Pretty much every failed social network out there failed because it had poor moderation tools, and this genius thinks the biggest mistake Bluesky has made is having any moderation tools at all.
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.
Between threads mastadon and bluesky, which one do you think will be the biggest in the next year? Or are they gonna all keep living in the shadow of Twitter
Given the inertia of moving social platforms and the spoiler effect of fragmentation, I assume ex-Twitter will remain the leading platform for a while still unless Musk manages to run it into the ground at record speed.
I don’t have any hard numbers on the rest, unfortunately. I personally favour Mastodon, and I believe some national governments have officially adopted it and are running their own instances, which might tip the scales a little if people see that as endorsement.
Bluesky overall seems to have the advantage in terms of marketing (probably because they have the advantage of money too). I have no idea about Threads, but being from the same company as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp may give them an advantage in terms of existing users for those services. I would expect they try to intermesh these services at one point or another.
It’s hard to predict, given that many people might just follow whatever their favourite personalities choose, and once enough users have gone there, other popular people may choose that platform too for its larger userbase, drawing more people in… It can snowball either way.
There’s also the ongoing debate about interfacing the other options with Mastodon. I’m not going to take a stance on that here, but it might be a solution to the split “some of my favourite people have gone here, the others there, but I want to keep up with both in a single app”. I think there would have to be a user-level option in Mastodon to block entire instances to allow people to choose not to get shown content from those services.
As an aside, I think that would be a good idea anyway, for Lemmy too. If I want to be able to browse All without seeing specific instances, I don’t want to have to look for an instance with that exact list of defeds.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It seems like there are some good ideas in there. Are there third parties out there running servers for each component that are open to the public yet?
Yes, there’s already some 3rd party reimplementations of both clients and PDS servers and feed generators (but haven’t heard of custom appviews yet). I don’t know anybody running an open PDS yet though, it’s mostly individuals running them
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
First, thanks for that explanation. That’s interesting.
Is there a good place to learn more? I can see why having custom feeds and 3rd party moderation tools are good, but I still have a lot questions.
First, is there a genuine benefit to dissociating a users identity from their server? I think the connection between users and their home instances are a brilliant innovation. They seem to bring village culture back to the internet. They help people associate within networks below just the global level. I think the atomization of people online has been a part of why there is so little trust.
Bluesky is open source and have a site for documentation
Splitting off identity means you can bail and take your friends and post history with you when a server either goes down, gets hacked, or if the admin goes insane, or if it gets freenoded (hostile takeover and impersonation)
On bluesky the closeness comes more from the personal connections plus the choice of feeds
You don’t need to go crypto to get there though, IPFS and similar exist and work. IPFS itself is kinda slow, but Iroh is aiming to be a more efficient alternative that solves similar problems. There are also protocols based on BitTorrent.
The way these work is basically:
users connect to relay nodes
relay nodes connect users directly
users continue communicating directly w/o any servers
Then you build stuff on top to keep everything in sync. No servers, aside from the initial connection, which means minimal risk of anything ever going down. If relays go down, anyone can set up another and people reconnect.
The problem is that step 3 is quite complicated, and there are a ton of technical complexities to synchronizing information at scale w/o a central authority. Mastodon/Lemmy/ActivityPub gets around this by having each node (instance) be a complete copy of everything that node cares about. You get a ton of duplication, and eventually that means costs pile up. With a proper decentralized system, there doesn’t need to be nearly as much duplication since you can always hop through some peers to find what you need.
You never do. Its only use case is a payment system for online crime. And even for that many criminals prefer gift cards because it’s such a hassle to explain crypto-tokens to your victims.
It’s useful for anything online where cash would be useful. So paying for services, money transfers between acquaintances, donations to charity, etc. It turns out cash is useful for crime, and privacy-focused cryptocurrencies work like cash, hence are useful for crime.
Don’t buy it as an “investment” or sign up for services to earn it, but it is useful for non-criminal things.
That’s not necessarily a given. Ethereum, for example, transitioned to proof of stake instead of mining and seems to have reduced electricity use by 99.5%. I’m not exactly sure where that number comes from, nor do I know a good way to compare crypto to other systems (e.g. do we count all the energy used by banks?).
But what I do know is that Bitcoin kinda sucks from an energy perspective, partially because they limit the number of blocks (e.g. buckets of transactions) per day, so mining is more valuable than on a currency with no such caps (e.g. more demand to mine each block = more miners = less efficiency per mined block).
