Short story reading - After Shirley

https://makertube.net/w/gSKcf2zf5BcZVM7Q7k3uax

Touched one of my OSS issue trackers and suffered some psychic damage as a result. Oops.

Doesn't help that I am a bit sensitive rn; I've been able to work out a switch to a devops role at work, which is more my speed than feature development has been. But we've got a dedicated developer-experience person starting in a monthish, and like. insofar as that's even a role that exists, it's /my jam/.

I'm terrified he'll be all "wow, what's this shitty bespoke CLI tool you're using, you should switch to $alternative".

Anyway BTW I PROBABLY HAVE A THERAPIST NOW so maybe that will help. Unless she recommends I just quit OSS for my mental health 😬

#Oversharing #TMI #StreamOfConsciousness #Hashtags

What to write in a bio about myself? I’m this, I’m that, BLA BLA BLA — this is how I used to write about myself. I have many hobbies that change all the time. I’m curious. I get obsessed with things. I’m this, I’m that.

But maybe I’m none of these things. Maybe I’m just me — Brett, a human who loves to experience and try on different things. Maybe I’m not any of these things. Maybe I’m just an idea.

#Identity
#SelfReflection
#HumanExperience
#StreamOfConsciousness
#WritingCommunity

My PDS Doesn’t Participate in Bluesky’s Age-Verification Flow

So, apparently, with the last few updates Bluesky has done, they have expanded the regions that need to be age-verified to Ohio, and they are preparing to expand it to Australia. They have also made it so that people don’t have access to DMs or material labeled by Bluesky’s moderation services. I’ve been looking into the age verification system that Bluesky uses as I configure my own PDS. app.bsky.ageassurance.begin is an explicit API call that a client or PDS must intentionally call to start the age-verification process, hand the user off to the verification provider, and receive an updated age-assurance state.

Check here for the official Bluesky documentation:

This endpoint is part of the Bluesky application Lexicon APIs (app.bsky.*). Public endpoints which don’t require authentication can be made directly against the public Bluesky AppView API: https://public.api.bsky.app. Authenticated requests are usually made to the user’s PDS, with automatic service proxying. Authenticated requests can be used for both public and non-public endpoints.

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/api/app-bsky-ageassurance-begin

If a PDS does not call app.bsky.ageassurance.begin, the age-verification flow does not start. Age verification occurs on the client side, not the server side. If a PDS does not implement the app.bsky.ageassurance.* endpoints, it cannot interact with Bluesky’s age verification flow.

Georgia—where I currently live as of writing this post—does have age restriction and verification laws; however, they are weak, so Bluesky has not had to do much in my state. As a result, I’ve just been using Bluesky’s PDS. However, I have been setting up my own PDS. Since my PDS does not call app.bsky.ageassurance.begin, does not check getState, and does not read getConfig, it has no way to initiate age verification, determine whether a user is verified, or enforce or reflect any age-based restrictions. My PDS does not participate in Bluesky’s age-assurance system at all. That’s just one part of Bluesky’s moderation structure. Bluesky’s moderation services use labelers.

Labels and moderation

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/moderation

Labelers are services or accounts that apply moderation labels. My PDS does not declare default app labelers, so it does not automatically trust any labelers. I have max user control with the minimum level of automated moderation.

If you do not want to through all of this trouble and want to keep using the native bsky.app, see here:

Bluesky’s age assurance sucks, here’s how to work around it.

https://gist.github.com/mary-ext/6e27b24a83838202908808ad528b3318

I am going to be honest. I hate Bluesky’s political, philosophical, and ideological values, think its moderation is heavily flawed, and am more closely aligned politically with the Fediverse. But… the Fediverse is not fun. It’s essentially people constantly commiserating, with no interesting or entertaining content, peppered with manifestos and “this bad thing happened in the news—be enraged by it” posts. I really wanted to love the Fediverse, but there’s nothing to do over there.

BlueSky’s Solution To Moderating Is Moderating Without Moderating via Social Proximity

I have noticed a lot of people are confused about why some posts don’t show up on threads, though they are not labeled by the moderation layer. Bluesky has begun using what it calls social neighborhoods (or network proximity) as a ranking signal for replies in threads. Replies from people who are closer to you in the social graph, accounts you follow, interact with, or share mutual connections with, are prioritized and shown more prominently. Replies from accounts that are farther away in that network are down-ranked. They are pushed far down the thread or placed behind “hidden replies.”

Each person gets their own unique view of a thread based on their social graph. It creates the impression that replies from distant users simply don’t exist. This is true even though they’re still technically public and viewable if you expand the thread or adjust filters. Bluesky is explicitly using features of subgraphs to moderate without moderating. Their reasoning is that if you can’t see each other, you can’t harass each other. Ergo, there is nothing to moderate.

