Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good essay [1] about "Web3" that highlighted a few of these kinds of issues, and I think it applies to anything like Bluesky claiming to be "decentralized" when it's prohibitively difficult to access it any way other than the biggest central service.
Concretely, Bluesky has an AppView that takes posts from relays and PDSes, subscribes to moderation labelers, filters posts that have labels which have certain labels, then displays them in the browser. Blacksky is the first independent implementation of relays and other large components of the system.
The default Bluesky AppView subscribes to the Bluesky Moderation labeler which cannot be disabled. No independent AppView has been made which can turn off the Bluesky Moderation labeler. That's all.
I have my concerns over the network, namely DAUs decreasing and community politics, but the tech is largely a matter of time I feel. It's true that the ActivityPub ecosystem has a lot more federation happening but ActivityPub is a much older system (which itself derives from OStatus which originated in 2012-ish.) Mastodon was released in 2016. It's bound to be more federated than Bluesky.
Concretely, nobody is going to subscribe to anything else in bsky but the default stack, anything else is unlikely to ever gain much adoption, and thus federation is basically meaningless and a technical implementation detail for how they wanted to manage their stuff.
It's like stack overflow for teams. Isn't that useless? Why not post on stack overflow? Because this is your stack overflow, for your organization. Stack overflow for teams isn't a competitor or alternative to stack overflow, it's a different use case.
You might be right simply that no one actual cares about any of this, and 99% of people don't care at all who gets banned or censored and who doesn't. And they'd all just stick around to the one place where everyone else is and that's that.
But this is an argument against the idea that people care or don't.
Assuming people do care, then Bluesky is the first protocol attempt that could actually work, because it lets you move your existing account freely to any alternatives easily, and because it also allows you to control your own recommendation algorithms.
If people don't care, than, people don't care, and that's that.
But if people do care, you need to achieve the above behavior, and that becomes a technical challenge that tech can solve.
The default experience just needs to be good enough. Beyond that folks with strong opinions will filter into moderation communities that offer them the curation they want. That's the technical side of this at least. There's larger problems around community culture but unrelated to tech.
People who want me to hear them belong to one of two groups: I want that, or I don't.
The second group may be expected to be overwhelmingly spammers and scammers, with a smattering of tankies and kooks, because the ability to reach the largest possible audience is attractive to them, right? So what you think, should each recipient maintain his/her own filter, or should the platform include some sort of common filter?
It is a serious concern for cryptocurrency that most users don't even get the touted benefits because of reliance on exchanges.
Any response that starts with "users could..." or "people could..." is pure wishful thinking and not worth wasting your time on. People don't work this way. En masse they will flow to the path of least resistance, and no amount of wishful thinking will ever change that.
That means classic claims like "bitcoin is scarce" or "transactions don't require anyone's permission" or "transactions can't be censored" or "nobody can seize your bitcoin" are generally false in practice.
Even if a person only trades via bags of cash in dark alleyways and never touches exchanges, they're affected by all this "paper" bitcoin.
If they need to touch an exchange at any point, even if holding in a cold wallet 99% of the time, that exchange can still take 100% of their tokens.
It may not be obvious to more casual observers, but there is a lot of trading volume happening on on-chain exchanges these days (as in easily 10B+ in trading volume per day with most of this coming from futures).
Hundreds of wallets might contain a the same monkey picture (or same hash and IPFS link to nitpick).
What matters is that Opensea says you have the "real" one.
Their database is the real list of who owns what, the blockchain is a distraction.
You can see it in their anti-theft systems. NFTs get hidden and blocked from trading after a police report, even if it's still there on the chain.
I still think there's room for something better technically. Mastodon seems more true to the decentralized ethos but I've never quite gotten used to the server dependency experience.
Nostr appeals to me technically but every time I'm on it seems swamped completely by discussion of cryptocurrency.
I guess to me it feels like one of these catch 22 (necessary but not sufficient?) problems where you have to have the right technical base for a platform, which seems doable, but even then you have to have the right userbase also.
The choice need not be limited to the familiar corporate hellscape vs decentralized usability nightmare dichotomy. Middle grounds can exist if we want them to.
I've seen a lot of general support for the criticisms and concepts described in this article:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
Anyone who builds what they describe there can expect it to take off faster than ever.
And for social media that isn't their userbase.
I’d like to see Bluesky’s long-term business plan and what they will do when someone inevitably wants return on investment.
[0] Yes, this describes all of current social media, but it doesn’t have to be this way. This business model should not be legal: as long as there is one “free” social media platform, that is the platform that is going to be used, simply because even $1 is infinitely more than $0 and no one can compete with free.
It's why I found it so dismaying when we went through years of apparently serious newspapers reporting on every twitter-storm as if it was important. Yes, it was a good if unreliable source of breaking news, but the general noise of people fighting back and forwards about whatever it was that week ... was just noise, among a relatively small group of motivated crazies. Using it as a societal barometer just results in skewed coverage and an emphasis on American social issues that aren't necessarily as relevant everywhere else.
I don't need to go find loonies. I can get on Twitter or Truth Social and get it from the horse's mouth.
I'm not sure that's true. It's important to note that these bans are from the Bluesky App View (one component of the infra), and that these users can continue to post under their identity (if they own it, which they can), and users on App Views that haven't banned these users could continue to follow them.
None of that works with Mastodon. An admin bans you from the instance, and you can no longer post, use your identity, interact on the platform, etc. You have to start from scratch.
In short, Mastodon reduces the blast radius, but the "blast" is the same as on any private platform. Bluesky/AT Proto changes the impact to a different, strictly lesser type.
ActivityPub's lack of portable identity is a pretty serious problem, but the fact that significant portions of ATProto still rely on centralized infrastructure with no credible path to decentralization is pretty clearly worse[1].
[1] There are only two credible relays, and only one credible app view, and building/running either requires hundreds of times more capital than spinning up a Mastodon instance.
I think there's a great value to the "small community" ethos that the fediverse supports much better than bluesky.
Bluesky is trying to build something as decentralized as email where still few providers dominate the market and most use few common ip/domain blacklists.
Yet it is one of the most decentralized protocols on the internet.
I a not saying Bluesky is a masterpiece but I think it is naive to hold it to a higher standard than email as a protocol.
If it fails due to little adoption then it is a fail, if it succeed there is a possibility of it becoming a good decentralized protocol
The content of the posts and some level of moderation is the selling point.
Personally that's kinda a bummer, because IMO my biggest disappointment is that its just Twitter but little different. Same pithy posts and petty bickering:(
There's more servers on Mastodon, yes, so in that way it is decentralized more. But as a user, I have a lot more sovereignty over my data on Bluesky than I get having my account on a Mastodon / fediverse. I can set up my own PDS quite easily, or move to another, or back to BlueSky hosting very easy. I appreciate this decentralization a lot.
And I have a much better chance of being able to analyze system behavior, understand propoganda networks on atproto/bluesky. Mastodon servers heavily discourage trying to view & understand the network, but Bluesky really lets everyday folks run and analyze the whole firehose, very very cheaply. Which is an incredible decentralization, a very powerful syndication that it's protocols enable, that's simply unmatched. Still, research is being done on both networks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45507566
> “I want to be extremely clear I was not making a death threat or inciting violence,” he told me, saying that he had sent 12 separate examples of other people posting the same Kirk image as a reaction meme. “I don’t wish death on Jay, I wish for her and her team to grow a conscience. I disagree with the decision and how it was handled. My account was taken down without any explanation for almost a full day in what can only be viewed as a retroactive ban.”
The email, verbatim read:
> A reply with an image; alt text reads:
> 'Charlie Kirk sitting in a white T-shirt that says "Freedom." A negative consequence follows!
[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/aliafonzy.blacksky.app/post/3m2jm7u...
https://bsky.app/profile/aliafonzy.blacksky.app/post/3m2k7c7...
The format is the problem. The medium is the problem. Poorly moderated groups of anonymous people voidscreaming as some “this will be monetized once we hit critical mass” exercise is the problem.
I believe that eventually people will sort ourselves out into the masses who never really understand or accept that, and those of us who choose not to subject ourselves to something so obviously poisonous.
