Even if somebody wanted to make an unmoderated ATProto app, I guess they could? Good luck with the app stores and regulators and users
ActivityPub provides the option to do just that. Anybody can spin up a server running Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma, etc… and moderate it however they like. There are a multitude of clients in app stores and an unmoderated server won’t affect that because they’re generic clients like web browsers. There are countries such a server could be hosted in with minimal regulations.
As for users… you’ll probably get some and they’ll probably be horrible. Most people will probably block your server.
You can also spin up your own Bluesky PDS (the account server) since federation is live now, or your own appview (basically the feed display server that has most of the smarts) and point your app to it, or set up your own relay (CDN like server) and point your appview and even point feed generators to it (3rd party custom feeds are supported in Bluesky)
So if you don’t like the decision made by anybody else you can just replace them. And yeah, just like on Mastodon nobody’s going to use unmoderated appviews, subscribe to scrappy feeds, or federate with a PDS hosting only shitty people.
It seems like there are some good ideas in there. Are there third parties out there running servers for each component that are open to the public yet?
Yes, there’s already some 3rd party reimplementations of both clients and PDS servers and feed generators (but haven’t heard of custom appviews yet). I don’t know anybody running an open PDS yet though, it’s mostly individuals running them
🤡
Well that’s a TL;dr if I ever saw one
The fact that Bluesky has some form of content moderation and has occasionally banned users for things like using racial slurs in their usernames.
Actually, Jack Dorsey may be the problem. Good to see him shift focus to that “free speech”, pro-cryptocurrency platform Nostr. I see it like a containment zone for the worst people.
I think that it’s hard to find a level of content control that everyone is happy with. I’d favor fewer restrictions.
But that’s one thing that’s nice about the Threadiverse model – it’s federated. You can have one set of restrictions on one instance, and another on another.
Beehaw has pretty good conversation. I enjoy my discussions on their communities. They have a pretty upbeat mood. It also has an extremely low bar for defederation – it’s defederated with even lemmy.world. I don’t like that, would not use that as my home instance.
My home instance is lemmy.today. The admin there is aiming for not defederating with anyone. I like that. But…not everyone wants that.
Point is, there can be multiple levels of content moderation on the Threadiverse, both at the instance and community level, and people who have different preferences can have the level of moderation that they want. Some people take a free-speech-absolutist position. Others want a safe space. Some people don’t want pornography on their forums. Some people only want certain types of pornography. Some people take issue with certain types of political radicalism. Some people want to associate with Threads users, and others do not.
I think that that’s maybe the best of all worlds.
Beehaw has pretty good conversation. I enjoy my discussions on their communities. It also has an extremely low bar for defederation – it’s defederated with even lemmy.world. I don’t like that, would not use that as my home instance.
Haha that’s an instance I haven’t heard about in a while… I personally blocked it because I want to talk to everyone on lemmy, not just half the population, and they’ve defederated from the largest instances.
And i guess that’s the good thing about the lemmyverse - you decide what level of control you want.
I personally blocked it because I want to talk to everyone on lemmy
Genius
didn’t phrase that well, what I meant was when I have a conversation on lemmy I don’t want to respond to a beehaw post that less than half the lemmy population can see.
I had fully understood what you wanted to mean, even though phrased badly. However the reason I quoted it is because of how contradictory is your thought process.
I mean, you are missing something;
not just half the population, and they’ve defederated from the largest instances.
I don’t know, sounds reasonable chief.
I don’t know, sounds reasonable chief.
They want to talk to everyone so they’re blocking someone/anyone? That does not sound logical. If that instance defederates, all that person has to do is just not use them as their home instance. They’re saying they want to talk to everyone, but they’re going out of their way to not do so (by blocking an instance, for whatever reason). Makes no sense to me.
didn’t phrase that well, what I meant was when I have a conversation on lemmy I don’t want to respond to a beehaw post that less than half the lemmy population can see.
It’s an incredibly ironic stance to take
I personally blocked it because I want to talk to everyone on lemmy
Ummmm… lol
didn’t phrase that well, what I meant was when I have a conversation on lemmy I don’t want to respond to a beehaw post that less than half the lemmy population can see.