Bluesky mentions that here:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-31-2025-building-healthier-social-media-update

As a digression, I’m not going to lie: I really enjoyed working on software built on the AT protocol, but their fucking users are so goddamn weird. It’s sort of like enjoying building houses, but hating every single person who moves into them. But, you don’t have to deal with them because you’re just the contractor. That is how I feel about Bluesky. I hate the people. I really like the protocol and infrastructure.

I sort of am a sadist who does enjoy drama, so I do get schadenfreude from people with social media addictions and parasocial fixations who reply to random people on Bluesky, because they don’t realize their replies are disconnected from the author’s thread unless that person is within their network. They aren’t part of the conversation they think they are. They’re algorithmically isolated from everyone else. Their replies aren’t viewable from the author’s thread because of how Bluesky handles social neighborhoods.

Bluesky’s idea of social neighborhoods is about grouping users into overlapping clusters based on real interaction patterns rather than just the follow graph. Unlike Twitter, it does not treat the network as one big public square. Instead, it models networks of “social neighborhoods” made up of people you follow, people who follow you, people you frequently interact with, and people who are closely connected to those groups. They’re soft, probabilistic groupings rather than strict labels.

Everyone does not see the same replies. Bluesky is being a bit vague with “hidden.” Hidden means your reply is still anchored to the thread and can be expanded. There is another way Bluesky can handle this. Bluesky uses social neighborhoods to judge contextual relevance. Replies from people inside or near your social neighborhood are more likely to be shown inline with a thread, expanded by default, or served in feeds. Replies from outside your neighborhood are still public and still indexed, but they’re treated as lower-context contributions.

Basically, if you reply to a thread, you will see it anchored to the conversation, and everyone will see it in search results, as a hashtag, or from your profile, but it will not be accessible via the thread of the person you were replying to. It is like shadow-banning people from threads unless they are strongly networked.

Because people have not been working with the AT Protocol like I have, they assume they are shadow-banned across the entire Bluesky app view. No—everyone is automatically shadow-banned from everyone else unless they are within the same social neighborhood. In other words, you are not part of the conversation you think you are joining because you are not part of their social group.

Your replies will appear in profiles, hashtag feeds, or search results without being visually anchored to the full thread. Discovery impressions are neighborhood-agnostic: they serve content because it matches a query, tag, or activity stream. Once the reply is shown, the app then decides whether it’s worth pulling in the rest of the conversation for you. If the original author and most participants fall outside your neighborhood, Bluesky often chooses not to expand that context automatically.

Bluesky really is trying to avoid having to moderate, so this is their solution. Instead of banning or issuing takedown labels to DIDs, the system lets replies exist everywhere, but not in that particular instance of the thread.

I find this ironic because a large reason why many people are staying on Bluesky and not moving to the fediverse—thank God, because I do not want them there—is discoverability, virality, and engagement.

In case anyone is asking how I know so much about how these algorithms work: I was a consultant on a lot of these types of algorithms, so I certainly hope I’d know how they work, lol. No, you get no more details about the work I’ve done. I have no hand in the algorithm Bluesky is using, but I have proposed and implemented that type of algorithm before.

I have an interest in noetics and the noosphere. A large amount of my ontological work is an extension of my attempts to model domains that have no spatial or temporal coordinates. The question is how do you generalize a metric space that has no physically, spatial properties. I went to school to try to formalize those ideas. Turns out they’re rather useful for digital social networks, too. The ontological analog to spatial distance, when you have no space, is a graph of similarities.

This can be modeled by representing each item as a node in a weighted graph, where edges are weighted by dissimilarity rather than similarity. Highly similar items are connected by low-weight edges, while less similar items are connected by higher-weight edges. Distances in the graph, computed using standard shortest-path algorithms, then correspond to degrees of similarity. Closely related items are separated by short path lengths, while increasingly dissimilar items require longer paths through the graph. It turns out that attempts to generalize metric spaces for noetic domains—to model noetic/psychic spaces—are actually pretty useful for social media algorithms, lol.

The Virulent Infection of BlueSky by Extremely Online, Brain-Rotten Zombies from X Continues

So, it appears a new migration from Twitter to Bluesky is underway. It appears to be some of the most virulent former 4chan users possible. Yep, I got off Bluesky just in time, lol. I’ve been keeping tabs on a particularly virulent and toxic subgraph on Twitter for years. It pretty much stayed off Bluesky because they couldn’t act like abusive dumpster fires there. Welp, looks like they’re becoming more active on Bluesky. It’s not looking good over there.

That they are on the move says something. It’s sort of like how the US is suddenly a place that is hospitable to measles. It was all but eradicated here.

My husband likes to say that you can tell where not to be by where I am looking from somewhere else. I like fires. So if I am observing your platform or community from a distance, you probably don’t want to be there.