Bluesky has been drama central since the beginning, consisting mostly of people who thought Twitter wasn't censoring enough (or censoring the wrong people), the free speech crowd came later and, well, tested the waters and found transphobic speech was in fact not free, and that despite distributed promises, the town wasn't big enough for the two parties to coexist
1. It was founded by the free speech crowd. 2. It is funded by VCs and required to eventually make a profit, which implies one set of constraints on free speech. 3. Its main initial userbase was people who expected a completely different set of constraints on free speech.
I don't think this is a contradiction that can be resolved by Bluesky. Blacksky might manage it, but I think they will turn up new contradictions, and the high cost of running an alternative ATProto stack is a big impediment to resolving those.
This place also suffers from some pretty severe systemic issues that are inherent to any site that delegates moderation responsibilities to ordinary users. Invariably, these tools get abused to silence people.
The amount of greyed out and dead posts in this very comments section is exhibit A, and it's a pattern I've seen repeated in pretty much all other sites like it.
I can't imagine the mindset that wouldn't want to be capturing some of the amazing wonderful world about them & the thoughts in their head & sharing them with others. I find these views about walking away from putting yourself online, seeing only the harm, as being deeply nihilistic & running away from clear amazing basically spiritual human value.
Indeed. As you said, it's the people, not the technical details of the "protocol" or "platform". My "favorite" Mastadon example: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>
When the one responsible for running the site can not run it anymore, it effects everyone on that website.
Examples:
- Digg (killed by owners removing their own product)
- Myspace (killed by new ownership leaving site to rot)
- Google+ (killed by Google)
- Facebook (killed by enshitification)
- Tumblr (killed by new ownership's rules)
- Twitter (killed by unhinged new ownership)
But mastodon is actually decentralised by design and implementation.
Mastodon as a whole isn't a single website, but instead is a whole collection of groups each running on their own server that can interact with each other as if they were one large site.
So with mastodon: when a site runner loses their ability to keep a site running (e.g. your example), only the single mastodon server/group is affected, the users move to a different group, and the rest of mastodon keeps running as if nothing has changed (because in the grand scheme of things, nothing has).
In AP land, for better or for worse microblogging is dominated by the ad-hoc set of standards that Mastodon pioneered, and too much of the community just treats AP as "HTTP+REST JSON APIs for social" and ignores the semantic components that AP can use to interoperate.
While that’s much preferable to Twitter in 2025 (and the right)… it’s not encouraging as for the future of, frankly everything.
It's a pipe dream I know, but on the surface social media could be really cool.
I prefer random comments without ranking, because it gives you a more truthful view of public sentiment. The force that aggressively filters comments is the same force that takes away the dislike button. It is all about controlling public opinion. Everything is good all of the time, and everyone is in a controlled demographic where they are insulated from new ideas that might make them difficult to advertise to.
Yeah, it's called the real world. We have millions if not billions of years of experience in dealing with in-person differences, tentative contacts with members of neighbouring tribes and smoothing out conflicts. One will find the risk of getting smacked over the face for being an absolute idiot to be a very effective motivator to remain on our best behaviour with strangers.
On the internet these days, you can only choose between an echo chamber, or all-out culture war.
Doubtful that it would be an improvement.
I probably read more viewpoints I disagree with on Substack than anywhere else.
Granted, we had a huge Imgur user migration, so that's the current flavor of the content, but the OG userbase was aiming for a culture that is perfectly defined by "thoughtful positivity."
FWIW, it looks like Mastodon software has some features for moving servers, including bringing your followers, but not your posts:
In the AT protocol, your identity isn't tied to a server. You don't need the older server's consent or support to have a new identity somewhere else.
It kinda is. Your identity is in the hands of whoever controls the PLC Directory. You can argue this is better than having your account and identity on the same place, but it still a third party that you depends on.
As I found with one marketing experiment, this makes it terrible if your goal is to reach as many consumers as possible in a niche.
But HN members who aren't mass-marketing could change that, by moving to the Fediverse -- giving it their endorsement, and network effects.
Amazing. Another great reason to be there as a person trying to interact with other people.
I was mentioning one use case that's a showstopper that much of HN would appreciate, and which forces a lot of the people who attract other people to be on the proprietary platforms.
Of course a risk of making Fediverse become more popular is ruining it for those people who want very small-neighborhood community. And who don't mind that, on any given topic, they're basically stuck with the handful of people who happened to be there, not those who would be most interested.
I'd still like to make Fediverse more welcoming to more people, to get more people on it.
I have an optimistic belief that a more popular Fediverse could be better than any of the commercial alternatives. Though it would become more like them in some ways, as it grows.
Why? Why should HN members, or anyone else, move to another network with the same kinds of fragmentation and mutual mass bannings (and/or demands for mass bannings) that we are talking about here with Bluesky? See, for example, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>
Between my single-user-instance and Facebook's billion-user Threads, ActivityPub is genuinely decentralised.
I think the goal of pushing many of these harassment's forward, is to further have a reason to force these platforms to clamp down on its users to push the agenda of needing to control speech. The people who benefit directly are government insiders that want to wield power over the population.
Its very similar to what I suspect the RIAA did during the file sharing craze. They would post there own content to force these platforms into submission.
IMHO. Decentralization is just another way to centralize control at choke points. The only way to make these systems censor proof is to have them built on distributed networks[0].
Secondly any for profit entity that pushes a platform is going to want control over the platform and as such be diametrically opposed to freedom of expression.
Look at BitTorrent as an example. Its been working for years. yes they can poison nodes, but its clearly much more resistant to these kinds of attacks then our current iteration of social media platforms. Why do we keep buying into platforms that doing give us what we need?
Also I'd be very wary of any overly complicated system designed to make it very difficult to understand the process of connecting to peers. Complication is usually a way to obfuscate the technical process of a system to prevent people from making any meaningful changes to it.
[0]: https://medium.com/distributed-economy/what-is-the-differenc...
I don't know of any sense in which Mastodon has increased centralization, I think its blocking tools have been distributed essentially since the beginning, not something that has iterated toward centralization over time in response to an unfolding debate. Although it does have a complicated history and as possible that new things have happened I'm not aware of.
BlueSky though, to your point, is a good example of centralization not being reliable in terms of not being accountable to users. Or for a different way of saying the same thing, the lack of accountability has served to reveal how centralized it truly is.
It does seem to be simple enough that people don't get confused about using it, but it doesn't seem to walk the actual walk of decentralization.
So if for example #archlinux disagrees with your opinion and they decide to ban you for it, you are now banned from many other unrelated channels.
I have also seen subreddits that auto-ban users that have ever posted in specific other (unrelated) subreddits.
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos... is how it works fwiw.
Wheras with Matrix, you can run your own server, with your own rules, and federate with the rest of the network.
It sucks when server operators group together because it effectively becomes a centralized moderation team that makes decisions for users with tenuous implicit consent but user moderation lists aren't that.
This is actually today's controversy on Bluesky because the #1 attribute of its power users is they're terrified of "AI" and the idea that "companies will steal their posts to generate AI slop", which means they think the ML moderation is stealing their posts.
Oh, but the ML can't be decentralized because the training datasets are illegal.
Centralization eventually ends up with a single entity in charge of everything, which eventually does (or doesn't do) something that causes it's value to collapse.
The real solution here is federalization: A bunch of independent self-govening entities that co-operate with other entities to assist each other in moderation.
A good non-social network example here would be adblockers.
- Each adblocker uses at least one ad tracking list, with most adblockers allowing for multiple lists to be used and a sensible default for their own users to use.
- Each list has it's own moderators that add/update/remove entries on their list based on their own values.
- Adblockers (and their users) can collaborate on requesting changes to lists, resulting in faster reactions to advertising changes on the web, and in turn faster updates passed down to users of those adblockers who participate.
- If an adblocker can't do their job anymore (e.g. their owners/workers can't do their job anymore, the owner sells out, etc...) users can switch to (or create) a new adblocker.
- If a list fails, adblockers can switch to other lists (or create a new one).
No adblocker and no list holds all the power. Adblocking as a whole is strengthened by always having viable alternatives that can be switched to, and methods to quickly create new alternatives if the need arises.
That's the power of federation: the strengths of centralization without the weaknesses.
The social media version of a federated twitter is mastodon. A whole bunch of groups running their own mastodon servers that can interact with each-other as if they were a centralized mastodon website, with similarly aligned servers sharing co-operatively maintained bad-actor lists.
