I know Jay IRL and can attest to her being a very good person, and I have strong faith in her ability to be a competent leader for Bluesky and to deliver on the project's potential.
Just an anecdote but I wanted to contribute it. A big reason I ended my Twitter involvement and switched to Bluesky is simply because I expect them to succeed and replace it, indifferent of the ideological alignment of either platform.
Bluesky has a really neat approach to composable moderation. You can subscribe to one of the many labellers and decide how you want your feed to be moderated. e.g. to hide US Politics https://bsky.app/profile/uspol.bluesky.bot or spoilers https://bsky.app/profile/mod.shawn.party or transphobia https://bsky.app/profile/asukafield.xyz. I haven't used any of these, so I can't attest to their quality, but it's a unique approach. Personally, I subscribed to one that hides the engagement-farm follow bots that works.
Of course the other part is Bluesky's PDS (the 'instance' hosting content for those who sign up on bsky.app) - they're free to moderate their infrastructure however they see fit. You might find yourself banned from there, but you can always host your own PDS and still be followable on bluesky.
One of my favorite design decisions in Bluesky is that you can set any label from any labeler to off, warn, or hide, including @moderation.bsky.app. If you think that labeler applies the "Intolerance" label incorrectly, just turn it off.
Yeah, I like that too. Technically there’s a lot of really great design decisions that were made, but I’ve seen people take screenshots of the app and crying “censorship!” not understanding it’s a setting that can be changed or that a different client could be implemented against aproto.
I don’t think they’re wrong either based on past precedent and their mental model of how most social networks work.
I’d propose that Bsky instead asks the user if they want to view the content or block it, allowing them to change the setting right then and there (and not have to dig), instead of outright saying “Intolerant” and making them jump through hoops every time they want to view it.
I think anyone who wants to make a social thing popular with a mainstream audience is strongly incentivized to ensure that newcomers don't encounter Nazi shit. I think most of us know the parable of the Nazi bar.
Of course anyone who wants to stick around should eventually learn a bit about how the moderation works so they can decide what they want to see and what they don't.
There’s a huge gap between “nazi shit” and bad satire. I don’t think the content being labeled as “Intolerant” is funny, but I do care about how history rhymes.
Reddit hit a decent balance by calling it “NSFW” and letting people change the setting as they encounter it.
I think 'intolerant' is good enough. I know I am intolerant/insensitive on some stuff and I would accept that a post I would make mocking animal death (not proud but I did that) to be flagged as intolerant or whatever. Honestly it's often low-brow anyway, nothing of value is lost.
I think I wasn't clear enough. Bluesky has a strong incentive to hide extremist content by default, but I do not claim their moderation service applies the intolerance label correctly.
I think they are wrong. We are fleeing X because a lot of right winger's mental model for appropriate political discussion with liberals is mostly mean trollish harassment, purposefully putting people down and trying to make people feel bad so they can "drink liberal tears". It's not good faith counterpoints. Avoiding that is not censorship of ideas.
This piece by Christine Lemmer-Webber mentions Christine's very positive experiences working with Jay Graber. I consider CLW to be a reliable and trustworthy source of information, so I think it's relevant here.
(Also it's really a very, very good analysis of Bluesky, by the co-author of ActivityPub, so if you're into that kind of thing...)
The weakness in AT seems to be the relay servers. Data/posts may be edited or deleted on a PDS, but once published what is the mechanism to alter or delete in clients/relays downstream?
Also what’s the mechanism to prevent AT from turning into a firehouse of usenet bot spam?
What does that even mean? Relays not being able to arbitrarily edit posts is by design, and why PDS updates like posts are signed by their authors. That's a strength, not a weakness.
The mechanism for spam filtering is the same as any other network. You can drop posts from low-trust PDSes, or use Bluesky's existing labeling system to apply advisory "spam likely" labels to accounts or posts that some heuristic decides are spam. This can be done in a composable way with their algorithmic feed aggregator and labels.
I'm not sure I would describe that as a problem, just something people using federated networks should be aware of. It is inherent to any system that sends messages to a bunch of other peoples' computers unless it implements some sort of DRM, which is effectively incompatible with open source software.
> Allowing edits and arbitrary insertions also means you could easily pretend you posted something earlier than you did, or edit an earlier post to say something else [1]
Are you prepared to deny (for example) the link between race and IQ, or does “believe science!” only cover topics you find comfortable? That’s the sort of discussion that Bluesky users refuse to permit.
This xkcd comic makes the mistake of conflating the right to free speech and the 1st ammendment. The 1st ammendment exists to protect the right of free speech from the government, but the right is god given.
Whoever you think gave you the right to feee speech, it cannot extend to forcing others to relay your speech or THEY don't have the right to free speech.
So is the right not to hear someone. Say anything you want in your own house, but if you spout vileness in my living room, I’m tossing you out the front door.
