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.
One design drawback/bug is that at any point a labeler you subscribe to (even if you set it to !warn) can start issuing labels that are set to !hide and you will not even be notified, posts will just start disappearing.
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 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 '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 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.
By googling “your body my choice” I can find pages of left wing news articles but no examples whatsoever.
Did you miss the fact that X is a platform based on free speech? People are allowed to out themselves as whatever they want, which is a good thing. The examples you’re linking to have 0 likes on them, so I wouldn’t be all that worried about anonymous teenager provocateurs who are trying to get a reaction out of people.
Personally I’m spending less time there not because of overt racism specifically, but because even innocent posts end up pulled by trolls into adversarial, low-information stupidity.
I’m not trying to convince you to join Bluesky though, if you prefer X I think both Bluesky and X are better if you continue to spend your time there!
> Did you miss the fact that X is a platform based on free speech?
How can you say this with a straight face? I am genuinely baffled by people who hold this view.
Just because you say that your platform is all about “free speech” doesn’t mean it is and there are clear actions that X/Elon took which go against that claim.
The primary of which being that posting “cisgender” gets your post flagged and demoted in the algorithm and that Elonjet was banned. How can you seriously claim free speech absolutism when there are direct examples showing the very opposite.
They don't owe the repo any updates, if there are none. As long as you have no evidence of foul play, you're just a run of the mill conspiracy theorist.
Is this the Babylon Bee? Like, it posts a lot of transphobic stuff. What would you call that, if not intolerance?
There’s an odd tendency amongst the modern far-right to want to (a) be openly bigoted but (b) not to be judged for it. I feel like this ‘snowflake bigot’ phenomenon was born a couple of decades back, with some homophobes getting very upset about the term ‘homophobe’, not because they felt it was inaccurate as such, but because they felt it cast their thing as a _bad_ intolerance, like racism.
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.
> 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]
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.
Most importantly, because having to fend off obnoxious assholes and sealions is not a desirable property of a social space. In no way is adding that an improvement. If I wanted more of that, I'd stay at work where at least I get paid to do the work. This is a lesson that Bluesky has learned from the ruins of Twitter.
And secondarily, because your proposition is clearly neither "earnest", "unbiased" nor "honest" and the invitation to "consider" it as if for the first time is laughable. You might need people to annoy, but they don't need you. You protest too much.
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.
That's the problem with pretending it's merely a legalistic right rather than a general principle.
If a big chunk of your society make a habit of censuring people for disliked speech, organizations that are in the business of relaying speech make a habit of dropping customers over disliked speech, etc? Then your society is not practicing the principle of freedom of speech.
The thing is, there is a fundamental disagreement ablut what the “principle of free speech” is. The 1st Amendment is not, in fact, a restricted-to-government application of a broader principle that there should all speech should be treated equally and unimpeded. It was very much an implementation of a theory that speech should succeed or not as a result of decisions of others to choose to hear more of it or not, choose to repeat it or not, and that the government putting its finger on the scales go suppress or compel speech was a distortion that interfered with that. You seem to adhere to a very different principal that you call free speech, but which is not the same principal which animated the First Amendment. Which is understandable, there are an array of different principals people adhere to, and only a finite number of ways of arranging words to name them—but it is important not to conflate your principal of free speech with the one underpinning the Constitutional right, or to treat it as universally what people are talking about when they talk about “free speech” as a principal when it is different, and incompatible with, one of the more common understandings of not only the legal right to free speech, but the animating principal behind that right.
It's a human right. Some principles are so fundamental that they supercede governments and so-called norms, and free speech is one of those. You don't have to be religious to know that these rights are as fundamental to human life as breathing and something worth fighting for, rather than something that we merely practice at the pleasure of some privileged people who think they're better than us.
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.
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.
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.
I don't really understand the first picture since it has nothing to do with race or racism, and I'll bet you 100 million dollars the latter two won't appear on anyone's front page unless you're searching for exactly that.
Discussing politics in political threads, with people who disagree with my own beliefs. I love going in echo chambers of people whose ideologies I don't agree with, and try to reason with them and understand them.
I'm a software engineer who's already seen the field of software. Talking about it isn't that interesting to me. I make more money than I need selling a rather simple subscription service, written in an obscure language that never gets mentioned here.
And finally, the obligatory "no u", since telling someone that this website is not for them is the epitome of this website not being for you.
Hm, last time someone challenged you, you responded with
>I’m not here to argue with socialists
And told them to read a book instead of asking your opinions. Sounds like you’re just here to whine about things you don’t like and insert your opinions.
Really just depends on the quality of the other person's argument. Good to see that you're spending time going over my post history though, makes me feel special. Would never cross my mind in a million years to click on your profile and start scrolling.
Clive Myrie is not an immigrant, he was born in northern England. The post is blatantly about race (“how often do white hosts”, “stop the racism”).
You asked for something high-engagement, but the stuff that tends to be “in your face” is low engagement/high volume, as in this case I shared with you elsewhere in the thread. https://x.com/kaseyklimes/status/1862323859321483316
You've linked a profile of someone whose entire following is centered around an anti-immigration sentiment. There are entire political parties centered around that. I understand that you're advocating for censorship, and you hate X because it's not going to cater to that wish.
My point is that X isn't some propaganda tool of hateful content. It's a platform that has a little something for everyone, just as it should be.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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
Because of the owners personal relationship with his daughter you can't say cis. The blue check replies on any big post are the racism convention. I find the environment to have gotten very unpleasant. Imagine if every flagged poster here instead got the VIP treatment.
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)
This idea that everyone should be required to listen to the ravings of anyone passing by (or, on Twitter, anyone who has paid Elon Musk for the privilege) is really pretty weird. Mass blocklists are hardly new; “here are the people to add to your killfile to get some semblance of signal to noise” was a thing on USENET in the 90s, say, and of course, before Musk broke it, they were common on Twitter as an informal user-added feature (the death of the API made them far more difficult to implement.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
This HN comment section with showdead enabled reveals that Ms Graber attracts trolls and misogynists like moths to a flame.
Sometimes I think that the efficient moderation on HN hides the extent of the problem in this community. When Trump won the election, the HN ‘new’ page was briefly filled with posts saying things like “Eat shit n**s and f*gs!!!”
But since the efficient moderation quickly hides all this for users who don’t go out of their way to enable viewing dead posts and comments, we can blissfully go on discussing the finer points of tariffs and whatever, ignoring the fact that a growing number of people around really just want to see minority scapegoats suffer. It feels a bit like frogs in a boiling kettle.
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.
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