I agree, I have accounts on different lemmy servers depending on what slice of fedi I want to expose myself to.
Pretty much every failed social network out there failed because it had poor moderation tools, and this genius thinks the biggest mistake Bluesky has made is having any moderation tools at all.
Jack Dorsey looks like Rasputin
Lover of the Russian queen?
“I lit another fire and it also burned!” -Jack
He went from looking like The Mandarin from Iron Man to wish.com late stage Tyrion.
Maybe space karen can by bluesky as well now. Let’s start the bidding at $50 billion.
Biggest mistake he made was allow Twitter to be sold to an idiot
Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. … But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it. That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company.”
This is the same problem that all these “free speech platforms” keep running into. Some people will abuse free speech - if nothing else, I think everyone can agree spam is a type of abusive speech. But the difference between abusive speech and ordinary speech isn’t a sharp line, and the definitions of “abuse” will vary. So there needs to be some mechanism or rules for deciding what that line is. But all the people that create these platforms instead wanna pretend that line doesn’t exist, so they don’t create a means of determining it. So then “abuse” becomes whatever the users demand and/or the decisionmakers decide it is. Which is exactly the same as having no free speech to begin with.
Which is why I applaud Bluesky’s innovative approach to moderation. It’s truly decentralized and decoupled from the server you’re signed up to.
what
They’ve designed their platform so that you can outsource different aspects to different servers. So you can choose a moderator who curates your experience and that’s a different person from who hosts your data, which may be different to who sorts and determines the ‘top posts’.
Bluesky has moderation accounts you can follow like regular accounts that basically flag or hide posts according to how you configure them. This differs from the Fedi model where your chosen instance dictates what you see. There is the standard account that every user follows by default, but even that can be configured to your liking. And if you don’t want it on, you can disable it and follow a different account that moderates content to your liking.
I, for once, don’t like seeing insects, something that shouldn’t be moderated because there are valid reasons for posting pictures of insects. On Bluesky, I can follow a moderation account for phobias and have it hide any pictures I wouldn’t wanna see.
Thanks to that, Bluesky is more flexible IMO and requires me to do less for more. Unlike the fediverse where I have to maintain my own filter lists which don’t always work when pictures get posted without alt text or keywords found in the filter list.
That…actually sounds cool? So why is this considered a mistake?
So why is this considered a mistake?
I imagine that much granularity fucks with their efforts to introduce ads.
Because Jack Dorsey is obsessed with the same “free speech absolutism” that Elon Musk is, and he’s butter that people don’t want to be shown Nazi propaganda, hate speech, and all that other shit on his platforms.
Dorsey is an idiot, just like Musk. Don’t let their money fool you.
I don’t know, don’t ask me. People always find stupid shit to be outraged about, but this one is really not it tbh. I personally love it and hope the Fediverse adopts something similar to it or even just reuses the same open source code for these labeling accounts (as they’re called over there), albeit adapted to the ActivityPub protocol.
ah interesting. can i check to see how many blacklists ive ended up on
You could always brute force comparisons between different mods
Bluesky is pretty fun and I’m glad he’s not there shitting it up anymore. I’ve only seen one nutsack on there so far.
Bluesky hasn’t been hyper-commoditized yet. I don’t see ads everywhere. I don’t have bots jamming ׺°”˜
”°º× 🎀 𝒫𝓊𝓈𝓈𝓎 𝐼𝓃 𝐵𝒾♡ 🎀 ׺°”˜”°º× into my feed. I’m not being spammed with “We noticed you haven’t joined our premium service yet, but for $8/mo we’ll stop showing you this message!” annoyance marketing.But I’ve got no doubt its coming. It just hasn’t hit that Twitter-level critical mass of users, such that enshittification turns a profit rather than curbing adoption.
It just hasn’t hit that Twitter-level critical mass of users
Twitter used to be bigger than it is now and it also used to have less spam. So clearly size isn’t the problem.
The problem with twitter is Musk fired all the people who spent their day figuring out how to hide (or just delete) shitty content.
