So, if you’re online poisoned like me, you may have noticed that Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has been having sort of a slow motion, low-key public meltdown for the past several weeks. Most recently, in this interaction with a user.
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Even with practical technical decentralization, the vast majority of Bluesky users are on, well, Bluesky. Bluesky was never really packaged as something that was relatively easy for someone to spin up on their own servers; the network has been historically extremely centralized, and only small minorities of users have broken off.AT Proto decentralization doesn’t exist as a practical reality, and if it ever does it won’t be for years. Most of the work driving effective decentralization is being done by third parties, who have limited guarantees about future compatibility with possible breaking changes on Bluesky’s end.
Bluesky inc isn’t really making ‘a protocol’, they’re making Bluesky, the monolithic (to within a rounding error) social network that they operate.
I do genuinely believe that the Bluesky team set off from the start to create a decentralized protocol, but unfortunately for them they ended up running a social network. And at this point, AT Proto has become essentially a sort of ideological vaporware; a way for Jay Graber et al to run a social media platform while claiming they don’t run a social media platform.
This is, of course, just another iteration of the Silicon Valley monoproduct: power without accountability. The tech industry elite are very much like Gilded Age railroad barons – buying up whole towns, breaking up strikes, imposing top-down economic policy on whole sectors – except all the while they claim that they are just technology enthusiasts playing with their little trains.
This does raise a question relevant to the Fediverse. Some Bluesky users are lobbying to have Jesse Singal banned, whoever that is. Of course, a hallmark of a decentralized network is that there is no central authority that could actually do that. Implicitly, this demand is a rejection of the very concept of decentralization.
Once people find out what decentralization means, are they even willing to tolerate it?
If you’re the kind of person who wants a particular person banned, you probably want to be on the kind of instance that would ban them, and then from your perspective, they’d be banned, so you’d never have to see their posts. It still being possible to interact with them from other instances isn’t any more of a big deal than it being possible to interact with them on an entirely different website after they’re banned from regular social media - no one can ban someone from the whole Internet.
Yes. On Bluesky, they could be individually muted or blocked. You can make and share blocklists, make your own custom feeds that exclude such posters, or even create your own moderation service that removes (or blurs, …) posts for your subscribers. Obviously, that is not satisfactory for some people.
Of course, a hallmark of a decentralized network is that there is no central authority that could actually do that. Implicitly, this demand is a rejection of the very concept of decentralization.
What, you can absolutely ban people on a decentralised network. You may not be able to expunge someone from a part of the network they control themselves, but you can expunge them from the part you control. Bluesky has this power and has used it in the past.
Yes, but that doesn’t seem sufficient for some. Conservatives certainly would like to remove trans people from the public completely. Aside: It’s foolish for trans people to copy these tactics, assuming this comes organically from the trans community. These people are certainly acting like the heels in some right-wing propaganda play.
Bluesky offers several ways in which users can remove unwanted content from their experience. Easiest is for users to block Singal; banning him from their personal part of the network. Blocklists can be shared easily. Users can also spin up their own moderation service.
I probably shouldn’t go into the details of what Bluesky can do on a technical level. Incidentally, that blog post contains errors.
In short: On a technical level, the Bluesky company can greatly reduce the visibility of someone. But they would likely run into legal problems if they used that on Singal. The EU regulates what can be done quite strictly. Maybe they could benefit from some industry friendly “loopholes”. I’d have to look that up.
Unfalsifiable conjecture. Contradicts everything the people involved say themselves. Including transparently good actors like some of the board members.
Assumes bad faith, basically. Which ironically is one of the founding ills of social media.
Bad rant. Wrong on technical aspects and self-contradictory. Anyway, off-topic here.
Bluesky is a platform for scammers and morons.
If you’re not the one scamming, that only leaves one other option.
Bluesky is of course just another American social media company. If they are not shit now, they will be once they get bigger. The American model has reached a dead end and it’s not suitable for good products, competition and real innovation.
Side note, it’s been a while since I’ve lived in the US, so my knowledge of local “culture wars” is from online sources, but the article is incorrect in claiming that Jesse Singal is a transphobe. I say this as someone who often disagrees with him.
I will add that many of the commentators in his substack are unhinged and likely transphobes.
Yes, he is absolutely a transphobe, by the very wiki article you linked?
Legal scholar John Inazu characterized the backlash as “widespread outrage from progressive commentators” and that in some criticisms, “ad hominem attacks far outpaced their substantive critiques”.[13]
US americans are largely the same, be it trumpers or self styled liberals, they always have to be “better than” or “the best” of something. This leads to dangerous orthodoxies that don’t allow debate or discussion which furter leads to stances that are nothing but distilled anti-intellectualism. The trumpers call everything woke, the liberals call everything phobe. Meanwhile the overton window has moved so far to the right, the country elected a pedophile scam artist as president because they know him from TV and the rest of the world is left holding the bag.
