Reminder: when a platform or tool is lauded for implementing safety features like social-network mass-blocking-lists, those tools can be used to quietly silence *good* people, too…

Quoth rahaeli on Bluesky:

[Pin:] if my posts show up as blocked to you if you repost or reply to them, it’s because you were subscribed to the abusive and vendetta-filled “lolicon artists” or “CSAM supporters” blocklists by @csam.okconfirmed.com [that] were deleted by Bluesky. When a mod list is deleted for being abusive, some remnants of the block stick around. It’s a known bug and there’s no easy way for you to fix it. I’ve reported it to Bluesky and hopefully they’ll resolve it soon. I really, really hope they’ll fix it soon, because I am up to approximately 20 asks about it a day and it is really fucking annoying.

Some would say that Bluesky is to blame for this issue, e.g.:

“leaving big accounts to explain weird bugs/features” is an addressable concern re: bsky I’ve seen raised twice now

…presumably from the perspective that obviously when you subscribe to a blocklist you want Bluesky to track changes to that list dynamically rather than to treat it as a one-off set of blockings…

Which makes sense except that implementing the feature in that way would mean that the blocklist subscriber could never unblock individuals who might be on that list (e.g.) by accident.

Do we want users to entirely outsource their blocklists to random blocklist maintainers?

No, I didn’t think so either.

So: either blocklist-based blocks are held at an individual level and can go stale with respect to the source blocklist, or else they are held at a blocklist-subscription level and require absolute and ongoing trust in the list maintainer, or they turn into an awkward mass of “Alice blocked Bob because of [List] but subsequently manually unblocked Bob, what state is Bob in now?” which would destroy usability and performance on the server end.

This is not a solvable problem, instead it’s a choice and a matter of building a solution and taking the lumps which come with it — as with all “safety by design” propositions.

#blocking #bluesky #censorship #safetyByDesign