Twitter used to be bigger than it is now and it also used to have less spam. So clearly size isn’t the problem.
Twitter usage surged significantly prior to the Musk buyout. In 2010 they had 40M. They crested 400M users by 2020.
That’s the difference between growing your base and harvesting them.
Bluesky has in the neighborhood of 5-6M, by comparison.
There is a LOT of furries though.
Can confirm, my brother is a furry and on bluesky.
Oh no, not the Vrchat of social media
Between threads mastadon and bluesky, which one do you think will be the biggest in the next year? Or are they gonna all keep living in the shadow of Twitter
Given the inertia of moving social platforms and the spoiler effect of fragmentation, I assume ex-Twitter will remain the leading platform for a while still unless Musk manages to run it into the ground at record speed.
I don’t have any hard numbers on the rest, unfortunately. I personally favour Mastodon, and I believe some national governments have officially adopted it and are running their own instances, which might tip the scales a little if people see that as endorsement.
Bluesky overall seems to have the advantage in terms of marketing (probably because they have the advantage of money too). I have no idea about Threads, but being from the same company as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp may give them an advantage in terms of existing users for those services. I would expect they try to intermesh these services at one point or another.
It’s hard to predict, given that many people might just follow whatever their favourite personalities choose, and once enough users have gone there, other popular people may choose that platform too for its larger userbase, drawing more people in… It can snowball either way.
There’s also the ongoing debate about interfacing the other options with Mastodon. I’m not going to take a stance on that here, but it might be a solution to the split “some of my favourite people have gone here, the others there, but I want to keep up with both in a single app”. I think there would have to be a user-level option in Mastodon to block entire instances to allow people to choose not to get shown content from those services.
As an aside, I think that would be a good idea anyway, for Lemmy too. If I want to be able to browse All without seeing specific instances, I don’t want to have to look for an instance with that exact list of defeds.
I don’t understand how any of these visions fundamentally differ from Mastodon.
Decentralized? Yep. It’s got no center. Open source? Yep, you can fork it and make your own if you want. Unmoderated? Sure, if you want that, you can set up an instance and host whatever illegal content you want. You’ll have a lot of legal problems and most people don’t want it, but the option exists.
Is there any point besides money and crypto bullshit? If you want to post short comments that your friends can subscribe to that isn’t controlled by a big corporation that gives your data to the government… well we have that. It exists. It’s pretty okay. Go use it.
I hate the term web5 but the tech stack described here is much better than anything else I’ve seen. https://developer.tbd.website/projects/web5/
You don’t need to go crypto to get there though, IPFS and similar exist and work. IPFS itself is kinda slow, but Iroh is aiming to be a more efficient alternative that solves similar problems. There are also protocols based on BitTorrent.
The way these work is basically:
- users connect to relay nodes
- relay nodes connect users directly
- users continue communicating directly w/o any servers
Then you build stuff on top to keep everything in sync. No servers, aside from the initial connection, which means minimal risk of anything ever going down. If relays go down, anyone can set up another and people reconnect.
The problem is that step 3 is quite complicated, and there are a ton of technical complexities to synchronizing information at scale w/o a central authority. Mastodon/Lemmy/ActivityPub gets around this by having each node (instance) be a complete copy of everything that node cares about. You get a ton of duplication, and eventually that means costs pile up. With a proper decentralized system, there doesn’t need to be nearly as much duplication since you can always hop through some peers to find what you need.
You don’t need to go crypto to get there though
You never do. Its only use case is a payment system for online crime. And even for that many criminals prefer gift cards because it’s such a hassle to explain crypto-tokens to your victims.
It’s useful for anything online where cash would be useful. So paying for services, money transfers between acquaintances, donations to charity, etc. It turns out cash is useful for crime, and privacy-focused cryptocurrencies work like cash, hence are useful for crime.
Don’t buy it as an “investment” or sign up for services to earn it, but it is useful for non-criminal things.
No, it’s not useful as a cash substitute because of its hilarious inefficiency.
