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.
John Gruber@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.