I felt she became CEO of Bluesky out of nowhere, but that's not true. She seems to be heavilly involved in the space with her app "Happening" and that got her a seat at the table with Jack Dorsey and landed her in her current role.
So the way that this worked is that Jack tweeted that, and they created a Bluesky Twitter account at the end of 2019. I got really excited. I was currently working on a social app of my own that was an alternative to Facebook Events called Happening, and I’d been building on decentralized social protocols, playing around with them, doing a lot of research, published a lot of research on it.
One thing I like about Bluesky is that until this post I had no idea who the CEO is, as opposed to every other social network where it's some billionaire (besides Signal but that's a communications network not a social network).
It doesn't matter, the quality of discourse is very different
What Bluesky gives all users is the choices and control at an individual level, and the ability to operate their own moderation labellers if they so choose
They have taken the controls from the corporation and given them to the people. People use these tools to remove the trolls and unproductive discourse, the fresh start means it is not a sisyphean task to keep your feed and comments cleaner
From my limited research, most new Bluesky users are ecstatic they have regained the ability to gang-report and tattle on people they don't like again.
That I don't agree, it seems to me the BlueSky way is block and ignore. I didn't see a lot of negative engagement, and ragebait (I don't have any blocklist ATM,I want to have the full experience) seems to receive very little responses (except from idiots, but right now it's clearly not as much as twitter, pre or post-buyout).
It's more about not having to endure trolls. They can be added to list and then users can decide if they want to subscribe to these lists. We don't have to do it individually and that's a powerful tool to keep the network more respectul
There is far more apolitical content on Bluesky than political content and the list ratio is similar. Lists are both positive (people to follow) and negative (people to ignore), which is technically custom labellers where subscribing users can choose if they warn, mute, or block for themselves
The general vibe is to ignore & block rather than to engage with trolls. Dunking with reposts is also frowned upon. Having a fresh start means a new set of norms can be established. It really is a refreshing experience from the other options out there (not just Twitter)
You're welcome to stick to the free speech loving site where you're not allowed on the network at all if you post parodies or ADS-B location data if the boss man notices, but on the other hand if you tweet racist enough stuff you might get a pat on the back and a retweet.
As much as I like Musk, Twitter has become horrible. I created a new account for work and without following anybody, my feed was filled with some of the most horrible racist shit against black people I have ever seen.
Now I don't mind that stuff in forums and 4chan (some folks find that content funny) but if I have to do work, it cannot coexist with that content.
I used to like Musk pre-Twitter, but he's turned into such an immature person -- or maybe he always was and now can just flaunt it without consequences.
Being immature is fine if you're alone in your basement hacking away, not when you have the power to single-handedly control the (formerly) most useful digital public square in the world, and use it to your own political ends.
Do you mean pre-Twitter buyout or pre-Twitter presence?
If you mean pre-buyout then I have bad news for you: Musk has been baselessly calling people pedophiles since at least 2018.
If you mean pre-presence then I have bad news for you: If you only liked someone before they were really expressing themselves, you probably never actually liked them.
I meant pre-buyout. I guess I hadn't heard much about his personal antics before then; mostly just knew of his achievements with Tesla, SpaceX, and admired him pushing the auto industry towards EVs (kicking and screaming, but they had no choice because Tesla posed an actual threat where no EV company had ever done before).
He should've been banned from Twitter for his own mental health years ago. Dude should've just stuck to building rockets and stopped trying to get into the culture war.
It's worth noting that Bluesky has exponentially grown to 23MM users on the back of changes that increasingly force X users to engage with what begins as a minority of trolls.
These types of users are not some noble vanguard of the free speech of the wise masses, or whatever else proponents try to portray them as - quite the opposite. Who do you actually know IRL who's a bitcoin-obsessed tradcath neo-nazi?
The "freedom of speech" being afforded here isn't going to the benefit of scientists or economists with technical misgivings of a small part of some overreaching left-anarchist agenda. If it were, the "free speech" crusade would be much easier to understand. But for every Jordan Peterson, there's twelve Nick Fuenteses, being treated as if their opinions have the same value. These types of users are a very vocal minority exceedingly committed to flowing a firehose of low-quality, sneery, fact-free, outrage-bait content. And fewer and fewer people are interested in any of it.
"Free speech" is the government-level abstraction. Private platforms are better to moderate their service, because this specific contingent ruins every platform they're permitted to dominate. It's the Nazi bar problem in a nutshell.
X's usership is dropping like a rock[1] as Bluesky's growth surges[2]. Nobody wants to be forced to engage with these types of users, and the trends demonstrate this. If I were one of X's investment partners, I would be fuming at Elon's abject squandering of my perfectly good investment capital.
If this is the platform Elon actually wants, then fine and dandy. Just don't complain when the result is different than what you expected and huge amounts of people leave instead of assimilating to the hivemind.
