I just received my invite code today and took a quick look around the app. Like Mastodon I do not prefer microblogging platforms. And that’s all I know about Bluesky.
I heard it was pretty much twitter with even less moderation, but it’s a smaller so you’re slightly less likely to run into open neo nazis, but only slightly. I only have hearsay to go on, as it never really interested me, but most of the people I know that went to it have stayed.
there is some transphobia but it’s nowhere near modern levels and most of it is drowned out and countered but it is still there. it’s not bad though. i only encountered one instance since ive been there
I see more transphobia on Lemmy than BlueSky, but that might be because Lemmy is more oriented towards what everyone is saying while BlueSky you mostly see stuff from people you follow. There isn't an algorithm driven feed there (yet)
...you say that like they are being invited and not sneaking in against everyone's wishes. Even the Lemmyverse is not entirely free of them, unfortunately.
The guy you replied to was me. It's wild you take fact that bad actors are pressured to leave and try to make seem like that's being welcoming of them??? That makes absolutely no sense.
Personally I don't even get to see any of them, I mostly see mentions after they are driven out. As much as the moderation there could stand to be improved, I doubt even your instance can actually match your standards of if you can't make absolutely sure not a single bad actor makes their way in, you are actually enabling them. The thing about Nazis is that they lie and play coy a lot, and the more that instances grow, the harder it is to identify all of them. it's not like all of them show up wearing swastikas.
If an instance grows beyond it’s ability to quickly identify and ban Nazis then it’s bad at moderating itself and will probably be defederated from by instance admins that are good at moderating.
If the users are driving out Nazis as you say, then it kind of implies that the admins are either OK with them being there, or didn’t get to them quickly.
Even though the userbase is effectively driving them away, you are trying your hardest to try to spin that as a bad thing, ignoring the growing challenges of moderation at scale for an idealistic perfection that is not nearly as unblemished in practice as you want to pretend.
I don't know what's your beef with BlueSky, but this level of self-righteousness is just tiresome. And we are not even talking about actual Twitter which is overrun with nazis, This is not a problem in BlueSky. I'm starting to doubt that they are the actual reason for all this fuss.
If you don't want to be there, that's up to you. But I'll probably stick with it, many people that I'd like to follow are there.
If the users are the ones chasing Nazis away it demonstrates a failure (or lack) of moderation, yes.
If you’re at a restaurant and the customers have to kick out some guy running around spitting in everyone’s food because the managemenrt sat idly by, that’s a failure in my view and I’m not going to spend my time there.
I saw your other comments. If you were honest over this being about how you are against corporate driven social media and in favor of decentralized ones, I'd respect your opinion much more than this repetitive insistence on the same point that "driving away nazis means they embrace nazis". Which is neither logical and it's wildly disingenuous regarding the challenges and the uglier sides of decentralized social media. Which by definition cannot entirely exclude nazis, even if you are not seeing them in one particular instance. Which, again, does not mean they are not there, it might just be that they are trying to stay incognito. All the more reason the willingness of the users to drive nazis out themselves is valuable, because expecting moderation to always catch them is naive.
If you tell me that relying on corporate social media is risky, I agree with you. There is more to this matter worth discussing, such as why people who rely on social media for a living, such as artists, may lean towards corporate platforms over user-driven ones. But we can't advance in a discussion if you keep going in circles to make BlueSky look bad for the nazis (they are driving away). If you are just going to repeat "but it means there's nazis" again, I'm not interested.
It’s great if you liked old Twitter (2016ish) or you’re a furry. It’s very furry-heavy though because the furry community is very tight-knit and so invites got passed around like candy for a while.
Been my experience that mastodon is chock full of furries too. So much of it gets posted on the art centric server I’m on. Had to create multiple filters for it.
It’s a microblogging service (similar to Twitter), ran by a small dev team and backed by Jack Dorsey (of Twitter origin). It’s been in “invite-only” closed beta forever so it has never really gone super mainstream. Some communities have kinda made their way over there but for the most part it seems threads and mastodon will run away with things in terms of being heirs to Twitter (imo). Bluesky is building their own platform (AT) that will allow others to stand up their own “bluesky” instances that federate with each other, similar to how mastodon works on the Fediverse with ActivityPub. Not sure what the progress is with that but am skeptical it will ever actually be a popular choice given the success of AP/Fediverse and the fact that threads and other large platforms (Wordpress, Tumblr, etc…) have already implemented or committed to building in AP support.
They chose not to after researching options. Pretty sure they decides account portability was a key feature needed and AP doesn’'t do this. As in taking your account and all your posts and data witj you to a new server. I assume there is a technical reason why this would be very difficult to add to AP/Mastodon otherwise they could have just added it themselves.
