colin

(disclaimer: this is not the official position of anti software software club nor have I even asked my coworkers to proofread this)

• in its past few months of operational history it's become obvious that bluesky has very little intent on doing anything beyond the bare minimum as far as moderation:
  • noted op-ed doofus matt yglesias joined the site and immediately got harassed for being matt yglesias¹ and couldn't block the people who were harassing him because blocks weren't a concept that existed on the site at the time; they had to implement blocks on an emergency basis because of the bad press.
  • their new community guidelines (which won't apply for another two weeks) are the first revision which attempt to set local speech rules beyond "be polite and respectful".
  • even the new community guidelines make clear that these are rules which only apply to Bluesky Social itself and cannot be enforced on other instances of the AT Protocol.
  • their "composable moderation" content labels (including the "political - hate groups" label that gave rise to bluesky's famous "racism slider") were originally applied exclusively by AI models, and I suspect this is still the case.
• despite being a supposedly "decentralized" service, none of the actual federation/decentralization story seems to have been publicly thought through at all, and I assume that the interaction of decentralization and speech policy is even less thought through than that.

the two possible futures I see for bluesky are

a) the future where it actually gets effectively decentralized, but all of the development work is being done by people who deeply believe in all of the worst "free speech wing of the free speech party" mistakes that twitter made in the early 2010s and the service is effectively unmoderatable;
b) the future where Bluesky and Bluesky PBLLC remain hegemonic in the space and we just get Trump-Era Twitter 2, except this time their moderation team gets to say "don't like it? run your own service" -- which they will absolutely say an order of magnitude more often to marginalized people than people with political views on the far right.

also, not on a technical level, but I get very bad vibes from trusting a twitter-funded twitter spinout² with jack dorsey -- the cofounder of block fka square, a financial services company which is still making plays in the cryptocurrency space -- staffed by a lot of people who worked on twitter's cryptocurrency projects. it doesn't matter how many adamant denials they issue that cryptocurrency will be involved, I just do not and will never trust it.

1. in case it's not already clear, I support harassing him because of articles like this

2. fun fact I discovered recently: jack still owns $1 billion of twitter; he negotiated this in the musk acquisition

I am begrudgingly & perhaps hypocritically on there because way too much community I'd hate to lose has chosen to try rebuilding over there instead of elsewhere (like, f'rex, here) but lordy do I agree with every one of these concerns.

yeah and to be clear I don't look down on people who start a bluesky account to hedge, and we're not gonna ban people linking to them on here or whatever.

however, I do think choosing to embrace bluesky instead of cohost or mastodon or tumblr or even like... spill or spoutible¹ and begrudgingly getting an account there in the event that doesn't work out is a mistake in pretty much every way something can be a mistake.

1. pretty much anything but twitter honestly. or hive social. or counter dot social². bluesky is probably better than those.

2. if you're unfamiliar with counter dot social, it's the mastodon fork run by the jester, which was defederated by basically the entire fediverse for deciding that the best way to deal with disinformation campaigns sponsored by Russia and China was to block those entire countries from signing up