Weird, I created an account for a family member last evening, and I didn't see anything racist at all. Without following anyone I only saw ads and some tweets by Elon Musk.
I logged back in today for the first time in years, and the only real difference for me was in-line ads everywhere (I see you, VW, and I won't forget), and it was quieter.
I suspect there's a difference between an already-curated account and a new account.
If you stick to just following, twitter 2 months ago was fine, as long as you also didn't read the comments or click on your notifications (which was inevitable follows by cryptoshills). At this point the people I was following have all left, because they had to put up with way more shit than I did.
Why don't you mind racist shit against black people in forums and 4Chan? Do you think black people shouldn't mind it either? Where else do you think racism is acceptable?
Taken at face value, I find this forum is far more unpleasant, and far less inclusive, than a bunch of high school nerds trying to shock each other with naughty words. They're not trying to outsmart each other for fake internet points.
The alternative is freedom of choice. Right-wingers will always whine that there’s no freedom of speech when liberals aren’t forced to listen to their drivel. Welcome to the marketplace of ideas!
Not a Musk fan myself but I echo your sentiment about Twitter. I have mostly used it to lurk and follow tech personalities that post things I enjoy reading.
Now I can’t open it at work because the main page is likely to contain horribly racist or otherwise bigoted memes and diatribes from people I’ve never followed or interacted with.
This. It's not a political issue at all for me. I just find that X has become full of dumb and trashy stuff, with no way to turn it off. The problem isn't that it's right wing or left wing or whatever—it's that it's lame.
> And so, mid-2021, they interviewed me along with some other folks and then chose me to lead Bluesky based on this vision that I pitched for how we were going to build Bluesky, which is essentially how we’ve built it. And so that’s how I got involved.
I am too and no one says it more than silicon valley or other urban dwelling politically active leftists. All my life I never heard it much at all until it became some cultural linguistic trend in early 2000's once Obama said it.
edit: Seems like relatively recent trend, probably has peaked [0].
… I mean, yeah, the language changes. People do not use exactly the same words at exactly the same frequency as they did 20 years ago. That’s how English works. Don’t like it? Go live in France.
(French changes, too, but in that case there is some active effort to stop it changing.)
It's a political signifier and should be recognized as such, is what I'm saying. As the New Republic described, it was a rhetorical "tic" of Obama, and is the same for other left wing types. It comes off as weird to me; not everyone uses it but a certain type over uses it a lot. So this is recognizable.
I noticed this trend take off during Obama’s first term. He used “folks” often in speeches and interviews. It caught on as a word that implies cultural unity and common heritage without actually referencing a specific culture or people.
Considering that she was not hired _just now_, it would be more reasonable if she is criticised on the basis of what she has done there last 3+ years rather than based on vague qualification-based arguments. Though I am also curious as what you think would make good enough qualifications for such a position, because I do not think that very traditional CEO qualifications would work that well here.
You don't need qualifications to become the CEO of a brand new company, which is what BlueSky basically was when she got the job. It doesn't matter how she got it at that early stage.
Seeing that company grow, and remaining CEO through that transition (and beyond) on the other hand isn't for everyone. I'm not a user or a customer, but from all the publicity and excitement, it looks like she's doing a pretty good job so far.
Blockchainers trying to make money from people that don't want to see nazis and photos from wars and genocide.
I have a hard time imagining how they'll manage to do it. As far as I can tell the profitable blockchains are pretty tightly coupled to either financial speculation or more obvious crime. I'm not so sure it will work in this domain.
The hope is being open and decentralised are counteracting forces to keep bluesky in check if they attempt to pull the rug.
We're yet to see how this turns out in practice. I do fear that the ATProto model means that Bluesky is still a pretty central component in the ecosystem. Mastodon, in comparison, seems to be more resiliant to one 'instance' screwing things up.
If Bluesky shut down all their servers tomorrow with no notice, what will happen to the network? If Mastodon shut down their servers (mastodon.social), users on that instance would be screwed, but me and many of the people I follow aren't on there so we would be fine.
I can’t tell what their business model is - it seems creepily like the original twitter in that it’s not about making money but about making connections etc etc. Which is great until you need money.
Bluesky reminds me of Twitter around ~2008, and Twitter only really got enshittified to the point that I barely use it this year. So I'm optimistic that we'll get a good decade in at least.
And we can takeaway our data. Everyone at Bluesky seems quite aligned on building systems with user sovereignty:
> one of bluesky’s mottos is “the company is a future adversary,” so we have to design this service in a way that preserves user choice & freedom
> users should own their data, identity, and relationships on the social internet, and devs should never get locked out of the ecosystems that they build
For all the shrill man-child cries of 'censorship!', there's protocols underlying already for you to host yourself! People do! Heavens spare us from these X-grade losers.
Is the plan to make a new app every 5-10 years when the old one crashes and burns for the same reasons? Surely the VC money will run out at some point.