People always had irrational populist and conspiratorial beliefs, but that was mediated by popular media generally not platforming kooks. Now you have the top 10 podcasts allowing people to mainline validation for conspiracies.
I don't see how centralization helps. Allowing (or demanding) that a media provider to regulate more could lead to less platforming for conspiracy theorists and populists.
This is a really dumb article, starting with this example. Singal is not anti-trans and never has been. He wrote critically of methodologies used by key papers that are cited in support of affirmation in youth gender medicine. That is it, and all it ever was. For that he was canceled. Ridiculous.
Reddit Inc controls far more of the moderation inside subs than they let on.
Their insane PE higher than nVidiaa isn’t from an AI data deal. It’s a narrative/propaganda control device.
We tend to hand wring about principles within the tech sphere, when the bulk of people just want a place that won’t make them feel immediately (longer term doesn’t matter) crappy when they use it, whatever that means for them. That tends towards centralisation because decentralised services have awful moderation and tend to create an even stronger strain of groupthink.
Bluesky isn't marketing itself as a decentralized platform because it's not. It's an opinionated view of a decentralized network, and others are free to use differently opinionated views or make their own.
IME they do care, but they have no patience to deal with the hurdles that decentralisation imposes upon your user experience. So ease-of-use and convenience always win.
https://gist.github.com/mary-ext/6e27b24a83838202908808ad528...
Their official website/app are compliant with those laws when unmodified.
We were content with "Are you 21 Y/n" for sites featuring alcohol for years, why did we have to go and mess it up?
And beyond the technical details, how can a corporation commit to transparency and non-bias when their very funding depends on it? Google already provided us with the most popular example of how this is not possible (“don’t be evil” by an ad company).
So the expectation is that the vice president of the United States should be banned because he says stuff people don't like? What's the benefit of ignoring reality like this? He's not going to magically disappear if Bluesky bans him - indeed he'll remain VP with all the power that entails.
This is worse than performative activism, it's like some kind of political denialism. You can't change reality by pretending it doesn't exist.
But I guess you say you should know the reputation of every person coming into your shop, and if their reputation is deemed inappriopriate by a certain group, they should not be allowed into the shop to prevent them from harassing any other customers.
But how are you gonna regulate that? Who is gonna decide who is inappropriate and who isn't?
I think we already have a fairly well organized system for that: law & order. If someone breaks laws, they are punished for it. So if someone is violent, whether it's inside or outside a shop, they can be punished for it.
And you as a shop owner don't have to also individually take the effort to investigate and punish the individual. Although if you want to you have the freedom to; it's your shop in the end.
> One of these people now sits in the White House, in part because of backlash to the deplatforming of him and others with similar politics.
It's not because of anything. Cause and effect doesn't apply to the brain of the median American voter - they live in a world of pure imagination. You could say they thought prices would go back down to 2016 levels, but that makes too much sense. If you look up what they actually think it's like "I voted for Trump because I want to protect abortion".
Good evidence that it worked to do what? Limit his influence and popularity? This is false. His unbanning had little effect besides the right wing giving Musk brownie points, but the initial ban fueled grievance politics and became a huge rallying cry for the right. It was an extraordinary backfire.
> It's not because of anything. Cause and effect doesn't apply to the brain of the median American voter - they live in a world of pure imagination.
I flatly disagree with this. Human beings are endlessly deep and complex. The extremes of the internet cause us to group people together and create 1-dimensional strawmen of them, but if you talk to any American voter -- offline and 1-on-1 -- you will find complexity, nuance, and surprise in their opinions. At least, that has been my experience, with a pretty decent sample size.
Edit: I've been loosely watching the score on these comments, and it's interesting to see how rapidly it fluctuates up and down. For those that disagree, please leave a comment. IMO what I wrote is pretty common sense and moderate, so I'm interested in hearing disagreements.
I've noticed there are usually wild swings depending on the active timezone. It would be interesting to try to extract a rough sentiment of each longitude, by looking at the timing.
Decreasing the reach of his propaganda. And reality isn't ignored since posts about him and his words/actions aren't removed
The problem with that is two-fold. One, it neuters any political impact - you're effectively driving away the very voters you need to convince. And two, it creates an echo chamber that distorts reality because everywhere you look people are agreeing with you. Then 2028 rolls around and you're shocked that "the bad guys" won again.
That seems like a good goal. I want to chat with friends about formula one or whatever, not have to have everything messed up by some weirdo who always wants to debate whether minorities have rights.
Not everyone wants to debate politics all the time. Sometimes they just want to exist as trans people, share posts with their other queer friends and enjoy their day.
Is it? No one I know uses it at all, the only time I even remember it exists is when seeing screenshots of Trump's posts reposted on mainstream media and twitter from his account there. It's essentially the "trump-branded-twitter" and I never even hear of anyone else actually using it.
Compared to twitter, where most people I know still have an account in one way or another, including most notable mainstream figures.
> Not everyone wants to debate politics all the time. Sometimes they just want to exist as trans people, share posts with their other queer friends and enjoy their day.
Well they'd be poorly served by Bluesky, seeing as how someone merely existing on the platform without even breaking any rules has become a hot-button issue.
The whole platform is filled with politics, and people complaining about politics(/political figures). Perhaps politics they agree with are more tolerable than having to see opposing politics on their feed, but I find it hard to believe they truly are attracted to Bluesky for the total lack of politics.
Well, unless they go there for furry porn. There's so much of it for those that seek out such content, perhaps it really goes drown out any semblance of political discussion.
I think this is what a lot of social media has become, particularly as people isolate themselves to only those sources and feeds they agree with.
This has also been discussed in the context of FB's feed where optimising for engagement has inadvertently led to a situation where users are constantly being bombarded with ragebait.
You can have personal rankings, for example people reporting on the most interesting things they’ve recently seen. But these will be individual lists, not aggregated by an algorithm over all user behavior.
You certainly don’t need likes and other reactions, and you also don’t need up- and downvoting of contributions. Those set the wrong incentives and do more harm than good overall, IMO. You do need reporting of problematic content, but only site moderation will see those.
The internet is weird sometimes
At a certain scale, social media tilts humanity in one direction. We can't seem to escape the trajectory of our very nature; it will outcompete any complex system we devise to outwit it.
and thereby reinforcing their echo chamber with efficiency.
This week one of the youtubers I like, Canadian auto mechanic who typically focuses on canadian politics. He decided to join bluesky. I commented that he's going to be banned by the end of the day. He replied that he is avoiding usa politics and controversial subjects. He ended up banned on the second day. No specific example, just that his account was reviewed and he's banned. I saw his posts, they were all tongue in cheek jokes poking fun. Absolutely no valid reason to ban him.
His most controversial post on bluesky that I saw, he commented on Obama saying that perhaps they should just shutdown the government and with the saved tax $, they can afford to buy healthcare.
There are essentially two tiers of moderation on Bluesky – that provided by Bluesky themselves, and community moderation. The community moderation is powerful and I use it fairly extensively already, and my hope is that in the long term it's the community moderation that represents the bulk of moderation on the network.
The problem is that Bluesky are legally required, and required by app publishing platforms, to implement some moderation themselves. It seems like their approach there has been to focus on strict legalities, leaving the rest to community moderation. This is a good idea for the decentralized nature, but unfortunately some high profile individuals know how to fly under the legal limit while still being a pain. Then there's outrage at them not being banned even though community moderation thoroughly silences them for anyone who wants it. This results in hate being targeted at the Bluesky team... and eventually that hate turns into threats (perceived or real) and that results in bans. Now it looks like Bluesky are banning their critics while allowing dangerous people on the platform.
Bluesky are not without fault here. They've not communicated about this well, they've not pushed community moderation well enough, and they've posted some questionable rage bait. But I do understand where they're going and think the future is ultimately bright for AT Proto and the Bluesky network.
I always found what Bluesky was "optimizing" for to be a stupid goal, and inherently a bad idea -- namely "the ability to keep your everything permanent."
That's EXACTLY what brings MORE danger to centralization. I get that losing an identity on a thing sucks BUT WE'VE ALREADY DEALT WITH THIS WITH EMAIL, and more over the ability to lose/destroy/start over -- like with email -- is a FEATURE as much as it is a bug.