Edit:

I had originally posted the above on a now-defunct federated blog. It got blasted to Mastodon. Someone replied and asked what I think is causing this. I debated actually answering, then decided that I’ve had enough of the dumpster fire that is social media. I decided not to wade through social media tech discourse into what will mostly likely be an Internet argument with a complete stranger. I am a techie dragon, and I engage with things to learn how they work so I can tinker with them. I only engaged with tech discourse to get my hands on how the tech works. There’s nothing in it for me to be part of larger conversations. Arguing with random strangers on social media is not an epistemically useful format. I do think I should answer, though. Just on my blog.

I treat social media like I do an addictive substance. I do not believe in abstinence, but I do believe in harm-reduction paradigms, so when I see everyone overdosing on social media, I pull back and shut down a lot of accounts. The Fediverse instance where the first part of this blog post was posted has been taken down, moved to this blog, and this section appended to it.

I often use the word weeb pejoratively. Here, I am using it categorically. There really isn’t an “official” name outside of otaku or weeb culture. I am at the fringes and intersections of it as a furry. My husband is a millennial weeb. With that being said—

The migration is in large part because Bluesky is capturing the otaku/weeb niche of X. X hosted networks that were ecosystems of “anime fans.” These included anime and manga artists, doujin and hentai artists, VTuber fans, NSFW illustrators, fandom shitposters, niche fetish communities, and other chronically and extremely online content creators and influencers. That culture relied heavily on timelines, informal networks, and discovery through reposts, replies, and algorithmic amplification.

Elon Musk pretty much destabilized X’s ecosystems and social networks from multiple directions at once. Algorithm changes made reach inconsistent. Moderation created anxiety and uncertainty about what would get suppressed or unintentionally “viral”. Bots, engagement farming, and blue-check reply spam actively poisoned fandom conversations.

Bluesky is the memetic and cultural progeny of early imageboard cultures. I conducted a phylogenetic analysis of the memetics, which you can check out here:

Bluesky is a competitor of X for otaku and fandom communities. Bluesky has a lot of the aspects of old Twitter dynamics around which fandom culture evolved. Recently, Bluesky introduced something big in those communities: going live. Since X is no longer habitable for weebs, they are moving to Bluesky.

For example, the AT protocol already has PinkSea:

https://pinksea.art

And, of course, there is WAFRN:

https://app.wafrn.net

I cope and deal with issues via personal, private sublimation and not so much exhibitionism of my art or consumption of art. So, while I do make comic books and do a shit ton of weeby art, it’s for the purpose of sublimation, so I’m not too interested in being a part of a community. That’s a large reason I am not active in those spaces. I’m quite cynical, in general, so I am suspicious of any community — and I mean any community, at all. Honestly, I am mildly contemptuous of mass participation or any sense of belonging. So, my art stays private, because it is created for me – and just me.

I Stopped Arguing With People Who Literally Piss in Their Own Mouths (no, seriously, for real)

The moment I stopped taking internet arguments seriously was in 2021, when I was having a heated argument with someone on Reddit. I checked their post history and discovered I had been arguing for three hours with someone who drank their own piss. That’s when I deleted my Reddit account. That was a perfect metaphor for why people argue online. They’re pissing and shitting in their own mouths. I’m not serious about it. At that point, I was like, “Might as well be a troll, then, since these people will literally piss in their own mouths.”

Another instance was when, after a debate, I checked the person’s post and comment history. They were a moderator of a large Cthulhu lady porn subreddit on Reddit, rule-34 style. So… yeah. I was like, “Y’all are nuts.” I shouldn’t care about what y’all have to say. I know OSINT, so out of curiosity, I’ll look into a person’s background.

Without fail, whenever a person is chronically on Reddit, Twitch, or Discord, they are the most perverted, creepy, fucked-up people imaginable. For shits and giggles, I will find them. Normally, they’re sad, sad, sad people. It’s especially sad when you realize these people’s profiles go all the way back to 2016! Imagine doing that for 9-10 years!

A quotation from Joseph Addison

Joseph Addison (1672-1719) English essayist, poet, statesman
Essay (1711-11-17), The Spectator, No. 225

More about this quote: wist.info/addison-joseph/80953…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #josephaddison #blurting #chatter #consideration #conversation #discretion #fool #minds #selfcensorship #selfcontrol #selfrestraint #streamofconsciousness #thoughts #wisdom

𝙍𝙚𝙫𝙞𝙚𝙬: "𝘼 𝙋𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙩 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝘼𝙧𝙩𝙞𝙨𝙩 𝙖𝙨 𝙖 𝙔𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙜 𝙈𝙖𝙣" 𝙗𝙮 𝙅𝙖𝙢𝙚𝙨 𝙅𝙤𝙮𝙘𝙚 -

If we allow the novel to work on its own terms, and quit asking it to meet our expectations of a common coming-of-age story, we can find that the style itself reveals the experience we seek.

https://waywordsstudio.com/general/reviews/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man/

#bookreviews #literature #books #bookworm #read #book #readreadread #jamesjoyce #fiction #autobiography #irishliterature #modernism #streamofconsciousness