Well, that’s basically the history of social networks thus far, so, I mean, sure, why not?
Obviously it’d be nice if it was the first social network not to either implode (Livejournal, Tumblr, Twitter), or fade into irrelevance (Friendster, Bebo, MySpace, Digg), or just ossify into mind-numbing tedium (Facebook, LinkedIn), but, well, if it does, presumably there’ll be another one along at some point.
(I realise that you could probably argue Digg either way, here. Digg had a multi-paradigm end.)
There's a bunch of right wing trolls who filmed themselves signing up & posting really shitty mean things. These are not well intended people; this is boundary pushing. You either lose by becoming a Nazi bar, or if you listen to them you lose by having their snivelling crocodile tears to deal with forever.
These folks can go run their own PDS! But generally I think nothing of value was lost, that the network has rightly refused to let itself be degraded.
Also, I suspect there was something else going on there, because there are lots of bigots on Bluesky. The “Very British Bigotry” blocklist (for fancy modern/Rowling—style transphobes), say, has literally thousands of people, completely unbanned, on it; Bluesky is really fairly small-l liberal about post content. One thing that they’re somewhat strict on is profile content, and I would speculate that those performatively getting banned are doing so on the strength of putting shit in their profile.
That's honestly the nice thing about BlueSky, you can't ban anyone from the network entirely and filtering / moderation tools are put in the hands of users to do with as they please.
If you get no engagement because you're on everyone's blocklist well that can't be on anyone except you since every user opts in to them.
While I prefer Mastodon to Bluesky, it’s for the same reason. Anyone can spin up a Mastodon server. Anyone else is free to say, nah, I don’t want to talk to them. That doesn’t prevent that server from existing and peering with like-minded instances.
Refreshingly, not a 90-page long self-indulgent monologue from the person themself, explaining in the minute details their philosophical, moral, and sociological stances on every thing they care to think about, which you'd expect from e.g. Elon Musk, the CEO of that other social network site with no usable name.
I know Jay IRL and can attest to her being a very good person, and I have strong faith in her ability to be a competent leader for Bluesky and to deliver on the project's potential.
Just an anecdote but I wanted to contribute it. A big reason I ended my Twitter involvement and switched to Bluesky is simply because I expect them to succeed and replace it, indifferent of the ideological alignment of either platform.
What’s your take on where Bsky will take “safety”?
I’ve seen right-leaning satire sites get flagged as “Intolerance”, which is fueling a fire that Bsky will cater to a left-leaning audience.
Bluesky has a really neat approach to composable moderation. You can subscribe to one of the many labellers and decide how you want your feed to be moderated. e.g. to hide US Politics https://bsky.app/profile/uspol.bluesky.bot or spoilers https://bsky.app/profile/mod.shawn.party or transphobia https://bsky.app/profile/asukafield.xyz. I haven't used any of these, so I can't attest to their quality, but it's a unique approach. Personally, I subscribed to one that hides the engagement-farm follow bots that works.
Of course the other part is Bluesky's PDS (the 'instance' hosting content for those who sign up on bsky.app) - they're free to moderate their infrastructure however they see fit. You might find yourself banned from there, but you can always host your own PDS and still be followable on bluesky.
One of my favorite design decisions in Bluesky is that you can set any label from any labeler to off, warn, or hide, including @moderation.bsky.app. If you think that labeler applies the "Intolerance" label incorrectly, just turn it off.
Yeah, I like that too. Technically there’s a lot of really great design decisions that were made, but I’ve seen people take screenshots of the app and crying “censorship!” not understanding it’s a setting that can be changed or that a different client could be implemented against aproto.
I don’t think they’re wrong either based on past precedent and their mental model of how most social networks work.
I’d propose that Bsky instead asks the user if they want to view the content or block it, allowing them to change the setting right then and there (and not have to dig), instead of outright saying “Intolerant” and making them jump through hoops every time they want to view it.
I think anyone who wants to make a social thing popular with a mainstream audience is strongly incentivized to ensure that newcomers don't encounter Nazi shit. I think most of us know the parable of the Nazi bar.
Of course anyone who wants to stick around should eventually learn a bit about how the moderation works so they can decide what they want to see and what they don't.
There’s a huge gap between “nazi shit” and bad satire. I don’t think the content being labeled as “Intolerant” is funny, but I do care about how history rhymes.
Reddit hit a decent balance by calling it “NSFW” and letting people change the setting as they encounter it.
I think 'intolerant' is good enough. I know I am intolerant/insensitive on some stuff and I would accept that a post I would make mocking animal death (not proud but I did that) to be flagged as intolerant or whatever. Honestly it's often low-brow anyway, nothing of value is lost.
I think I wasn't clear enough. Bluesky has a strong incentive to hide extremist content by default, but I do not claim their moderation service applies the intolerance label correctly.