Not only that, but also having a globally (eventually) consistent view of every conversation from every server. Unlike the "message passing" model used by email and ActivityPub, this means that every server has to carry all the traffic of the whole network (i.e., to be prepared to be a centralized service for the whole world). This is the main reason ATProto is mostly centralized - every alternative server has to be global scale, and who wants to bother with that just to show exactly the same content that Bluesky Inc does?
What I'm realizing, perhaps as an old timer -- projects like this seem to utterly forget the concept of "layers," despite, you know that being the whole internet, OSI and whatnot.
I remember having the idea that even this exact use case, air-quotes "twitter", could be done by simply layering something over email, e.g. you shoot an email to "posty-instance@myserver" or whatever and then some central-ish thing posts that to a public feed or whatever.
So much unnecessary reinvention.
I believe there's a universe of difference between ONE provider and a few megacorps plus weirdos like me who pay for my own domain; I actually think that would ALSO be a good model for twitter-esque microblogging the way it pretty much works for email.
Well I read your explanation, and it's still not obvious. Nor do I appreciate the implication that anyone who disagrees with you is missing something obvious. Not the best choice, rhetorically.
How is this meltdown at Mastadon not the exact same thing as what we're discussing here regarding Bluesky? <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195> As another said here,
>I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them.
At least with Masto, you know the possibility of being shutdown if you don't trust your provider, which is the same as email?
Also I can be intolerant to you, because you are intolerant (to people you think are intolerant).
This is neither smart nor moral. This is logically inconsistent and breeds conflict almost by definition.
It's never been more clear to me that you didn't click the link
It's a recursive paradox: an intolerant person cannot define what intolerance is, but that's what often happens in reality.
I also recommend
https://medium.com/extra-extra/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-prec...
As an effect it also reject the concept of an intolerant person, as there are only people with different views about what constitutes an acceptable state of peace and what represent real and present danger.
If the left view the right as jeopardizing safety, and the right view the left as jeopardizing safety, then existential conflict is inevitable and tolerance as a strategy is dropped by both.
"clear, specific and concrete danger" is something that may be a better set of criteria. If one can not specify the danger, or if it is not concrete, then its arguable not very clear or present.
Now, once you consider that the people that I’m imagining are nearly-spherical but covered in spikes and all of them are in the bottom of a big slippery bowl, you can see how they’re always causing harm to one another. Also in this scenario they can only communicate in grunts and as such they rely on me - the dungeon master judge - to resolve conflicts through a complex legal system that I made up. Sadly I am powerless to do anything about the spikes or how slippery the bowl is, so you can guess how that works out.
To all the people that talk about a “social contract” I say “put that in your pipe and smoke it”!
There is also a difference between speach and action. As a society, we should allow all speach (e.g., people questioning authority), but supress certain actions (e.g., violence). Currently, the American left seems to believe that people voicing the wrong views justified violence. That belief is abhorrent and fundamentally completely at odds with liberalism and a just and well functioning society.
Specifically, re-tolerance of intolerance, I highly recommend a speach by Rowan Atkinson on exactly that topic. If you Google it you can probably find it. It is worth a watch. He is an incredibly intelligent and eloquent man.
> But not everyone is looking forward to the idea: “I’d go back to Usenet before I went back to Mastodon,” wrote Bluesky user Count Von Horse Knuckler. “I do not need people yelling at me for not putting cat pictures behind trigger warnings or unwanted Linux advice.”
But I'm suspicious because:
1. That doesn't appear to be a valid Bluesky handle and,
2. Even if it's a pseudonym-- which is understandable-- how could there possibly be a former usenet graybeard who didn't love trafficking in unwanted Linux advice?
Edit: clarifications
I mean, I get "ignoring" someone so they don't show up when you log into whatever instance you're in, whether it's the AT Protocol or ActivityPub, but like... if someone somehow decides to do work on top of one of these protocols and extend it to allow people to basically comment on things that a victim user doesn't want to allow an antagonist to take part in, I mean, aren't you just like effectively putting fingers in your ears while someone in another room talks about you?
I don't see how, without centralization, you can say to the world, "Hey, here's my content, interact with it," and then also say, "Oh you, over there, you can't participate in this thing that I am doing."
Like, depending on the shape of the graph, that doesn't make any sense. You effectively cannot do that without just creating a bunch of silos that are non-cooperative.
Bam, you've reinvented centralization with extra steps.
While anybody can host their own PDS, the public bsky.app instance can and will “block” users by preventing their login and not pulling data from the PDS of the banned user or showing it in feeds.
Since, to date, the BlueSky “AppView” (the service backend itself that handles aggregating data, generating feeds, etc.) continues to be closed, being banned from the public instance is effectively being banned from the network. The data model (lexicon) is well documented and somebody else is free to write their own, but, for now, BlueSky is just as centralized as other platforms even if you can store your data elsewhere.
Without the backend that handles all of the XRPC endpoints [1] being available, BlueSky still effectively maintains centralized control over their part of the 'atmosphere'. Somebody could, of course, make an open source implementation of the app.bsky lexicon and users would only need to update their DID to point at their preferred instance, but AFAIK none exists right now.
What is missing?
Would projects like this one, which pulls only a subset of Bluesky data straight from the firehose, and can be processed as the end user pleases, help mitigate this limitation?
Theoretically they could maintain that filtering only occurs on the client level but they've made the choice to exclude banned users from the firehouse so their moderation choices effect everyone
Cat pictures need a trigger warning? Wonder what the triggering effect is there?
I can see Linux advice though: kill, mount, etc.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hyperbol...
For example "USpol" is often used as common CW but not specifically TW. But it could be "boob", or "giant spider", or "furry", or "food photo", or "super long post" whatever else you think people may react to with "I wish I didn't have to see that while scrolling the timeline". It's really just about making it a nicer place to others. It's common, but it's not like people expect you to put USpol warning on posts from account which deals only with politics.
If you post an image, you can tick the "Adult Content" box and it has that label applied to it. It's the only way to do that currently.
Are we decentralized yet? (arewedecentralizedyet.online)
492 points by Bogdanp 38 days ago | 283 comments
It's either centralized and moderated system wide or decentralized and moderated locally.
The problem with being connected and moderated locally is your creating global moderation problems for a local system, typically that means massive amounts of work for said moderators.
It's disappointing because I've mostly been able to replicate my Twitter experience there. It's better actually, because more funny people moved and fewer journalists so it's less of a doomscroll.
Bluesky in particular has this problem because it inherited a kind of leftist crustpunk poster from 2016 Twitter. They had a weird affect where they hated "nerds" for some reason and pretended to be those jock bully characters from 80s high school movies.
The modern Bluesky form has evolved into being terrified of "AI" and screaming at anyone who uses it or has ever heard of it that it doesn't work and will never work but is also using up all the water and steals everyone's art and is going to make everyone unemployed and also you're a STEMlord who needs to take humanities classes to learn to be ethical.
They're currently working on inventing new slurs for AI chatbots which are mostly remarkably offensive.
That sounds awesome. Thanks for the tip. I'm gonna join this effort immediately.
- posting about saying it "with a hard R"
- posting TikToks of yourself yelling "dirty clanker" at delivery robots on the street
- posting TikToks of yourself saying it in a sketch where you're a waitress in the South in the 1950s
- replying to people with prosthetic robot arms calling them "half clankas"
Cause those are all real. It's the internet, you should assume anything bad you can imagine is real.
https://www.tiktok.com/@supervilliansprax/video/754524076599...
I think I have backup: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samm...
Note Peter Thiel (the source of literally everything this sort of person is upset about) is a philosophy major.
The other words are worse.
Whatcha gonna do when we come for you?
Science journalist covering the science of perhaps the most salient social issue of our time?
Don't get me wrong -- there are other really important stories which aren't being covered as well as they should be, but Singal's beat would seem to be at least as important as... most anything linked from HN on a daily basis.
> People who vocally wish he was less influential would do well to remember how much juice they've been giving him.
I totally agree. By turning Singal into a boogeyman he almost certainly isn't, people are only feeding his social and journalistic capital. Singal is just someone who disagrees with you (in that classically liberal 90s American sense). Efforts to cancel or ban him have made some look like they don't have actual arguments to contribute.
That's how Singal makes those with opposing views look ridiculous.
Quite frankly, he didn't have to do anything. They did that allll on their own.
either the term "edgelord" means something very different from what it did 10ish years ago or you have a very misinformed understanding about how timid Jesse approaches online conflict. I haven't seen him initiate any form of edgy engagement in forever .. maybe ever.
