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...)
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.
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]
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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...)
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
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