I think they are wrong. We are fleeing X because a lot of right winger's mental model for appropriate political discussion with liberals is mostly mean trollish harassment, purposefully putting people down and trying to make people feel bad so they can "drink liberal tears". It's not good faith counterpoints. Avoiding that is not censorship of ideas.
Would you be able to link some examples of this happening? I think giving one or two examples should be sufficient, if they have high engagement.
In other words, you're doing your own moderation; that's great.
Probably because right-leaning satire sites promote intolerance. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck…
If you want to be catered to as a right-leaner you can just stay on X.
This piece by Christine Lemmer-Webber mentions Christine's very positive experiences working with Jay Graber. I consider CLW to be a reliable and trustworthy source of information, so I think it's relevant here.
(Also it's really a very, very good analysis of Bluesky, by the co-author of ActivityPub, so if you're into that kind of thing...)
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Incidentally, there's an article on Medium about Graber's experience listening to some internet old-timers https://medium.com/decentralized-web/the-internets-old-guard...
Someone else who's interesting is CEO of Signal https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/
Jay was involved in the early days of Zcash, which makes me much more confident that BlueSky will be a place that cares about user privacy.
The weakness in AT seems to be the relay servers. Data/posts may be edited or deleted on a PDS, but once published what is the mechanism to alter or delete in clients/relays downstream?
Also what’s the mechanism to prevent AT from turning into a firehouse of usenet bot spam?
What does that even mean? Relays not being able to arbitrarily edit posts is by design, and why PDS updates like posts are signed by their authors. That's a strength, not a weakness.
The mechanism for spam filtering is the same as any other network. You can drop posts from low-trust PDSes, or use Bluesky's existing labeling system to apply advisory "spam likely" labels to accounts or posts that some heuristic decides are spam. This can be done in a composable way with their algorithmic feed aggregator and labels.
This is also a problem with ActivityPub. The 'delete' command is basically a suggestion.
I'm not sure I would describe that as a problem, just something people using federated networks should be aware of. It is inherent to any system that sends messages to a bunch of other peoples' computers unless it implements some sort of DRM, which is effectively incompatible with open source software.
> One person's bug is another person's feature
> Allowing edits and arbitrary insertions also means you could easily pretend you posted something earlier than you did, or edit an earlier post to say something else [1]
[1] https://github.com/arcalinea/smor-serve
Being banned is some of the best user privacy around. Can't beat that.
And what did you do to get banned? Be specific
[flagged]
Not true.
Counter-mainstream arguments are immediately flagged (often within a minute), likely by third-party bots detecting undesirable comments.
Which "Counter-mainstream arguments" ? Be specific
Are you prepared to deny (for example) the link between race and IQ, or does “believe science!” only cover topics you find comfortable? That’s the sort of discussion that Bluesky users refuse to permit.
So, exactly what was expected: The same old boring trolling. Good riddance.
You are sadly all too correct. At least the process here is less formalized and expected than on Bluesky.
Then the user should be able to post exactly what they posted to get banned without fear
[flagged]
You'll always have X, Mr. Culonavirus.
[flagged]
You can always join another PDS or host your own, and still be on Bluesky. So not really banned in the same way as being banned from Twitter.
Your username is pretty sus.
But not mid?
Sounds like the door hit you on the way out.
https://xkcd.com/1357/
This xkcd comic makes the mistake of conflating the right to free speech and the 1st ammendment. The 1st ammendment exists to protect the right of free speech from the government, but the right is god given.
Whoever you think gave you the right to feee speech, it cannot extend to forcing others to relay your speech or THEY don't have the right to free speech.
"the right is god given"
The stupidest thing I've read today
Why are these companies forced to carry your speeches?
I feel like the XKCD perfectly reflects the free speech arguments I see online.
So is the right not to hear someone. Say anything you want in your own house, but if you spout vileness in my living room, I’m tossing you out the front door.
I felt she became CEO of Bluesky out of nowhere, but that's not true. She seems to be heavilly involved in the space with her app "Happening" and that got her a seat at the table with Jack Dorsey and landed her in her current role.
Was she grinding code on the clone app, or simply telling other folks what to build? To quantify experience, it requires accompanying detail.
What would the distinction between the two mean to you?
One thing I like about Bluesky is that until this post I had no idea who the CEO is, as opposed to every other social network where it's some billionaire (besides Signal but that's a communications network not a social network).
https://archive.ph/AhQIz
Sadly Archive can't pull the entire article.
Anyone have a link for the full thing?
Bluesky seems like another echo chamber.
Does Twitter actually ban or suppress speech on the left or right these days?
It doesn't matter, the quality of discourse is very different
What Bluesky gives all users is the choices and control at an individual level, and the ability to operate their own moderation labellers if they so choose
They have taken the controls from the corporation and given them to the people. People use these tools to remove the trolls and unproductive discourse, the fresh start means it is not a sisyphean task to keep your feed and comments cleaner
This post from Mark Cuban sums up the general vibes: https://bsky.app/profile/mcuban.bsky.social/post/3lbx7p3vdgs...