Yeah the not being able to fully move your account and all its history is one of the biggest shortcomings of AP for me. I hope they shore that up eventually.
It’s nothing to do with that, they made the AT protocol because is structured in a way that ensures that bluesky (the company) will always control the network. They wouldn’t be able to keep control with ActivityPub, it’s the same reason Threads will never implement it.
All the stuff about account portability is a distraction. Think about it: where would one move an account to anyway? Another BS node? Why? Unlike Mastodon instances there is no functional difference.
So the storage layer is “neutral”, accounts are “portable”. That to me means that node operators will have no agency in the system. Discoverability/search/recommendations are done in a separate layer, and the way the system seems to be designed (nodes have no say, they just provide the data) effectively places all the power with these “reach” algorithms.
3rd party feeds and recommendations and discovery already exists. They are also not dependent on the continued existence or openness of the bluesky servers. You can control your own experience and it’s easy to find and switch between feeds. Having more subscribers to your feed doesn’t make you more powerful in the context of network effects. If people stop looking your feed they’ll dump it.
Also, node operators have full control of what they forward to clients. They can absolutely apply moderation filters, and this is one of the expected means for such nodes to market themselves to their communities - “we have default feeds and moderation which suits your community”.
So it’s a winner-takes-all system that strongly avantages whoever starts building their dataset early and can throw as much money at it as possible.
Nonsense, the network uses relay servers which acts as open CDN servers and the firehose feed is open AND 3rd party hosted feed builders already exists (and they’re open source so you can copy them), you don’t need to waste duplicate work on building datasets. This network is cooperative. It has absolutely no winner-takes-all effects, it explicitly encourages division of labor and mix-and-matching multiple 3rd party services.
Another pretty good sign that BS’s decentralization is actually b.s. is the fact that the Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) used by BlueSky are currently “temporarily” not actually decentralized. The protocol uses something imaginatively called “DID Placeholder”. If I were a betting man I would bet that in five years it will keep on using the centralized DID Placeholder, and that that will be a root cause of a lot of shenanigans.
Then use web-DID which already is fully decentralized
Jack is not involved with bluesky anymore, he’s in nostr land now. He doesn’t have majority on the board and isn’t influencing development.
There is no way to opt-out from “reach” algorithms indexing one’s posts, as far as I can see in the ATproto and BS documentation. So fash/harassers would be able to choose an algorithm that basically recommends targets to them.
Moderation tools like this is in the works, it’s not complete yet. Mute/block filters already exists, and label services for moderation are being worked on
A whole lot of directly false nonsense and irrelevant arguments and ignorance of what the devs are working on
AT is not truly decentralized like activitypub. It’s similar to crypto where the majority stakeholder (in this case, bluesky the for profit company) controls the network. There are not “instances” run by community leaders, just free hosting.
The only thing they control is the DID lookup for PLC type account DID values, but if you have your own domain and use web-DID they control nothing that can’t be replaced
Ah interesting. One more in the “negative” column for Bluesky then imo. What Mastodon gets right (perhaps in a sea of things that it gets wrong) is that it relies on people to build and maintain their communities, rather than hoping that technology can solve all the issues of moderation, etc… Yeah, there are improvements that we hope will get to AP. It’s obvious bsky is just not the future.
It’s twitter except for the old guy instead of the new guy. If you left twitter for bluesky then you are likely just going to run into the same issue down the road where the old guy sells it for tons of money to whoever will pay. Those willing to pay are likely not great at managing a social media platform.
I wanted to like Mastodon but couldn’t. The only reason I used microblogging services like Twitter was to shitpost about Vampire: The Masquerade. Said game includes lots of death, blood, and other topics that make some folks uncomfortable. On Twitter, the atmosphere was very “don’t like, don’t read”, but Mastodon has an intense culture about using content warnings on anything that might make someone marginally uncomfortable. I’m cool with that, but I can’t do it on my shitposting or it sort of ruins the joke. Bluesky doesn’t have that atmosphere.
I know folks usually skew that way but it’s server to server. Frankly, I don’t use any warnings because I can’t be bothered and my instance is fine with it.
That misunderstanding proves how we need to review the user experience of federated projects, or at least do a much better job of explaining it to everyone.
When everyone migrated there were a lot of “helpful” newbies enforcing rules that simply don’t exist. There are too many people like that still but not so many you can’t mute them all.
They have a sandbox environment federating with 3rd party servers where other devs can participate in testing, and in the main public beta environment they just switched away from one main server to like a dozen (still no 3rd party there) and moved user accounts around, so they can test the federation code for stuff like performance and effects of account migrations, etc, in a live environment.
They’ve said they won’t open up federation with 3rd party servers on the main environment until they have moderation tools which can handle it, so they’re working on that also now.
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