Jeff Benner@gruber for some marginalized people, a draw of Mastodon is the ability to create communities with moderation that ensures safety. What Bluesky or Meta joining ActivityPub means to them is the likely collapse of that safety, as they offer a large volume of new users on servers where their track record for moderating hate and violence is poor. It makes sense if those communities want to commit to a defederate and see approach. Tech journalists will be covering their trust and safety issues.
@gruber I take your point that open means federation of instances, but I think open also means defederating when abuse or the likelihood of abuse warrants it. Open is also freedom of choice. Users that want to engage with Meta and Bluesky can move to more federated instances.
Kevin Karhan 
@jeffbenner @gruber EXACTLY THAT!
Also both #Facebook and #BlueSky are not only openly tolerating but also supporting Neonazis and #NSAbook is known for snitching on users...
John Gruber@kkarhan @jeffbenner Bluesky is tolerating neonazis?
@gruber @jeffbenner yes, #BlueSky literally operates a filter and mostly shadowbans them, but doesn't remove them from their platform, but rather groups them in a bubble prone to hategrooming...
And that's the problem: They.don't get yeeted off the platform.
Tim BrayIt shadowbans them so they can't get in people's faces and with any luck don't notice, and this is better than booting them (so they'll be right back with a sock puppet) how?
Not a Bluesky fan, but c'mon.
Hughster@timbray @kkarhan @gruber @jeffbenner FWIW, I've seen pretty much zero hate speech here since joining. In the few cases of relatively mild bigotry I've found, I've reported them and they've been gone minutes(!) later. So my impression is that booting them does seem to work here, and sockpuppeting doesn't seem to be getting around it.
@hughster @timbray @kkarhan @jeffbenner Do you encounter hate speech on Instagram? I never have and I signed up for it the day it launched.
Matthieu@kkarhan @gruber @jeffbenner You are misinformed. I am on bluesky and users get banned from the (one and only) server, not just shadow banned. They also check their invite tree to ban all the bad actors that they might have invited themselves.
It's not yet known how they'll moderate in a federated environment, but the bsky.social server IS moderated.
Now, I know a few nazi bubbles and last time I checked, they run pleroma and mastodon
It's not yet known how they'll moderate in a federated environment, but the bsky.social server IS moderated.
Now, I know a few nazi bubbles and last time I checked, they run pleroma and mastodon
@jeffbenner Why do it preemptively?
@gruber to prevent almost certain abuse that those marginalized groups have already experienced on the Meta platforms. Initial reporting on Bluesky moderation has also not been shining.
@jeffbenner I think Bluesky is doing a great job. Is your baseline perfection -- somehow not allowing a single dickhead to get a post through -- or something else?
@gruber I don't have Bluesky (I'd love to try), so I can only judge early reports that it had a lot of moderation problems. If it's gotten better, or some find that it's a positive environment, then I think instances should look at that. But I think Meta has a well-established track record for being poorly moderated, and toxic environments for these communities, and I think it's fair if they want to preemptively defederate them.