What seems to be true is that cryptocurrencies have a large upfront energy cost due to speculation, and that plateaus as it hits a certain carrying capacity. So crypto scales decently well, and if you do proof of stake instead of proof of work, it seems to scale even better.
And then we get into the issue of where your energy is coming from. Since cryptocurrencies are global, they can be done anywhere energy is cheap. For example, daytime purchases can be done using excess energy in an area where it’s night. For fiat, that energy use is more local, so you’re more likely to process a transaction during peak energy use (afternoons), thus higher energy capacity needed. It’s a really complicated topic, and I’d love for someone smarter than me to break it down.
But since it’s so hard to calculate, there’s a lot of bad information, which leads to unnecessary and unfair criticism from people who don’t see value in cryptocurrencies. If you ask a crypto bro, they’ll point to the massive amount of power used by financial institutions, and if you ask someone who’s against cryptocurrencies, they’ll compare POS and minor processing use by credit card companies to an entire Bitcoin block (which has lots of transactions). I’d really like to see an updated, neutral look into it, because all the information I’m able to find has huge holes in methodology.
But all of that is kind of irrelevant to the discussion about whether it’s useful. If it’s not useful, any amount of energy use is wasteful, but if it provides value, there’s certainly an amount of energy we’re willing to spend on it, so what exactly is that amount?
Also Ethereum is extremely inefficient compared to conventional tech (like just a database). All you need is to realize that complete trustlessness is impossible to understand that a distributed ledger has no problem to solve. And that’s why there is no practical application after all these years.
But energy use isn’t as simple as measuring transaction efficiency, there’s a lot more to a currency than storing who transacted with whom. There’s:
security of transactions - fraud and whatnot
coordination costs - international transactions, etc
cyber security, websites for managing money, etc
Or in terms you’ve used, someone needs to maintain that database, that database needs to be in some facility, and someone needs to audit the database. All of that is baked into cryptocurrencies. Yet the comparisons I’ve seen either account for way too much (e.g. bank tech support), or not enough (e.g. only POS and network costs).
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.
I think it’s clear it does. Students in schools switch their attentions so incredibly quickly that it preempts any immersion in the material. Seriously, talk to any teacher they will explain it better than me, I just deal with student computers.
Fine, disprove it then asshole. Where’s your evidence? If educators everywhere are setting alarms off about it, that implies something’s going on. This is the new thing that’s changed.
No need to be toxic about it. Do you think anyone who disagrees with you is automatically an asshole?
Other than that, there’s plenty that’s changed other than the existence of short-form content, with everything going on in the world right now people are more stressed than ever. And stress is definitely one thing that reduces attention spans.
Not saying that that is the solution but it’s definitely one explanation and in my view it’s more likely than what’s basically just the equivalent of ‘phone bad’.
It looks like that study checked the effects of short-form content addiction, rather than short-form content in general. Addiction can be caused by underlying factors, such as stress or depression, which are shown to reduce attention span so I don’t think it really shows a direct causal connection. In fact, I think it’s more accurate to say short attention spans cause short-form content rather than the other way around.
That said, excessive social media consumption can make stress and depression worse, I just think we’re focussing on the wrong aspect of social media’s effect on our mental health.
I have a feeling that the only short-term solution is heavy content curation by the users themselves. Nobody is incentivized to do it for us. It takes time and effort but the only thing that has made any kind of difference is blocking everything you don’t want to see. And I mean ruthlessly doing so. Someone replied with a clown emoji to this thread and they’re now blocked. That’s how petty I’m about it nowdays. The vast majority of users on social media just add to the noise and it’s this group of people I’m trying to get rid of.
The way I think about it is by imagining a room with 100 random people. Do I want to talk with all of them? No. I’d rather talk with the couple most interesting ones among them and ignore the rest. I don’t have the time and energy to pay attention to the constant feed of meaningless nonsense.
Block subs you’re not interested in. Block users that dont bring any value. Add content filters for topics you’re sick of reading about etc. You’re not going to miss out on anything. You’re not going to run out of content. You’ll hardly notice any difference but after some time the signal does start to get stronger and the noise does quiet down a bit.
It shouldn’t take so much effort. I really wish there was an automated way to share block lists with like minded users, and to discover those users based on similarity in who we’ve blocked.
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