There is a bunch of normalized transphobia in America. That certain views are shared by elected politicians doesn’t make them not transphobic.
“Trans allies aren’t even bothering to debate this white guy, they’re just calling him names” isn’t proof of anything more than the frustration of said allies. It’s essentially the same thing as “Trump derangement syndrome”.
If we want to argue that someone is or isn’t transphobic, it would be a better use of everyone’s time to focus on what they actually said and what justifications their critics give for applying that label.
IMHO, the US has bigger fish to fry than transphobia, it’s ridiculous it has so much air time in the anglosphere in the face of the much more relevant inequality and destruction of association rights. The neonazis set up the bait and the idiots gobble it up, hook line and sinker.
It‘s perhaps worth noting that the first people the Nazis came for was LGBTQ people. If you‘ve seen photos of Nazi book-burnings, there‘s a high percentage chance that what you‘ve seen is the first book-burning, because the vast majority of photos are from one event. The books being burnt at that event was research from an organisation called Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the Institute of Sexual Science), which was founded by a gay activist and focused mainly on LGBTQ research and care - including gender-affirming surgery. The Nazis very deliberately tried to wipe out this research and acknowledgement that trans people existed.
If you don‘t care about the current attacks on trans people in and of itself, it should trouble you as a canary in a coal mine. The famous poem‘s first line should be „first they came for the trans people“, rather than „first they came for the Socialists“. Don‘t do the „and I did nothing because I wasn‘t trans“ thing.
It all matters, even if your concern is purely for yourself.
Funny you’d mention that adage because the people getting sent to concentration camps are hispanics by ICEsatsgruppe. Leave it to amis to grandstand while missing the point…
By “association rights” I infer that you mean the right of free association.
If so, can you be a little bit more specific as to whose “association rights”, specifically, are a more important issue than the right of trans folk to get healthcare, be free from discrimination, and be able to play sports without being harassed?
My inclination is that the most important targets to defend against facist oppression are the ones being targeted, which does suggest one plausible answer, but I really do want to know what you meant in your post.
Are you telling trans people that the unequal treatment they face isn’t relevant? It’s all part of the same pattern of restricting rights. It’s a bit like saying, “never mind all that about the Jews, let’s focus on the Nazis.”
I’m saying precisely the opposite, but nice testament to Godwin’s law. Your reply is a nice example of the “phobes” point I had previously mentioned.
Godwin himself pointed out that his law doesnt apply when discussing actual fascists.
I guess I’m Nazi-phobic, but can you point out any other sense in which your statement holds meaning?
The transphobes are getting ready to take away my healthcare, I think I have to be very worried about that.
If I can’t get my medicine I will die.
One of the beauties of socialized healthcare is transphobes can’t take it away from anyone.
And they use the threat of trans people getting government healthcare as a way to stop socialized medicine. They also use racism this way, and sexism, and homophobia, and xenophobia, and other reactionary ideologies. These things are directly connected, we can’t really ignore one to focus on the other.
Besides, we need to form a mass movement, and you can’t form a mass movement by telling minorities to shut up and wait their turn.
Also I might lose my healthcare in the next few months. It’s kind of fucking urgent?
Please tell.me that you have better sources in the UK than I, and that their recent transphobic swing didn’t make trans care harder to get and keep.
I strongly disagree. Even the section on his articles about trans kids shows that Singal is able to show a measure of nuance and understanding with respect to the critiques of his work.
Not to mention the more global context. Are you sure that non-english speaking trans folks would have the same attitude (i.e. they may have their own opinions and priorities)? The reason I mention this is that I have some exposure to the local LGBT community and their attitudes don’t always align with “Western” expectations.
Anyone who doesn’t toe the line is a “transphobe”
I feel like many people who went to Bluesky were desperate for it to work and grow, rather than necessarily believing it would work and grow and in some cases - weren’t even people who the Twitter style even appealed to. They just went there to try and do a bit of damage to Twitter. This is likely why its now slowly losing activity.
I signed up to Bluesky not too long after it surged. And I made a few comments, but quickly just… didn’t have anything say. It’s just a “shout into the ether” site like Twitter - but smaller, and no nazis. That’s a good thing in itself, but in an ideal world I would never really use it.
similar story here
I just wanted any alternative to shitter for public accounts
I can see how the AT protocol is designed to scale. ActivityPub works fine now because the community is fairly small, but it will reach its limits as it is currently designed. Its basically an event driven model vs a push and pull model. Sure a docker image can more or less jusy be deployed, but that simplicity is a ticking time bomb.
Running a relay is way more powerful than the author states though. You could do stuff like selectivly intercept and reject events before they make it into or out of the firehose.
This sucks. Hopefully this will push ppl to sign up to mastadon or to other atproto instances and move away from the main bluesky acct.
For anybody looking for mastadon instance i recommend mas.to and for an atproto alternative, I’ve been on blacksky.community instance for a few weeks now and I rly enjoy it
