a really wild thing right now is that Bluesky has no clear moderation policy in practice, is under no pressure to make one, and does not have a reliable mechanism for users to report things to admins.
even wilder is that a great deal of bluesky's power users are so biased against fedi that they will plug their ears and start yelling if you try to mention that millions of us enjoy functional moderation over here
its such a lesson to me in the need to always be challenging our own assumptions
@seachanger
I am blissfully ignorant of all the alternatives to this venue. I find plenty of interesting things to enjoy, to learn, to sometimess express an opinion on. I am fortunate not to attract trolls, but if I did I would just block and report and move on. I don't have the time nor energy to waste on the others, which one does what better, etc.
I
Just
Don't
Care
@seachanger It's odd to me that the framing is usually 'mastodon will NEVER work' or 'fedi is a joke' or 'decentralized? no one cares!'
Like it's usually extremely strongly worded, not hedged at all, and very dogmatic. That pretty much reflects the way it's been framed by tech journalists too but it's grating to see the same take recycled over and over. Even the Bluesky haters here often have more nuanced critiques.
one thing that might help is some current & fact-based journalism about racism across the post-twitter diaspora, what we're all learning about moderation by having to figure it out ourselves, and how things are changing (or not) as various platforms/ servers evolve.
people forget that we're exploring extremely dynamic systems right now. and in rapidly changing systems, the stories we tell & amplify have a lot of power to break new ground, or sadly, to keep us spinning in negative feedback loops
what I really want to keep telling bluesky is you guys could just start a fediverse server, pay someone to develop quote tweet capacity and set your own moderation how you like it and be up and running in like a week 😆
no need to keep begging Jack’s crypto devs to create moderation they seem to be opaquely but firmly opposed to
Well don't start a server with Mastodon in the name or mastodon GMBH Will come after you and insist you use Mastodon.
Jack's devs want people building networks. When it's cool and trendy they can get advertising money and then they can rugpull and let polite nazis in to get rageclicks to boost that ad revenue.
He's speedrunning Twitter in a "defederated" hat and is banking on people not seeing through him.
The MastoHOA is real but mods are responding in real time.
@seachanger To be fair calling them "Jack’s crypto devs" is using the same kind of misleading words you're saying Bluesky users of do when talking about Mastodon. 🙃
@seachanger The subsequent edits make the original statement a whole lot less gratuitous, so I appreciate them. To clarify the funding actually came from Twitter, not Jack Dorsey. Bluesky is a public benefit corp, not related to Jack Dorsey, though he is 1 of the 3 board members. He does seem to not be a fan of their direction specifically because it’s not crypto-related like Nostr, which is where he’s been spending his time and energy.
@seachanger As for the devs, the CEO Jay Graber did have a history in crypto leading zcash but they’ve been very open about how crypto isn’t built to solve this problem, and have designed the protocol with no connection to crypto. It’s easy to mistrust but so far as someone who’s been very actively following the project and has a history working in this space I’ve had no reason to not believe them based on their public statements and their work so far.
@seachanger I’m not really sure what to say, they’re still running on the initial grant of $15 million and have that money for a long time without undue influence. They’ve been very publicly open about how they don’t have nor want involvement with crypto, and given everything I’ve seen firsthand/following along very closely I’m willing to take what they’re saying at face value because it lines up. I’m not trying to convince you, and if I end up being wrong I’ll gladly and publicly own up to it.
@seachanger My point was meant to be that a lot of people on Bluesky are making comments about the fediverse without following the project very closely, and people on Mastodon are also making a lot of comments about Bluesky without following along or understanding the project. I probably shouldn’t have called out your word choice, but it caught me as an example of this kind of behavior, but honestly I probably should have let it go since I’m not here to bother anyone, I appreciate both projects.
@seachanger My point was meant to be that a lot of people on Bluesky are making comments about the fediverse without following the project very closely, and people on Mastodon are also making a lot of comments about Bluesky without following along or understanding the project. I probably shouldn’t have called out your word choice, but it caught me as an example of this kind of behavior, but honestly I probably should have let it go since I’m not here to bother anyone, I appreciate both projects.
@seachanger This is going to be impossible to explain in 500 chars, but directly working on this at Twitter my conclusion is that central global scale moderation is intractable. I don’t think Bluesky’s approach is libertarian, but it does give control to users over the content they see which I think is essential/actually better than what we did at Twitter. I love Mastodon’s community, plus with a 5 year headstart much more feature complete on safety, but I think it will scale globally less well.
@seachanger The two projects seem to be at very different phases so it isn’t apples to apples. We know that infinite money doesn’t build good software, it actually seems reassuring that they’re only a team of 8 rather than taking $15 million and burning it to go fast. Personally I don’t think they should have opened up so soon, but it’s clear to me that they’re still in the phase of building foundational primitives like federation, user controls, etc, all of which exist but as beta level tools.
@seachanger I think that’s pretty fair, but also assumes a lot of intent about “Bluesky beta users” as a monolith versus what I’ve seen. What I’d say is that I trust the Bluesky folks to build a protocol 100x more than to run a social network, so the median outcome in my head is that they build a successful protocol for social media that gets adoption, but long term the Bluesky server doesn’t fulfill the hopes of Twitter users migrating over there because of the moderation issues you raised.
@seachanger You should be able to! Bluesky released a federation sandbox last week, which is letting users experiment with how federation will work. Just like on Mastodon you can federate, defederate, use the main server, or join any server. There are already more tools* available on a Bluesky server for controlling the posts users see, which I’d love to see Mastodon adopt.
Asterisk because I wouldn’t call all of ‘em production ready, though some definitely are.
@seachanger I’m curious too, but right now think any number anyone throws out will be pretty much hypothetical. Plus it took Mastodon a long time to bring the hosting costs down, they had to find the right strategies for their problems (like frequently dumping media caches or changing what data was included to federating servers) and so will Bluesky.
@seachanger Same, glad it went well! (I’m actually boarding a flight now so I wasn’t going to be able to respond anyway. 😂) While I’m visibly aware of the problems you mentioned I honestly haven’t experienced any of them on Bluesky myself yet*. I enjoy love a pocket of Mastodon but I’ve also experienced a decent amount of strange or frustrating comments, but I genuinely expect that to happen anywhere given enough visibility and a large enough community so I’m not holding it against a network.
@seachanger You don't even need to pay anyone. There are Fediverse compatible software w/QT's.
To me, the biggest issue w/Bluesky is that it's clear from their lack of understanding of the Fediverse that they haven't bothered looking. The differences aren't because they looked and found things they didn't like, but because they just ignored what was there.
I think the best-case outcome of Bluesky is that people will copy the good bits (if any) and integrate w/Fediverse and/or bridge.
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