(Not over the library coverage itself, just over ancillary stuff I heard on the podcast).
I'll put it this way: I had reason to tip our local politics Facebook off to the episode he did, and when I did that, I wrote a paragraph long disclaimer about what he's like. Not because I have any animus towards Singal, but because I didn't want anybody to associate me with some of what he's said.
So yeah, I'd push back on this.
Singal is a lot less interesting a subject (aren't we all exhausted of debating Singal at this point) than whether Bluesky is going to be a viable mainstream competitor to Twitter, and he's interesting to me only in what this drama says about that question.
I 100% agree with you on that part. As for the rest, it seems you and I have a vastly different experience with him and his views. Cheers!
edit: oh yea, I don't know whether you'd be comfortable sharing it here but I'd be fairly curious about that Jesse 101 you wrote for your facebook group. Not to criticize it or anything just to get a better idea of your POV.
He presents this issue as a sort of parental-rights-ignoring epidemic, but if you dig into the reality of it all there's a hell of a lot of parental consent, a hell of a lot of checks within the medical establishment about whether to do these things, and of course the person themselves being involved.
Singal is a fellow traveler to people who defend conversion therapy, which is a thing where _kids are sent to a camp to be trained into a different sexuality_. This is shit that's basically banned in many places in Europe, because many believe that those camps are basically child abuse.
So you're looking at a person who has a lot of distrust for the medical establishment, falsely presents the reality of the thing to make it sound like people are walking in for free top surgery the moment they get into middle school[0], and this is stuff that is being cited to add restrictions on other things.
There's this deeply personal thing that a very small segment of the population is trying to deal with. There are medical professionals that have some help (including just of the "talking" variety), some degree of acceptance in pockets of society. And this sort of thing means that people can have a little bit of dignity. And the medical establishment is trying to treat people!
Meanwhile this guy is using his voice to just spread fear around all of this, misrepresenting even really basic things. And to what goal? Again, parental rights are part of the equation in reality! And we're not talking about a sports thing here. So who is Singal out there fighting for?
I kind of don't care what this guy's opinion is on, like, taxes and the role of government in the rest of life. He's going out there writing this kind of stuff so consistently that he's known for it. And I have a very hard time understanding who he is the voice for, except for people who are just against trans people existing in public society.
I don't care about him being banned off of bluesky or whatever. I just want people here to have at least some access to medical care (in various forms) if doctors and parents agree. And his stuff is helping to provide ammo to roll this access back at a legislative level. Serious people should know that what he says doesn't hold up on examination. In the same way that people "know" that Trump just says things that sound emotionally right to him in the moment to prove a point.
[0]: I'm exagerating here but again, in the USA access to medical treatment is not easy!
You should see some of the background evidence on this. NY Times did a podcast series not long ago, which covered the controversy, called The Protocol: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-protocol/id1817731...
It was about how the so called Dutch Protocol re: gender affirming care first came to the US, and how long-ish psychological evaluation times were often truncated because of how far patients had to travel in the US. Then the lid flew off when such care moved to California.
> Singal is a fellow traveler to people who defend conversion therapy
Yikes. One doesn't usually expect people to use the actual language of McCarthy-ites.
> So who is Singal out there fighting for?
The kids? It's really not crazy to believe that the children, perhaps not given adequate care, could simply be wrong, or even socially influenced (like everything else in a teenager's life).
> He's going out there writing this kind of stuff so consistently that he's known for it. And I have a very hard time understanding who he is the voice for, except for people who are just against trans people existing in public society.
It's a new treatment and how it is practiced here in the US is the very Q he is examining. I'm not saying he's right, but I do feel better if there is someone with a critical eye looking at new treatment methods.
Perhaps there is a debate to be had on treatment protocols, but I generally feel like, for something that covers such a small segment of the population, the default is to err towards letting that debate happen in professional circles.
Oh agreed. If, for no other reason, that is how the politics, even on the American Left, are now. A few years ago, people were talking about gender affirming care as a matter of right for the children. Singal, among others, changed that conversation.
> I have very little patience for the idea that access is easy.
Agreed, but I think you may have misconstrued Singal's point. He's not saying it's too easy, he's saying there is not enough preliminary psychiatric care like the treatment protocol dictated in the Netherlands.
> Perhaps there is a debate to be had on treatment protocols, but I generally feel like, for something that covers such a small segment of the population, the default is to err towards letting that debate happen in professional circles.
Um. Those professional circles like HN's professional circles need to be open to the air every now and then. Like -- what if we allowed Peter Thiel and his circle of founders, raised on Heinlein novels and sugary soda, to dictate tech policy in the US? Some people are just too weirdly close to a thing. We actually do need the wisdom that normies can offer.
Specifically, re: this topic, four European countries, who have a much more experience than Americans do with this care, have recently implemented more restrictive approaches to care. See: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/06/us-europe-transgend...
If you think it'd be wrong to force a cis kid to be trans, then it's also wrong to force a trans kid to be cis.
I think that's a fine point to make, but I also think it's unlikely to be politically feasible, any time soon, in the US. You may have been perfectly capable of making this decision, but, in the most common case, most parents know that teenage brains driving almost adult bodies sometimes make really terrible decisions. And lots of us imagine we were much smarter than we actually were in adolescence. Moreover -- parents can be just as profoundly stupid.
I'd imagine a teenage Melanie Griffith would say she was perfectly capable of consenting to the very adult relationship she had with Don Johnson, and to which, I believe, her parents consented, as well. In retrospect, I'm not sure adult Melanie Griffith would feel the same. Or at the very least she may not allow her daughter to do the same.
Perhaps that's why we should willing to accept some guidance from things that at least can pretend to be objective -- science and journalism. Especially views critical of our priors and intuitions. And we definitely shouldn't seek to silence or de-platform anyone simply because they disagree.
Please -- vote the bastards out of office who don't take your problems seriously, but also please don't silence journalists for suggesting that there is more to this question than two simple American Left and Right narratives. Some of us need that kind of help to understand the world.
So instead we need to enable parents to allow healthcare to disfigure their young kids when they predictably get influenced from social media and their peers?
How is it 'disgusting' to try to let someone live as they were born?
Medical officials fairly broadly agree that gender-affirming care improves the quality of life of patients, and so of course it should be allowed.
It's disgusting to try and use the law to force medical professionals to give sub-par care for no good reason.
> How is it 'disgusting' to try to let someone live as they were born?
I assume you're opposed to cosmetic dental braces for children? Even though just like gender-affirming care, they can lead to better self-perception and better outcomes (but 'disfigure' the child by making their teeth more aligned with stereotypical norms)
This is not really true any more at this point in history. European countries have either backed away from pediatric gender affirming care, or they never allowed it in the first place. It's increasingly the case that the US and Canada are the outliers in the broader consensus that the evidence for the benefits of endocrine interventions in children is too weak to justify routine prescription.
> I assume you're opposed to cosmetic dental braces for children? Even though just like gender-affirming care, they can lead to better self-perception and better outcomes (but 'disfigure' the child by making their teeth more aligned with stereotypical norms)
Are we really going to try and draw an equivalence between cosmetic dental braces and permanently-altering hormones? A wire pulling a kid's teeth into places is not comparable to chemically castrating the kid for a few years and giving them opposite-sex hormones in their mid-teens. The measured benefits to the latter have to be way higher to justify that level of invasiveness and permanent change.
These kinds of blithe comparisons to the seriousness of gender-affirming care no small part of why trust on this issue has waned so fast.
No, let’s be real, this isn’t a dominant narrative in public discourse outside this thread. You’re irritated that you can’t simply assert a de novo principle of pediatric ethics that bans gender-affirming care without absurd collateral damage.
What "absurd collateral damage" have the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, or Norway encountered when they banned endocrine interventions for treating gender dysphoric youth?
OP said:
>>> How is it 'disgusting' to try to let someone live as they were born?
Asserting this as an ethical principle leads to absurdities. That’s all that occurred here.
> What "absurd collateral damage" have the UK, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, or Norway encountered when they banned endocrine interventions for treating gender dysphoric youth?
This is irrelevant to the point at hand (nobody here was discussing European medical policy), but this is not accurate. It’s strange, because you’ve correctly summarized what occurred elsewhere.
