon is very imperfect, but tying moderation and server together gives a sense of place+identity that gives some motivation to actually do the (hard!) work of running distributed servers.
I don't understand the incentive to run bsky servers. If all interesting features are abstracted, you end up with email: a "distributed" protocol dominated, in practice, by Google and Microsoft.
@damon this isn't to say that it will work out in the long run for Mastodon/fediverse!
And (like I asked!) maybe there are other incentives in place to actually run bsky servers? But for the moment the best I can tell is that it is all work, no power or identity or... anything?
@luis_in_brief how so? It doesn’t do the hard work it just largely goes based on if someone or something vibes with the community. That’s group think and easier. Respecting people as individuals, respecting language, culture, country etc is hard. I often see that neglected and pushed aside here, especially language. Not sure how that’s “hard work”
@damon running any public-facing web server is hard work, with regular updates, user support, spam, etc. It can also become very expensive work, because storage and bandwidth add up quick. That's simply a fact of internet life.
In email, those costs have driven most to abandon self-hosting, giving huge market share to Google and Microsoft. As a result, every time Google makes a change to (for example) spam rules, every "independent" server has to adapt quickly—or lose more users.
@damon In Mastodon, the belief that servers are communities, with shared values (expressed in part through moderation), has encouraged people to invest and given at least some pushback against centralization.
I'm not sure that will last, but it might. I'm not clear what the similar positive dynamic is for Blue Sky.
@luis_in_brief This is different than what our conversation was focused on which was moderation. Of course most of what you’ve said is true. Yet, I’ve gotten significant pushback when speaking about fedi sustainability. People say it’s not expensive. So is it expensive or not?
@KevinMarks@dsalo@luis_in_brief honestly only in a very secondhand way, it’s been an age and a half since I read de Certeau and I got so annoyed with his prose, though I’d be less so now. But I’m working in a much simpler register tbh
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