That’s not necessarily a given. Ethereum, for example, transitioned to proof of stake instead of mining and seems to have reduced electricity use by 99.5%. I’m not exactly sure where that number comes from, nor do I know a good way to compare crypto to other systems (e.g. do we count all the energy used by banks?).
But what I do know is that Bitcoin kinda sucks from an energy perspective, partially because they limit the number of blocks (e.g. buckets of transactions) per day, so mining is more valuable than on a currency with no such caps (e.g. more demand to mine each block = more miners = less efficiency per mined block).
What seems to be true is that cryptocurrencies have a large upfront energy cost due to speculation, and that plateaus as it hits a certain carrying capacity. So crypto scales decently well, and if you do proof of stake instead of proof of work, it seems to scale even better.
And then we get into the issue of where your energy is coming from. Since cryptocurrencies are global, they can be done anywhere energy is cheap. For example, daytime purchases can be done using excess energy in an area where it’s night. For fiat, that energy use is more local, so you’re more likely to process a transaction during peak energy use (afternoons), thus higher energy capacity needed. It’s a really complicated topic, and I’d love for someone smarter than me to break it down.
But since it’s so hard to calculate, there’s a lot of bad information, which leads to unnecessary and unfair criticism from people who don’t see value in cryptocurrencies. If you ask a crypto bro, they’ll point to the massive amount of power used by financial institutions, and if you ask someone who’s against cryptocurrencies, they’ll compare POS and minor processing use by credit card companies to an entire Bitcoin block (which has lots of transactions). I’d really like to see an updated, neutral look into it, because all the information I’m able to find has huge holes in methodology.
But all of that is kind of irrelevant to the discussion about whether it’s useful. If it’s not useful, any amount of energy use is wasteful, but if it provides value, there’s certainly an amount of energy we’re willing to spend on it, so what exactly is that amount?
Also Ethereum is extremely inefficient compared to conventional tech (like just a database). All you need is to realize that complete trustlessness is impossible to understand that a distributed ledger has no problem to solve. And that’s why there is no practical application after all these years.
The biggest individual difference is that bluesky makes identity independent of the hosting server (via cryptographic keys) and makes content location independent of the hosting server (via content addressing).
And these features together also enable more efficient caching and propagation in the network as well as enabling features like custom feeds and 3rd party moderation tooling which works the same independently of which server you’re on. So Bluesky can give you a better global view of the network and more efficient communication between users on many different servers in the same thread.
Ironically enough, Jack’s other favorite place Nostr (which is built as P2P with repeater nodes) is also adding moderation tooling similar to that in Bluesky (labelers making use of the content addressing and account key ID) to flag stuff
First, thanks for that explanation. That’s interesting.
Is there a good place to learn more? I can see why having custom feeds and 3rd party moderation tools are good, but I still have a lot questions.
First, is there a genuine benefit to dissociating a users identity from their server? I think the connection between users and their home instances are a brilliant innovation. They seem to bring village culture back to the internet. They help people associate within networks below just the global level. I think the atomization of people online has been a part of why there is so little trust.
Bluesky is open source and have a site for documentation
Splitting off identity means you can bail and take your friends and post history with you when a server either goes down, gets hacked, or if the admin goes insane, or if it gets freenoded (hostile takeover and impersonation)
On bluesky the closeness comes more from the personal connections plus the choice of feeds
Wait, did they sell Bluesky to Musk?
Wait, people hate him now. I remember people loving him in the Twitter years. What happened?
He went mask off and everyone realized he’s a fascist
How is he a fascist?
He’s a billionaire with all his money
Being a billionaire. Doesn’t make you a fascist. Are the Obama’s billionaires? Are they fascists?
Thank you for watering down words. If real fascist shows up. No one will believe you. Because people cried wolf one too many times.
The highest estimates I can find put Obama at < $150M.
Not coincidentally, Dorsey still has about $1 billion of his personal wealth invested in the company now known as X
HAD. Had a billion dollars…
Maybe he started with 5 or 10 billion dollars left in the company!
How to become a billionaire: Start with 5 billion.
Maybe he started with 5 or 10 billion dollars left in the company!