It suppresses outgoing links, which is like, the whole reason for many content creators to be on a website like it.
Serious research on the topic is unambiguous in that it promotes right-wing content: https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/17/24298669/musk-trump-endo...
So it doesn't censor
False. https://www.vice.com/en/article/x-purges-prominent-journalis...
Wow criticizing Israel gets you suspended?!
From my limited research, most new Bluesky users are ecstatic they have regained the ability to gang-report and tattle on people they don't like again.
That I don't agree, it seems to me the BlueSky way is block and ignore. I didn't see a lot of negative engagement, and ragebait (I don't have any blocklist ATM,I want to have the full experience) seems to receive very little responses (except from idiots, but right now it's clearly not as much as twitter, pre or post-buyout).
It's more about not having to endure trolls. They can be added to list and then users can decide if they want to subscribe to these lists. We don't have to do it individually and that's a powerful tool to keep the network more respectul
Pre-curated echo chamber lists? Wonderful. They would have loved East Germany.
why do you insist on trolling here?
There is far more apolitical content on Bluesky than political content and the list ratio is similar. Lists are both positive (people to follow) and negative (people to ignore), which is technically custom labellers where subscribing users can choose if they warn, mute, or block for themselves
Here is a directory of the starter lists so you can get a feel for the mixture: https://blueskydirectory.com/starter-packs/all
The general vibe is to ignore & block rather than to engage with trolls. Dunking with reposts is also frowned upon. Having a fresh start means a new set of norms can be established. It really is a refreshing experience from the other options out there (not just Twitter)
"What pushed me off X was just watching good people behave badly" ~ Kelsey Hightower (https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/kelsey-hightower-...)
You're welcome to stick to the free speech loving site where you're not allowed on the network at all if you post parodies or ADS-B location data if the boss man notices, but on the other hand if you tweet racist enough stuff you might get a pat on the back and a retweet.
As much as I like Musk, Twitter has become horrible. I created a new account for work and without following anybody, my feed was filled with some of the most horrible racist shit against black people I have ever seen.
Now I don't mind that stuff in forums and 4chan (some folks find that content funny) but if I have to do work, it cannot coexist with that content.
I used to like Musk pre-Twitter, but he's turned into such an immature person -- or maybe he always was and now can just flaunt it without consequences.
Being immature is fine if you're alone in your basement hacking away, not when you have the power to single-handedly control the (formerly) most useful digital public square in the world, and use it to your own political ends.
Do you mean pre-Twitter buyout or pre-Twitter presence?
If you mean pre-buyout then I have bad news for you: Musk has been baselessly calling people pedophiles since at least 2018.
If you mean pre-presence then I have bad news for you: If you only liked someone before they were really expressing themselves, you probably never actually liked them.
I meant pre-buyout. I guess I hadn't heard much about his personal antics before then; mostly just knew of his achievements with Tesla, SpaceX, and admired him pushing the auto industry towards EVs (kicking and screaming, but they had no choice because Tesla posed an actual threat where no EV company had ever done before).
He should've been banned from Twitter for his own mental health years ago. Dude should've just stuck to building rockets and stopped trying to get into the culture war.
"Never meet your heroes" is from Madame Bovary which was written in 1857. With Twitter we can meet all our heroes.
Here's what the toddler Musk said about Bluesky yesterday:
https://imgur.com/a/AOd6lIp
At least we know it's getting to him.
Always projection with these guys.
What, did it refuse his offer of an imaginary submarine, or something?
It's worth noting that Bluesky has exponentially grown to 23MM users on the back of changes that increasingly force X users to engage with what begins as a minority of trolls.
These types of users are not some noble vanguard of the free speech of the wise masses, or whatever else proponents try to portray them as - quite the opposite. Who do you actually know IRL who's a bitcoin-obsessed tradcath neo-nazi?
The "freedom of speech" being afforded here isn't going to the benefit of scientists or economists with technical misgivings of a small part of some overreaching left-anarchist agenda. If it were, the "free speech" crusade would be much easier to understand. But for every Jordan Peterson, there's twelve Nick Fuenteses, being treated as if their opinions have the same value. These types of users are a very vocal minority exceedingly committed to flowing a firehose of low-quality, sneery, fact-free, outrage-bait content. And fewer and fewer people are interested in any of it.
"Free speech" is the government-level abstraction. Private platforms are better to moderate their service, because this specific contingent ruins every platform they're permitted to dominate. It's the Nazi bar problem in a nutshell.
X's usership is dropping like a rock[1] as Bluesky's growth surges[2]. Nobody wants to be forced to engage with these types of users, and the trends demonstrate this. If I were one of X's investment partners, I would be fuming at Elon's abject squandering of my perfectly good investment capital.
