David GerardJul 4, 2023

this is an excellent summary of the real-life problems - moderation, discoverability, searchability - of a future federated Bluesky AT Protocol network from @jonny

https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/110552684614320107

see also

https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/issues/18
https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/issues/19

i particularly like the observation that the functions people *want* from social media - moderation, discoverability, search - just straight-up require centralisation.

Decentralisation has its virtues, such as the fediverse ticking along mostly fine while Twitter and Bluesky pooped themselves on Saturday. But for usability for non-nerds, decentralisation is a harsh antifeature - see Mastodon. You can't search your fuckin' friends, I mean wtf, FUNCTION NUMBER ONE on a new network!

Any eventual atproto network will naturally centralise on a big graph server, 'cos otherwise you don't get search or discoverability.

there isn't as yet a central repository of critiques. also the protocol isn't finished yet, there's a lotta vaporware and handwaving.

actual Trust & Safety people of considerable experience, e.g. Yoel Roth from Twitter and Denise from Dreamwidth and formerly of LiveJournal, spent many futile hours posting at length to the company CEO and devs on how Bluesky's plans would make essential moderation functions literally impossible.

even if Bluesky gave a hoot about doing moderation properly, which doesn't seem to occur to them. they seem literally incapable of understanding the question.

some of the devs are getting to understand the problems. because Bluesky pressed them into service to do moderation personally. they understood there was a problem here once they saw some shit.

but basically Bluesky wrote a moderation white paper and fell in love with it, and they are impervious to any idea they didn't think of themselves, or the history of thirty years of internet social media.

like, when you get to "let's make block lists public!" why the fuck are you doing something that obviously stupid? "well the white paper requires it" i mean.

there is no one weird trick to technically scale moderation. you have to do the fucking moderation. with people.

that's *fine* for now - there is no network. bsky.app is a fun single-node server to be on. 200k users, high quality queer shitposters, great userbase!

but it's important to keep in mind that it's *run* by rationalist neoreactionary-leaning blockchain bros who have shown an unfortunate tendency in practice to defend their neo-nazi friends from being kicked off for death threats against minorities.

the technical details are secondary, even if you approach them with an unwarranted assumption of good faith. because atproto was designed with bad assumptions by idiots. it's a historical fact that Jack Dorsey's driving motivation was to make a network nazis couldn't be permanently banned from. that's what he funded these people to do, and the tech is just details at that point.

on Mastodon, Bluesky would have been fediblocked by now just for its nazi coddling.

btw i will definitely be calling Bluesky's wizard white paper idea "compostable moderation" from now on

jonny (good kind) (@[email protected])

so far, #BlueSky / #ATProtocol seems like a federated system the same way Google Alerts is a federated system. - you can self host your website or uses Google sites. - Google crawls you - People subscribe to algos/alerts - Google Alerts emails you the matches

Neuromatch Social
Show threadmccJul 4, 2023

@davidgerard @jonny What I would like, eventually, is a system where mod/discover/search are potentially centralized, but I have my choice of which center to select without having to pick a fundamentally different set of content. (Which opens the door to a "center" which is, like, a tree of centers.)

I doubt BlueSky is that system because I subscribe to the conspiracy theory that BlueSky was specifically designed, before it split off from Twitter, to cement the Twitter servers at the center.

Show threadmccJul 4, 2023
@davidgerard @jonny When I was trying to imagine moderation on my stalled-out decentralized-mastodon prototype, I imagined accounts clumping together into cliques with an agreed-on moderator, and then cliques clumping together into federations that accept each other's mod decisions. Someone wants to talk to you, you see if they've been cleared as Basically Okay by your clique or a member of your clique's super-clique (or maybe super-cliques ally together into super-super cliques, idk.)
Show threadDavid GerardJul 4, 2023

@mcc @jonny the natural centralising tendency of the graph server and the DID server will keep it centred on bsky.app, yes

as for moderation, on mastodon we discover that moderators are also frickin' idiots. @amtiskaw receives some *astoundingly* dumb notices. I got a post reported literally because i advocated Signal.

Show threadmccJul 4, 2023

@davidgerard It's not that I disagree, but I would like to float a theory by you: What if *all* moderators are frickin' idiots? saw plenty of frickin bad decisions made by Twitter moderators and you've posted some bad decisions made by Bluesky moderators.

If this is the case, the goal should be to find a system that allows us to eventually discover, and collectively empower, the *least* frickin idiotic moderators from the set of all possible candidates.

Show threadmcc
@davidgerard Both the "pure centralized" model of a Twitter and the instance federation model of Mastodon aren't super good at this, and my hypothesis is it's because both are *brittle*. In the Twitter case if the mods turn out to be frickin bad you can do literally *nothing*. In the Mastodon case if they're frickin bad you can only fire them by switching instances, and that's so much work you might as well switch to bluesky…
Jul 4, 2023 at 7:10pmWeb
Show threadmccJul 4, 2023
@davidgerard Bluesky's "marketplace of algorithms" approach otoh, which I haven't fully investigated, has the potential to work like I want because it could turn into a marketplace of human moderation teams… but since the focus is so heavily on selecting different machine moderation approaches, I have doubts the ecosystem will actually grow in that direction :/
Show threadDavid GerardJul 4, 2023

@mcc per the linked bugs, atproto doesn't seem to have had a lot of thought put into helping users defend against bad actors.

(because it exists to enable bad actors)

Show threadRAOFJul 5, 2023

@mcc @davidgerard the thing that kinda sticks out for me is that “can run an internet-visible server well” and “can moderate a community well” are almost entirely dissimilar skill-sets, and yet we combine the two.

If you squint hard enough, Matrix of all places has something most similar to decoupling these? In the abstract¹, homeserver administrators are mostly responsible for ensuring the technical substrate runs well and to limit spam signups, and community moderation happens (largely) above that, with a moderation bot that can be subscribed to one or more feeds of moderation decisions.

¹: not to claim that this is how it does work, or that it works well now, but that there are the bones of an approach like this. Eventually.

Show threadmccJul 5, 2023
@RAOF @davidgerard I like Matrix now. Element is a really nice program. Between Mastodon, Lemmy and Element I think Element is the best at being the thing it is.