Let’s go review the situation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty_blocker
> Danish guidelines published in 2023 recommend the use of puberty blockers on transgender patients at either Tanner stage two or three, as a means of buying time for patients to consider their gender more fully before making a decision.[119]
> In 2020, Finland revised its guidelines to prioritise psychotherapy over medical transition.[120] However, these guidelines are a recommendation, not a mandate.[121][122] The Council for Choices in Health Care allows the use of puberty blockers in transgender children after a case-by-case assessment if there are no medical contraindications.[123][124]
> In 2023, the Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board, an independent non-governmental organization, issued a non-binding report finding "there is insufficient evidence for the use of puberty blockers and cross sex hormone treatments in young people" and recommending changing to a cautious approach.[148][149] The Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board is not responsible for setting healthcare policy, and the Directorate, which is, has not implemented the recommendations, though they have said they are considering them.[148][146][125] Misinformation that Norway had banned gender affirming care proliferated on social media.[146]
Misinformation, by the way, that you continue to peddle in.
> While European health authorities aren’t instituting bans on treatment, currently minors in six European countries—Norway, U.K. Sweden, Denmark, France and Finland—can access puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones only if they meet strict eligibility requirements, usually in the context of a tightly controlled research setting. (Italics in the original)
Read through your quotes carefully:
> The Council for Choices in Health Care allows the use of puberty blockers in transgender children after a case-by-case assessment if there are no medical contraindications.
And how many of such cases were granted? This could be a de facto ban, if no such cases are granted.
> issued a non-binding report finding "there is insufficient evidence for the use of puberty blockers and cross sex hormone treatments in young people" and recommending changing to a cautious approach.
Again, how many new patients are being put on blockers after this recommendation?
You're trying to spin this false narrative that patients with gender dysphoria are still being prescribed puberty blockers as normal treatment for GD. This is not the case. Even though the legislatures in these countries haven't banned the treatment, effectively nobody is getting puberty blockers for childhood GD in these countries.
Actions speak louder than words. You can split hairs about how "recommending" the discontinuation of puberty blocks is not ban. But at the end of the day, what unambiguously true is that the vast majority of patients who are prescribed blockers in the US would not be prescribed blockers in these countries. If you have actual stats on the number of new patients prescribed blockers in these countries in 2025, by all means share it.
Welcome to the cleft palate surgical repair denialism club!
Looking at Sweden, it was alarms from the medical and research side that resulted in stopping the prescription of hormone blockers to children. The historical record has demonstrated poor treatment results and high rate of harm, with doctors reporting problems of politicians and parents pressuring them into doing treatments that they themselves do not think will be to the benefit of the patient. Opponents has described the act of removing treatments as transphobic, and politicians from both side joined in, but very little is now focused on the science or data.
The problem, if you can call it that, is Singal hasn't broken any of their TOS or guidelines.
Right now, AFAICT this is a people with pitchforks problem, who are asking for something which they don't have any business asking.
Sure, if you want to stick your fingers in your ears, block Singal. There are widely used block lists for people who even merely follow Singal. Asking for his ban from a public use platform is too much without more than "He wrote some articles for the NY Times, The Atlantic, and NY Magazine, I didn't personally enjoy."
Bluesky has a problem of its user base demanding purity, and it will 100% be the death of it.
yeah but that's an accusation without basis in reality.
https://www.professorwatchlist.org/
https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-makes...
https://www.azregents.edu/news-releases/abor-chair-statement
Yup.
As someone who describes themselves as Leftist, I wanted to enjoy Blue Sky, but the purity tests are insane.
To give a concrete example, I was called a Nazi for owning a Tesla Model 3. The fact that I bought the car 6 years ago, long before Elon Musk made his hard-right turn, was irrelevant. They literally expected me to sell the car and take a huge financial loss (Since I need a car and would then need to buy a new one, and the trade-in value of my M3P is shit) just to virtue signal.
It's not 2012 anymore, and the modern mainstream social media ecosystem has turned into an utter disaster area. If you're going to do social media in the 2020's, you need something better, not the same tired ideas and empty promises about "We'll do it _right_ this time around, honest."
Mastodon, for all its faults, at the very least was truly and demonstrably decentralized.
A decentralized system would allow for that to happen tbh. That 85% can exist in their bubble but other actors who see them as dangerous and unsafe should have the means to mute/disconnect.
He's exceptionally skilled at taking complex and highly polarized topics and picking them apart in a way that invites readers to consider different perspectives.
Unfortunately, that in itself is a polarizing approach, as many people just want their pre-existing beliefs reinforced.
Who else have you read on this 'controversial issue'? Why did you consider them less persuasive than a journalist with no particular expertise?
Why have you not named what the 'issue' is?
Are 'people' an 'issue' to be solved in general, or just in this case?
If we changed topics to 'what should be done about the "autism issue"', does your opinion change? If so, why? There are perfectly valid questions being brought up by heterodox thinkers all the time. We're not even certain that those people experience emotions, there's literally no way to tell, and we shouldn't shy away from hard questions and even harder truths, don't you think?
Do you believe that the executive branch of the federal government is best-suited to dealing with undesirable minorities generally? If so, what national-level 'solutions' currently being discussed in the halls of power are your favorites?
In the spirit of cooperation, I'll go first. Openly trial-ballooning the revocation of the second amendment for trans people is my favorite in terms of pure audacity.
I'm fine with labelling this person "anti trans"
For example, I'd expect "criticizing expert medical and scientific consensus on healthcare for our minors" to link to some kind of article describing what Jesse Singal said about this topic and why it's incorrect, but instead it links to a general page about "healthcare providers serving gender diverse youth" that doesn't even mention anything about the accused person or their writings.
You should probably at least give Jesse the right of reply here: https://unherd.com/2023/11/the-rage-behind-transgender-map/
Why are some people like this?
That is absolutely how some of the more "passionate" activist types have been for the past 5+ years on a number of social topics, not just trans.
First though, a clarifying question, do you think the civil-rights movement, as it existed in history, was 'too passionate'?
If not, in what specific way is the current 'activist' movement worse than those movements of our recent past?
Which civil rights organization has gone too far recently and what is the preferred middle ground that you do accept?
I'm not American but looking in from the outside i can't figure out anything 85% of you would agree on there right now.
As evidence, consider the fact that from your comment, I literally have absolutely no idea which political side you are on.
It used to be common sense to immediately ban creeps of all stripes, especially the obvious ones. Singal certainly qualifies. Putting aside the super annoying 'just asking questions' vitriol that he publishes to national papers, his pdf-file chat log stuff alone would warrant an instant perma from me without a second thought.
Speaking to your broader point about the 'death' of a platform. The people that made bsky what it is now (good and ill) are precisely the people you are blaming for its downfall, which is weird. Normally when you run a business you want your users to remain so that you might profit.
Relatedly, I'm very very tired of the 4chan/crypto/ai gas-leak that has enshittified everything, aren't you?
I've seen bsky users chat casually about their rpe and death-threat ratio before and after leaving twitter, and for that alone, I would choose the 'threat lite' platform for as long as it remained so.
> "The question is not whether those views are right, it's whether those are mainstream."
I don't agree that this is the question, nor do I agree with the your unsupported number. This isn't an election, and popularism is a coward's appeal. Was the Gaza genocide not a genocide until the polls caught up with what we could all see was happening?
I don't even think you believe what your wrote. If the 'views' in question are truly shared by 85%!* of a population that never agrees on anything, then surely there's no problem with sharing them on this forum? A guarantee of 85% positive karma is awaiting you if you just speak your truth. It's the Trump era, and you can say the 'r-word' and the 't-slur' now. What was actually holding you back?
These platforms were supposed to be the "digital town square". Implicit in that is the idea that anyone and everyone can discuss and share their ideas. When would you remove someone from an actual town square? Only when they are being extremely disruptive or violent.
Further, it cannot be a "town square" if half the town isn't allowed to be there.
These are privately owned for-profit hundred-billion+ dollar publicly traded advertising companies. These are, almost definitionally, not honest actors! Are you serious, you still believe their marketing copy from 8 years ago verbatim?
What am I witnessing here?
I haven't used FB in years but Twitter is very (stupidly and incoherently, but very actively) moderated. Unless you are being technical and saying that Twitter doesn't exist and so isn't moderated, and the moderated thing is X, but...
