Dan GillmorApr 30, 2023
@mmasnick done by far the best job of chronicling the Twitter/Musk follies and the resulting social media diaspora. His 6-months-later piece, on where we stand in what I hope will be a massive move to decentralized networking, is a must-read: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/28/six-months-in-thoughts-on-the-current-post-twitter-diaspora-options/
Six Months In: Thoughts On The Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options

Today is six months since Elon took over Twitter and began this bizarre speedrun of the content moderation learning curve in which he seems to repeatedly… not learn a damn thing. Over and over agai…

Techdirt
Show threadErin ConroyApr 30, 2023

Generally appreciate Mike, but this is clearly a lot of BS from Jay & Bluesky, & Mike's totally uncritical take leaves me skeptical of the value of the whole discussion of #Bluesky.

"No no, the lack of blocking has nothing to do with not prioritizing it, don't be stupid! We're just being thoughtful & it's so super complicated! But also one white dude got trolled, so we prioritized it & voila, here it is 24h later! p.s. let's not ask any questions about Jay's candor or competence"

Show threadCraigApr 30, 2023
@chargrille My working assumption is that blocking still doesn’t exist at the protocol level, but they panicked and bodged it in as a kind of “instance-level block” that works only because bsky is (at the moment) a protocol running on a single instance. Federated blocks are a hard problem, as Mastodon demonstrates; it’s something they probably thought they could defer, but running a platform brings different challenges than designing a protocol.
Show threadErin ConroyApr 30, 2023

@craigm

Thank you, & I agree. Of course Graber & Dorsey knew #Bluesky would be single instance when they launched and none of that touches the basic point people were making that a) they could/should have prioritized blocking as a basic safety feature for said single instance (especially since the engineering costs were plainly negligible enough that they could scramble to push the code over a 24 hour period), but b) they didn't, & c) offered BS excuses that show quite shallow design thinking.

Show threadErin ConroyApr 30, 2023
@craigm Like, this is just *very* unimpressive design. I wouldn't hire a software architect responsible for it. They've had a year & given how it ties into Jack's "blind spots" on the racist (sexist, bigoted) use of social media platforms that he "somehow" has never managed to correct or be accountable for, it doesn't make sense to assume mere incompetence is the sole cause. It's not reasonable to think the failure to listen to Black test users calling for block features is an accident.
Show threadCraig
@chargrille It’s terrible product ownership on top of a promising protocol; the problem is the people who own the product are really only interested in the sexy chain-of-trust and schema interop stuff, and are in over their heads running the circus. (Compare to Mastodon, which built a pretty good product on top of a really crappy protocol!)
Apr 30, 2023 at 9:11pmWeb
Show threadCraigApr 30, 2023
@chargrille My overall take, for what it’s worth, is that Graber is smart and decent, board member Jeremie Miller (of XMPP fame) is smart and decent, neither one has any sense of what it means to run a social media platform at scale, and right now they’re only at about 2% of their waitlist, so they’re probably doomed, since they lack the funding or revenue to make bsky itself large *and* not a toxic dumping ground.