If this is the platform Elon actually wants, then fine and dandy. Just don't complain when the result is different than what you expected and huge amounts of people leave instead of assimilating to the hivemind.
[1]: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-formerly-twitter-los... [2]: https://www.euronews.com/next/2024/11/26/bluesky-plans-to-qu...
> These types of users are a very vocal minority exceedingly committed to flowing a firehose of low-quality, sneery, fact-free, outrage-bait content.
You may be right about X but this is the most on point description of BlueSky ever written.
Would you be able to link just one example of high engagement, horrible racist shit against black people?
Weird, I created an account for a family member last evening, and I didn't see anything racist at all. Without following anyone I only saw ads and some tweets by Elon Musk.
Wow I have been on twtr dor years, never seen this.
I logged back in today for the first time in years, and the only real difference for me was in-line ads everywhere (I see you, VW, and I won't forget), and it was quieter.
I suspect there's a difference between an already-curated account and a new account.
If you stick to just following, twitter 2 months ago was fine, as long as you also didn't read the comments or click on your notifications (which was inevitable follows by cryptoshills). At this point the people I was following have all left, because they had to put up with way more shit than I did.
That tracks. I was just skimming whatever has replaced the timeline.
It’s no longer twitter it is “x.com”. Much different moderation and user base
really? i see stuff like this all the time
Why don't you mind racist shit against black people in forums and 4Chan? Do you think black people shouldn't mind it either? Where else do you think racism is acceptable?
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Taken at face value, I find this forum is far more unpleasant, and far less inclusive, than a bunch of high school nerds trying to shock each other with naughty words. They're not trying to outsmart each other for fake internet points.
The alternative is not having freedom of speech (which is a principle not a law)
The alternative is freedom of choice. Right-wingers will always whine that there’s no freedom of speech when liberals aren’t forced to listen to their drivel. Welcome to the marketplace of ideas!
Not a Musk fan myself but I echo your sentiment about Twitter. I have mostly used it to lurk and follow tech personalities that post things I enjoy reading.
Now I can’t open it at work because the main page is likely to contain horribly racist or otherwise bigoted memes and diatribes from people I’ve never followed or interacted with.
Since there are so many horribly racist memes on there, you should be able to link one example?
This. It's not a political issue at all for me. I just find that X has become full of dumb and trashy stuff, with no way to turn it off. The problem isn't that it's right wing or left wing or whatever—it's that it's lame.
With so many of those horribly racist or otherwise bigoted memes being posted or promoted by Musk himself.
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From the linked interview at https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24108872/bluesky-ceo-grab...:
> And so, mid-2021, they interviewed me along with some other folks and then chose me to lead Bluesky based on this vision that I pitched for how we were going to build Bluesky, which is essentially how we’ve built it. And so that’s how I got involved.
Why do they always use "folks" in place of the word people?
Regional slang. "Those people" can sound a bit cold/distancing when folks feels a bit warmer.
I’m sure it varies but I’m from the midwest and it’s just regional vernacular. It’s what I would say if I were speaking instead of writing.
I'm Swedish and use "folks" when talking/writing English all the times, just sounds more informal, cozy and folksy so that's what I usually go with.
I am too and no one says it more than silicon valley or other urban dwelling politically active leftists. All my life I never heard it much at all until it became some cultural linguistic trend in early 2000's once Obama said it.
edit: Seems like relatively recent trend, probably has peaked [0].
I'm not the only one that noticed [1][2]
[0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=folks&year_sta...
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/156807/politicians-always-ta...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=rise+in+popularity+of+the+wo...
… I mean, yeah, the language changes. People do not use exactly the same words at exactly the same frequency as they did 20 years ago. That’s how English works. Don’t like it? Go live in France.
(French changes, too, but in that case there is some active effort to stop it changing.)
It's a political signifier and should be recognized as such, is what I'm saying. As the New Republic described, it was a rhetorical "tic" of Obama, and is the same for other left wing types. It comes off as weird to me; not everyone uses it but a certain type over uses it a lot. So this is recognizable.
Why did you use the word "always" in place of the word "often?" I doubt there was any motive behind it.
I noticed this trend take off during Obama’s first term. He used “folks” often in speeches and interviews. It caught on as a word that implies cultural unity and common heritage without actually referencing a specific culture or people.
Considering that she was not hired _just now_, it would be more reasonable if she is criticised on the basis of what she has done there last 3+ years rather than based on vague qualification-based arguments. Though I am also curious as what you think would make good enough qualifications for such a position, because I do not think that very traditional CEO qualifications would work that well here.
You don't need qualifications to become the CEO of a brand new company, which is what BlueSky basically was when she got the job. It doesn't matter how she got it at that early stage.
Seeing that company grow, and remaining CEO through that transition (and beyond) on the other hand isn't for everyone. I'm not a user or a customer, but from all the publicity and excitement, it looks like she's doing a pretty good job so far.