I'm sure some actual humans manage to still get banned from time to time, but you can't be telling me that things haven't changed for the worse right? Do they even have a 'trust and safety' team anymore?
Well, except the groypers, but that's a feature, not a bug, as they otherwise are not breaking the law or platfom rules and therefore deserve to be on the platform just as anyone else does.
The experience on these platforms is somewhat better than it was five years ago, because the people making moderation decisions for these platforms have been largely replaced by people who are less prone to banning people because someone who dislikes their political speech labels them a creep. There are still serious moderation issues on these platforms, but yeah compared to five years ago there is somewhat more freedom to speak without risking getting arbitrarily banned, and a wider range of topics being talked about.
> Putting aside the super annoying 'just asking questions' vitriol that he publishes to national papers, his pdf-file chat log stuff alone would warrant an instant perma from me without a second thought.
You should be able to perma-ban anyone you want from your own feed for any reason. If it is possible for you to make the platform ban Singal (or anyone else) in a way that affects anyone other than ypu, then that platform is not meaningfully decentralized. I've occasionally read articles by Singal but I don't follow his output closely and don't have a strong opinion about him one way or the other. I should still be able to read what he posts even if you think it is not worth reading.
> Relatedly, I'm very very tired of the 4chan/crypto/ai gas-leak that has enshittified everything, aren't you?
I don't think 4chan, cryptocurrency, or AI have much to do with each other, nor that online discussion related to to these phenomena in some way universally constitutes enshittification or not.
crypto (and gambling I suppose these days) is a barometer of the advertising/fake user space. There's a fundamentally different vibe to a site trying to trick the gullible into getting 'free' crypto from musk and a site trying to sell you 75% off crocs at Target. You are free to disagree.
AI is the source of a huge wave deeply inauthentic and frankly boring/weird content. This reduces the signal/noise ratio, and thus the perceived value of any website. Again, your are free to disagree, but to me this is all symptomatic of cyclical autophagy.
For the most part they’re fairly easy to avoid, but reading the replies for popular accounts is a minefield.
This is sort of like email in the old days before the spam filters got good. Bluesky needs better reply-spam filters. Or maybe they already exist somewhere, but it needs better ways to find the good filters?
If that gets fixed then maybe it has a chance to become a more welcoming place.
good moderation requires discretion and keeping the users happy, not slavish legalism
even on a free service, users have some tiny leverage; they can vote with their feet
Do you mean null? Ironically, 4chan actually still uses Cloudflare to this day, and did through that whole controversy too.
I assure you there is way, way worse things posted to /pol/ than there ever was, or will be, to Kiwi Farms.
I enjoyed his interview with Nina Paley and Chris Cohn on life after cloudflare: https://heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-107-how-the-internet-...
I have been halfway following the Farm's status for the past couple years from null's telegram/forum posts, I didn't know he spoke about the situation at length anywhere.
Discretion should be rarely used. For everything else, create a set of rules and stick to them.
Being someone who is obsessed with denigrating an oppressed minority should get people banned from more private places than it does currently. I'd like to hear counterarguments if there are any. If you don't think that characterization applies to Singal and Vance, why?
Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him.
To answer your question: because truth is no defense. How many times have you seen some statement accused of being something-ist, instead of simply false? How often did in further arguing the factuality of the original statement not even come up?
Singal's work is not well-researched or reasonable. There have been countless analyses documenting the factual inaccuracies in his work, not to mention the routine and egregious violations of journalistic ethics.
Nobody has cast false aspersions on him, least of all the person that you are responding to. On the contrary, your comments on this post suggest to me that your defense of Signal and your description of him as "grounded and reasonable" has more to do with your approval of his beliefs rather than an honest assessment of his work.
I'm sure that Hacker News would love to delve into the arguments instead of trying to downvote or flag your posts into non-visibility because they disagree with you.
But if you really are honestly curious and unbiased, M. K. Anderson wrote a well-researched article for Protean in 2022.
He misrepresents Singal's writing, uses guilt-by-association smears, and focuses more on personal vilification of Singal than substantive critique.
For example his claim that Singal's writing "endangers trans lives" is hyperbolic and unsupported.
This is nothing more than a hit piece penned to destroy the heretic.
Partially due to Singal’s sensationalist journalism, trans people in the United States are about to lose access to some forms of healthcare—treatments that will remain accessible to cis people, like hormone replacement therapy.
So I think history has vindicated this particular claim. I don’t expect you to agree, however.
I am honored that you made an account just to respond to this! Welcome to HN.
The allegations of harm seem to come from an a priori conclusion that these treatments are beneficial.
But, in the States at least, there is no longer any funding for that. They cut all of it by grepping the NIH and NSF databases for “gender”, more or less.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/nih-terminating-active-researc...
What there soon will be in the States, assuming SCOTUS overturns the Colorado ban this term, is a renaissance of conversion therapy. If you abuse the child hard enough and long enough, they’ll have bigger problems than gender dysphoria or—coming up in the next wave of manufactured outrage—same-sex attraction.
Hard to say that the “just asking questions” club has the child’s best interests at heart.
Somewhat unique among studies on pediatric gender affirming hormone therapy, this study had a control group that wasn't prescribed blockers. The group on blockers fared no better than the control group. This is the study that primarily motivated Finland to stop routine prescription of puberty blockers to children, with half a dozen or so other European countries following suit after their reviews of the evidence.
Researchers in the US have typically balked at the idea of including a control group in their studies on blockers, arguing that it's unethical to withhold live-saving medicine from patients. This, conveniently, lets authors frame null results as positive, by claiming that gender dysphoria patient would have fared even worse without blockers. This is what Johanna Olson-Kennedy did in her latest study: she observed no change in the patients' outcomes, and claimed that this indicates that blockers are beneficial because they prevented the patients from getting even worse. But without a control group in her study, this is statement is just speculation.
The retreat from gender affirming care is motivated by the absence of good evidence in favor of their usage. And it's hardly a US-specific phenomenon. It's uniquely politicized in the US, I'll grant that, but this shift in stance on altering children's endocrine systems is happening in plenty of other countries too, so I'm not so convinced this is solely borne out by this latest President.
And again, I find the attempts to equate anti-gay conversion therapy aimed at suppressing homosexual desire with exploring ways to become more comfortable in one's natural body. It's fundamentally different to[ tell a boy attracted to other boys that his feelings are wrong than it is to tell a boy identifying as a girl on account of his same sex attractions, "boys can like other boys, not only girls can like boys". The former is telling someone to reject a part of themselves, the latter is expanding's one's concept of gender to include one's natural state of being.
You conflate the European change in medical policy, which still permits the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria, with American legislative bans that do not permit that. “Not routinely prescribed” is logically distinct from “never prescribed.”
Finally, you misrepresent conversion therapy. “Exploring ways to become more comfortable in one's natural body” is simply an inaccurate description of both conversion therapy as practiced in the past and “gender exploration therapy” as practiced today.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10018052/
> Proponents of gender-exploratory therapy acknowledge that some consider it a form of conversion practice, paradoxically resenting the suggestion while opposing bans on conversion practices on account that it would prohibit their approach. As for critiques of gender-exploratory therapy, they are presented as evidence of trans health care’s ideological capture. Yet a close comparison of gender-exploratory therapy and conversion practices reveals many conceptual and narrative similarities. How proponents talk about gender-exploratory therapy is nearly identical to how individuals offering conversion practices targeting sexual orientation frame their own work. Despite the language of exploration, gender-exploratory therapy shares more with interrogation, if not inquisition.
Well, anyway. I cannot quote the entire article here.
No, it largely does not. Most European countries at this point, if they do permit blockers at all, only permit it as part of a clinical study, not as routine treatment for gender dysphoria. This excludes all but a slim minority of (if any) patients. Pointing out that it's still legal as part of experimental trials is a nuance that doesn't affect the >99% of patients that aren't part of a trial, and thus cannot be prescribed these substances.
Your linked publication doesn't actually interview patients who've worked with clinicians or otherwise try and dig into real-world evidence about what this clinical practice does. It's just one author postulating her opinions as fact, with no effort to back up her claims with evidence.
Singal is part of the “Disinformation and Conversion” faction, as a promoter of so-called “rapid onset gender dysphoria.”
