Twitter rival Bluesky’s first major crisis

"Inside Twitter rival Bluesky’s first major crisis, as investors pressured CEO Jay Graber to speak out about racist incident"

The fact this is a thing at all speaks of the fact we still have no clue what we're doing with social networks.

Let me change something in the headline, see if it still makes sense:

"Inside World Wide Web's first major crisis, as CERN investors pressured inventor Tim Berners-Lee to speak out about racist incident."

It doesn't make sense because the Internet, the Web, DNS, HTTP, HTML, those are technological components which have no moderation component, they're just technology on TOP of which you can apply moderation and regulation where you need it.

Social networks are exactly like IP, but instead of devices getting an IP address, people do. So an identifier is tied to a person, then this person can publish messages. Those messages can be wired around to other people based on preferences and subscription. That's it.

As long as we keep fusing together issues of moderation with issues of networking, this will happen. They're like two layers that want to freely adapt to one another, not be part of one monolith.

Note I AM NOT SAYING that we need no moderation. We absolutely do need moderation. I'm just saying "moderation" as an issue should be decoupled from the network layer.

This sort of incident is something where I think the fediverse has an edge. Can someone sign up on the fediverse with an offensive name? Yes. And they can suffer the consequences when they are blocked and defederated. On the fediverse, no one is held responsible except the offender themselves. And there is built-in social accountability for server admins. On a corporate controlled platform, people expect the platform to control the actions of users and make decisions that are universally considered morally acceptable. That's an impossible task. You can't make everyone happy.