Bluesky are openly welcoming, verifying and hosting accounts of prominent far right politicians. Trump's VP Vance is now on Bluesky:

https://bsky.app/profile/jd-vance-1.bsky.social

"We welcome the Vice President to the conversation on Bluesky" (Bluesky in their email to Fox News)

More 🚩: Bluesky is centralised, run by a for-profit corporation, its CEO has blockchain background, it is partly owned by VCs & Blockchain Capital.

Bluesky are going down exactly the same Nazi Bar path as Twitter.

(via @mastodonmigration)

JD Vance (@jd-vance-1.bsky.social)

Christian, husband, dad. Vice President of the United States. jdvance.com

Bluesky Social

@FediTips @mastodonmigration Not surprising that they open him with open arms "to the conversation".
As if you can converse in a meaningful way with fascists. πŸ™„

I wonder what happens should he or anyone from that sickening regime joins a fediverse instance.

@McWabbit

If Vance joined a Fediverse instance, and the instance admin didn't kick him off, other instances would defederate that instance.

But this isn't possible on Bluesky because it's centralised.

Hello feditips.

I am a moderator at this instance you see me posting from, app.wafrn.net.

We have optional (read: opt-in) bluesky integration and we have just banned JD Vance

Yes, we can do that. Because yes, Bluesky is just a bit more open than you make it out to be :)

@alexia

That's a bridge, not actual federation.

And blocking just Vance is not defederation. It does nothing to isolate the instance that is hosting him and platforming him. If you want to defederate, you need to block the entire bsky.social instance.

No, we are not a bridge, here read our source code:

https://github.com/gabboman/wafrn/tree/main/packages/backend/atproto

We ingest the firehose directly, we interact with bluesky directly. You can even view bluesky accounts like, say, bluesky's own directly: https://app.wafrn.net/blog/@bsky.app

Notice how there's no bridgy in there? You can check my profile on the bluesky side at https://bsky.app/profile/alexia.at.app.wafrn.net too ← Notice how there's no bridgy here either?

wafrn/packages/backend/atproto at main Β· gabboman/wafrn

Wafrn is a federated social media inspired by tumblr. Join us and have fun - gabboman/wafrn

GitHub

@alexia

If you are federating, are you now going to defederate bsky.social?

Or are you okay with them platforming fascists?

Are you going to take a stand on this or not?

Well to answer that we must first look at how bsky.social is just the auto-assigned domains for new users

the underlying servers are all hosted at subdomains of .bsky.network, luckily mary-ext / mary.my.id has a neat lil' GitHub repo that collects them all in one place: https://github.com/mary-ext/atproto-scraping?tab=readme-ov-file#bluesky-hosted-servers

Now if we wanna specifically exclude content from the PDS that JD Vance is on, all I'd have to do is look up which one of these PDS instances vance's account is, nuke it from our database and stop ingesting content from that PDS through the firehose

For reference, we can use https://pdsls.dev to look up JD's server and determine it to be https://woodear.us-west.host.bsky.network/

problem is, unlike how fedi tends to work, the underlying PDS instances are assigned automatically; Vance didn't choose that PDS, it was chosen for him. As such straight up blocking this PDS from being indexed has about the same impact as blocking a large Mastodon instance like mastodon.social or something along those lines would have: We would hit lots of people that have nothing to do with vance, or are even actively blocking and shaming him

Now you are right in the observation that Bluesky PBLLC is choosing to platform vance, jesse singal and others; Their moderation is very akin to centrist beliefs, and as such quite weak in protecting especially those most vulnerable.

It's just that from a technical standpoint with how ATProto works, it doesn't quite make as much sense to block the server vance is currently on, it makes much more sense to block the account and associated did:plc identity ← This makes sure that even IF vance moves his account (although I'd doubt it) to another PDS, he will stay blocked on our infra.


#bluesky
GitHub - mary-ext/atproto-scraping: Git scraping of AT Protocol/Bluesky instances

Git scraping of AT Protocol/Bluesky instances. Contribute to mary-ext/atproto-scraping development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

@alexia

"As such straight up blocking this PDS from being indexed has about the same impact as blocking a large Mastodon instance like mastodon.social or something along those lines would have: We would hit lots of people that have nothing to do with vance, or are even actively blocking and shaming him"

...in other words, too big to defederate?

That's a copout answer, shame on you.

If mastodon.social was hosting Vance, other instances would be defederating them including mine.

@FediTips @alexia if people blocked the specific bsky.network node that jd vance was on (or bsky.social), then he could just migrate his account somewhere else - keeping all his posts and followers, which will now be visible to people who blocked "the server" rather than the individual

ATproto is more decentralised than ActivityPub, users are way more than just their instance...

@FediTips @alexia it is a fundamentally different network that you are refusing to take any time to learn about because you want to make it a turf war and want to, quite frankly, act like a smug prick rather than actually *caring* about any of this

you don't care about moderation. you don't care about people's safety. you don't care about an open internet. you care about being smug online about your choice of software. which is why you want to put "shame on" people who are doing way more to take action on any of these problems than you ever will

thank you emma ur cool