South Africa abstained. There goes BRICS, out the window.
Armenia voted in favour. Moldova voted in favour. Kyrgyzstan abstained. Tajikistan abstained. Ubzekistan abstained. There goes the Commonwealth of Independent States, gone apart from Russia and Belarus.
Iran abstained! Cuba abstained! I mean, how remarkable is that?
Putin remains a master strategist and a geopolitical genius.
I eagerly await tankie downvotes. 😜
I don’t think funneling more people to one mega-instance is a good idea…
It's not. The sign-up process needs to be simplified, sure, and some "default" options need to be presented to the people trying to join, but focusing on one mega-instance is simply dangerous and goes against the whole idea of decentralization.
Wow, three downvotes. Tankies must really be calling all hands on deck on this one. 🤣
I think this might be a pretty clear indication Putin is entering the "find out" phase of the "fuck around, find out" cycle.
Mainly because of fedi. Had been using fedi for years, never had a Reddit account.
Depends on your instance software (i.e. the software that is powering your instance). Friendica can do that I believe.
Maybe talk to @feditips@mstdn.social? I think they might be interested. They run a site that seems like a good home for a compatibility matrix: https://fedi.tips/
Moderation is a necessary feature of social spaces. It’s how bad behavior gets constrained, norms get set, and disputes get resolved. We’ve kept the Bluesky app invite-only and are finishing moderation before the last pieces of open federation because we wanted to prioritize user safety from the start.
I do hope I will eat my words as far as moderation on BlueSky is concerned. I do doubt I will, though.
It’s a little surprising that the person you’re linking to managed to install and operate their own Personal Data Server without reading enough of the BlueSky website to see that federation isn’t turned on yet!
Until federation is turned on they don't get to call BlueSky a decentralized/federated social network. And until an actually decentralized DID is used, they don't get to call it a decentralized protocol. And until they actually implement some features related to moderation and fighting harassment, they don't get to claim they care about moderation — they cared enough about "free speech" to design a whole protocol around it, so I believe I am quite correct to say that moderation is an afterthought in BlueSky.
All of this is basically "trust us, this time we will not screw people over" coming from a Twitter-funded startup started by Jack Dorsey. I don't believe they deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Why should they be different? If a user neglects to label their own post, shouldn’t other people be able to label it? (And shouldn’t the reader be able to decide who’s labels to give what importance to?)
It's not about labeling, it's about protecting people using a given network from malicious/harassing behaviour. That is always contextual. Putting a label on a post doesn't mean much, it loses a lot of the context. Saying "you're not welcome in this community" after reviewing of a broader context (multiple posts etc) is a much more effective way to do this.
You're also completely missing the point that it's not just about "whose content I see" but also about "who sees my posts". As I wrote in the blogpost:
What actual difference would being able to choose between different recommendation/discoverability algorithms make for at-risk folks who are constantly harassed on Twitter? There is no way to opt-out from “reach” algorithms indexing one’s posts, as far as I can see in the ATproto and BS documentation. So fash/harassers would be able to choose an algorithm that basically recommends targets to them.
On the other hand, harassment victims could choose an algo that does not recommend harassers to them — but the problem for them is not that they are recommended to follow harassers’ accounts. It’s that harassers get to jump into their replies and pile-on using quote-posts and so on. Aided and abetted by recommendation algorithms that one cannot opt out of being indexed by in order to protect oneself.
Anyway, we won't agree. I rarely find common ground with free-speech-maximalists. I see fedi admins and moderators as people helping protect and nurture their communities, you see them as "hostage-holders". We might as well stop here.
After reading atproto.com I still think it won't matter, because secondary centralization will happen in the "reach" layer. That's where the power in the system will be. As explored pretty in-depth in the blogpost that started this whole thread.
imo it is the ActivityPub world that is cosplaying decentralization.
ActivityPub has a over 20k different independent instances, mostly federating with one another. BlueSky has one, and if you try to set up an independent one, it won't federate.
I mean, I'd laugh, but it's not even funny.
BlueSky also already has a system for flagging different categories of sensitive content, much like Mastodon’s CWs.
You are confusing content warnings (not exposing others to potentially triggering content you post) with moderation (making it hard to harass users). These are two very different things.
This is answered in the blogpost:
And once you’re the biggest game in town, people will optimize for you (just look at SEO and Google Search). It won’t matter much that people using the network can freely choose a different algorithm, just as it doesn’t matter much on the Web that people can choose a different search engine. And the more I read about BS’s protocol, the more I think this is done on purpose.
Why? Because it allows BS to pay lip service to decentralization, without actually giving away the power in the system. After all, BlueSky-the-company will definitely be the first to start indexing BS-the-social-network posts, and you can bet Jack has enough money to throw at this to get the needed compute. I guess decentralization is a big thing lately and there are investors to scam if you can farm enough users and build enough hype fast enough!
(...)
Of course, fedi could also have some search and discovery algorithms built on top. Operators of such algorithms (there had been a few attempts already) would also benefit from being first and going big. But their potential power is balanced by the power fedi instance admins and moderators have (blocking and defederating) and by the fact that fedi is perfectly usable without such algorithms. And by strong hostility of a lot of people using fedi towards non-consensual indexing.
You might be interested in reading it, might answer other questions you perhaps have.
Yup! You posted a separate thread about it here, linking in case people missed it.