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