i was gonna write a post comparing cohost and bluesky's respective top-down/social-first and bottom-up/technical-first approaches to designing a social network but i fucked up and accidentally wrote it in a thread on bluesky
edit: if you have a bluesky account you can see it here. i'll make a better post on cohost at some point. the big summary is that i don't trust bluesky's idea of building a hands-off social platform where the majority of the moderation is done by machines and users, and banned nazis can just pick up their entire account and following graph and move it to the next atproto site over. they expect that people will be fine with hate groups and bigots using the platform-at-large as long as they can choose to hide their posts.
this doesn't appear to be necessary yet; the community on there is currently lovely, thanks to the seed effect of inviting a bunch of queer shitposters. but the fact that it is regarded as the solution to the inevitable problem, as an element of their mostly AI-based strategy for userside experience curation, is worrying as hell
The more I think about it, the more I come to realize that conflating a user's agency to not want to see sexual material with the platform responsibility to not amplify hate is peak technoutopian nonsense.
The whole equivocation falls apart when you realize that sex and fascism are in not only completely incomparable, but that trying to make that comparison literally a point of fascist ideology.
To treat sex and fascism as two sliders that a user can set is in and of itself an expression of fascist thought. It derives naturally from technoutopian ideas of algorithmic neutrality, but the implications are nonetheless fascist for that origin.