You seem under qualified to make this assertion. On what basis do you think you can make this claim?
I’m a cto at a 350+ person company
Handed out? She built it.
No she didn’t and that’s what I mean.
Self-appointment? Nobody stops you from founding your own company and becoming a CEO of it.
But she isn't the founder.
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Blockchainers trying to make money from people that don't want to see nazis and photos from wars and genocide.
I have a hard time imagining how they'll manage to do it. As far as I can tell the profitable blockchains are pretty tightly coupled to either financial speculation or more obvious crime. I'm not so sure it will work in this domain.
when can we start placing bets on time to enshitified? it all ends the same. not worth signing up for.
The hope is being open and decentralised are counteracting forces to keep bluesky in check if they attempt to pull the rug.
We're yet to see how this turns out in practice. I do fear that the ATProto model means that Bluesky is still a pretty central component in the ecosystem. Mastodon, in comparison, seems to be more resiliant to one 'instance' screwing things up.
If Bluesky shut down all their servers tomorrow with no notice, what will happen to the network? If Mastodon shut down their servers (mastodon.social), users on that instance would be screwed, but me and many of the people I follow aren't on there so we would be fine.
I can’t tell what their business model is - it seems creepily like the original twitter in that it’s not about making money but about making connections etc etc. Which is great until you need money.
They're going to launch a paid subscription model https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/24/24278666/bluesky-working...
Because of baseless nostalgia, you’ll always prove yourself right in this matter.
Focusing on the things that are good and beautiful and making the future better than today would be a good start for someone with your mindset.
Bluesky reminds me of Twitter around ~2008, and Twitter only really got enshittified to the point that I barely use it this year. So I'm optimistic that we'll get a good decade in at least.
And we can takeaway our data. Everyone at Bluesky seems quite aligned on building systems with user sovereignty:
> one of bluesky’s mottos is “the company is a future adversary,” so we have to design this service in a way that preserves user choice & freedom
> users should own their data, identity, and relationships on the social internet, and devs should never get locked out of the ecosystems that they build
https://bsky.app/profile/emilyliu.me/post/3jzkm4kezos2d
For all the shrill man-child cries of 'censorship!', there's protocols underlying already for you to host yourself! People do! Heavens spare us from these X-grade losers.
Your cynicism is well founded, but until that happens, enjoy the platform.
Is the plan to make a new app every 5-10 years when the old one crashes and burns for the same reasons? Surely the VC money will run out at some point.
Well, that’s basically the history of social networks thus far, so, I mean, sure, why not?
Obviously it’d be nice if it was the first social network not to either implode (Livejournal, Tumblr, Twitter), or fade into irrelevance (Friendster, Bebo, MySpace, Digg), or just ossify into mind-numbing tedium (Facebook, LinkedIn), but, well, if it does, presumably there’ll be another one along at some point.
(I realise that you could probably argue Digg either way, here. Digg had a multi-paradigm end.)
This one is at least a Benefit Corp. It's worth a go - seems to be working for, say, Kickstarter, which hasn't enshittified yet.
I'm willing to sign up for a fresh new app every 5-10 years.
If they keep making them, I'll go with it.
I don't think that they're making identical mistakes, but we can't assume that it will last.
From some of the comments here, it sounds like BlueSky started with healthy dose of enshitification: censorship and suspensions.
Trolls feed off engagement and bluesky makes it easy to nuclear block so trolls don't like that very much.
There's a bunch of right wing trolls who filmed themselves signing up & posting really shitty mean things. These are not well intended people; this is boundary pushing. You either lose by becoming a Nazi bar, or if you listen to them you lose by having their snivelling crocodile tears to deal with forever.
These folks can go run their own PDS! But generally I think nothing of value was lost, that the network has rightly refused to let itself be degraded.
Also, I suspect there was something else going on there, because there are lots of bigots on Bluesky. The “Very British Bigotry” blocklist (for fancy modern/Rowling—style transphobes), say, has literally thousands of people, completely unbanned, on it; Bluesky is really fairly small-l liberal about post content. One thing that they’re somewhat strict on is profile content, and I would speculate that those performatively getting banned are doing so on the strength of putting shit in their profile.
That's honestly the nice thing about BlueSky, you can't ban anyone from the network entirely and filtering / moderation tools are put in the hands of users to do with as they please.
If you get no engagement because you're on everyone's blocklist well that can't be on anyone except you since every user opts in to them.
While I prefer Mastodon to Bluesky, it’s for the same reason. Anyone can spin up a Mastodon server. Anyone else is free to say, nah, I don’t want to talk to them. That doesn’t prevent that server from existing and peering with like-minded instances.
Refreshingly, not a 90-page long self-indulgent monologue from the person themself, explaining in the minute details their philosophical, moral, and sociological stances on every thing they care to think about, which you'd expect from e.g. Elon Musk, the CEO of that other social network site with no usable name.
ex-twitter?