Wow. I've read that article and if you think that was unbiased or even-handed...
There is a tech blogger who I really don't like and this blogger happened upon a comment where I said I really didn't like anything they had written, and happened to ask, "Why?" And my answer was how deeply incurious they were, and how incurious they invited their readers to be. This blogger never acknowledge the potential they might be wrong. Even as a nodding feint to fallibility as something we simply expect of people writing about any complex topic.
That's what that article is like to me.
I said it was well-researched, which is true.
I've been a member of this site for fifteen years. I know that nearly any material - not abstract - defense of transgender rights will get downvoted into invisibility, as will any attempt to name transphobia, no matter how civilly presented or exhaustively-cited.
For that same reason, I also know that it's not a worthwhile use of time to delve into substantive "debate" on these topics in this thread, or any place where transphobia is being trafficked openly, for that matter (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45508592).
Do you intend this to include his almost entirely uncritical coverage of so-called “rapid onset gender dysphoria”? How well do you believe he researched and fact-checked the claims of Lisa Littman? Was he simply misled that her retracted study was real science?
> Perhaps his journalistic output conflicts with your beliefs, but that's no reason to cast false aspersions on him.
Perhaps his journalistic output reinforces your beliefs, but that’s no reason to overstate the quality of his journalism.
Well, no, he did unambiguously break the TOS back when he originally joined. Then Bluesky amended their TOS, which gave them an avenue to avoid banning him.
Before they amended the ToS, they did do that. It's completely possible to enforce, especially when the person in question is the one sharing the evidence of the offending behavior. There's no dispute of facts at play.
Care to explain? The links in the article re: potential violations are mostly BS.
Even by the loosest definition what Singal did was not doxxing?
For instance, Alejandra Caraballo, like it or not, is a public figure. A role, I would add, that she has chosen for herself. She testifies before Congress FFS. When she says something in public, including on Bluesky, I'm not sure she deserves some radical right to not have it heard anywhere else. No matter what vague term you can point to in the Bluesky guidelines or TOS.
People mix up “users wanting him banned for having abhorrent views” (which is the opinion of some people) with “users wanting him banned for the same stuff they see other people get banned for”. It serves as a kind of cover because even when you point to a concrete example of him violating the rules the moderation team will dismiss your report as being personally motivated. It’s a funny defense, “This guy couldn’t possibly be breaking the rules and be near-universally considered an asshole by the users on this site! It has to be one or the other!”
This is an insane thing to ban in the terms of service, and it is in and of itself a good reason to avoid using BlueSky. I would not want to rely on any service to communicate that made it against the rules to post a screenshot of a public message from someone who blocked my account on their end.
That’s a perfectly reasonable opinion to have. The post you were responding to was not about the merits of the rule, it is about uneven enforcement of it.
That rule would be a reason to avoid BlueSky if you are not Jesse Singal, because you could get banned for breaking it. If you are Jesse Singal it is not a reason to avoid BlueSky, because that rule does not exist for you.
The strange thing about this is that Jay and the moderation team are sympathetic to your point. They don’t think that evading blocks (or doxxing) should always be grounds for taking action against an account. For at least one user they ignore all instances of it
Screenshotting someone's public post is not block evasion.
I don't like platforms that try to keep me ignorant of what others are publicly saying, keeping me in a non-consensual information bubble. It is basically deception.
That’s neither here nor there. The nuclear block is a big part of how Bluesky works, and abiding by it/was part of the rules for users other than Jesse Singal.
The point I made is that other users that share your disagreement with the nuclear block would get suspended or banned for evading it, whereas Jesse Singal would not/does not. The message to other users was “if you don’t like it, tough”
I say is/was because I don’t read his posts. I stopped paying close attention to all that some time after it became clear that retroactive changes to the ToS to justify (lack of) actions is the baseline for how Jay and Aaron run the site.
Despite all its flaws, reddit got this mostly right. Having explicit sub-communities allows groups of people to keep to themselves if they want to and ban anyone who's not welcome.
No, OP is being transphobic and referring to trans women as men:
> Note that the "banning controversy" is that they're not banning enough people for having entirely mainstream political opinions, and mostly targets journalists. Or let's be more specific: mostly targets people who don't think that men can identify into being victims of misogyny.
The problem with this is... if you have free speech rights you should use them, not give them up the instant you imagine someone might know you said something.
> I wouldn't be surprised if the founder will be arrested in the near future. Since free speech does not cover harboring violent extremists.
Of course it does (in the US.) You're required to respond to legal process and report CSAM, but you don't have to do pretty much anything proactively.
The clash there is between people who think they are living in a rule-of-law liberal democratic regime that treats them as respected citizens with free speech rights and are protesting to register disagreement with some policies, and people who think they are living in a fascist state that has declared, and intends to treat, them as domestic terrorists and are protesting to rally opposition.
Naturally, these different premises about the context and intent of protest lead to different conclusions on how best to approach it.
You're describing the US South in the 60s. The civil rights protestors did not respond by becoming black block anarchists, they responded by doing civil disobedience and getting their faces on TV.
If you're an upper middle class internet user you're actually more respectable than the security forces and can defeat them by showing up. What are they going to do, get NTBed again?
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-07-23/proteste...
No, I'm describing one particular split among peotrst groups that exists today (similar splits may have existed in the 1960s civil rights movements, but differences in the technical, political, and social context beyond the point of disagreement being discussed make them of limited utility as analogs, even to the extent that they were otherwise similar.)
> The civil rights protestors did not respond by becoming black block anarchists
The average modern protestor who follows the precautions-against-mass-surveillance-and-retaliation is also not a black bloc anarchist.
> If you're an upper middle class internet user
The average protestor is not upper middle class, even if your implicit contention that political respectability is entirely driven by class, that the upper middle class is uniformly more respected than the agents of state enforcement, and, most critically, that the decisive point here is respectability were correct.
You’ve heard this line of thought before, and forgive me for parroting but here it goes:
Bluesky attracts the same people X attracts, they just disagree on specifics which in most cases are surface level. The fanaticism and tribalism is basically the same. There is no utopia where a community is pleasant without a lot of guarding and gatekeeping and, really, viewpoint alignment and subject matter filtering. Some topics are basically there for shitflinging, and that’s mostly the topics that seem to be a hot poker for everyone.
No one gets banned for preferring Debian over Fedora.
I don't use neither X nor bluesky, but I did get an X account for a while so I could check the links in random news or conversations, and half the posts had unrelated Nazi messages just below.
Not 'oh that's right wing so he's a Nazi' comments, I mean literal swastikas and kkk uniforms.
For example, there were a shocking number of posts against the proposed digital ID system because it's being advocated for by "Larry Ellison, a Jew". That's a verbatim quote, BTW. Uh, excuse me? There are plenty of valid reasons to dislike Larry Ellison, but his supposedly being Jewish is 100% not one of them. But there it was, up front and proud: oppose this thing because Jews are pushing for it!
That was one example of a great many loathsome things I saw there, and before anyone asks, no, I didn't see any leftwing equivalent content. Not saying it's not on there, just that it was not on my default timeline.
Curiously I was immediately downvoted, which (assuming most people here aren’t that extreme) makes me think people relatively into the network aren’t familiar with the current state for a newish user.
If a platform doesn't ban someone: short it as people say they are cancelling
If a platform does ban someone: also short it as people say they are cancelling
requires a publicly traded platform like Netflix or Disney+ as significant pieces of the parent company's revenue
That's just empathy. Seems like it's gone to the toilet in some part of the usa or maybe it's just weirdos on internet. Either case it's despicable.
This is extremely wrong. Humans do have an impulse to show respect to the dead, even in some cases dead members of some kind of enemy community. But it is also extremely common and extremely widespread for people to celebrate the deaths of their enemies, from leftists making jokes about the death of Margaret Thatcher, to British people continuing to burn Guy Fawkes in effigy for his centuries-old act of unsuccessful terrorism, to Jews continuing to disparage Haman, some 2500 years after the events that formed the basis for the Purim festival.
Now, that's assuming people are one unified group. In reality, most people are forced into an "in" group or an "out" group. The "in" group exalts the death of the "out" group member, so the "out" group members must respond in kind. That eventually leads to the degradation of both groups, leaving the "above" and "beyond" groups with the remnants. In turn, the destructive and negative conflict continues.