Mastadon feeds are already available in "federated" section which is quite nice.
Mostly UI seems to be a twitter clone, which is great as a starting point for inviting new users.
It has a dark mode and a separate mode to hide chrome and fluff called "zen mode". Yay!
The "federation mods are all powerful" is another step in the wrong direction. Reddit mods revel in the control they wield, and we've already seen this happening in the Mastodon ecosystem all over again.
BlueSky's protocol will allow end users to subscribe to the moderator(s) they want without having to worry about choices being made for them carte blanche by online dictators lording over their fiefdoms.
The internet bred the worst kind of power structures. We're sliding backwards with these platforms that enable and empower useless middle managers.
The people who always end up as admins and power moderators on these sites are absolutely the ones who should not have it.
You must treat the fediverse the same way as your neighbourhood not a club. You should not go to the most glamourous instance, but find one that has people that share the same values you do.
Everybody is complaining about failures in the fediverse but nobody applies the elbow grease to grow better communities. It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy there. :)
It's a neat trick though. Let other people put in the work and then ban them and give their communities to their friends.
But above all, as you pointed out, why are people trying so hard to replicate an obviously easily exploitable and now more prone to individual failure/abuse model? Is unprotected identities and scraps of paper, oh and tags like 2007 twitter, really the best, most user honouring application of current tech?
Why do you think another protocol which has barely any implementations at the moment would be better when confronted with the same problem: many developers, interpreting some things in many ways?
and basically all the comments. including yours.
I wasn't specifically endorsing Bluesky, but it would not be surprising if a professional, clean slate protocol based on the "learnings" of the past would be simpler to implement and just all round better. I think the use of DIDs opens up to many interesting options, none of which need to use a blockchain.
It's a shame about ActivityPub, I think Linked Data is a really important tech that hasn't been picked up enough, but from what I hear it's a really half hearted implementation at best.
I think the main thesis of what she is saying is that there are a many places where developers need to think for themselves because the spec has many blind spots. But that's why we also develop tools and libraries to make it easier for future devs to start from a good foundation. She is doing it (as far as I know), and I am doing it.
> Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written.
I have developed too but it wasn't very difficult for me. Well, in most cases all my problems were due to my laziness to read ActivityPub rfcs carefully.
https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/4-13-2023-moderation
Anyone can label content. It can be human or automated. Different teams can expose their own sets of labels.
The end user chooses which labels they want hidden or displayed.
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Edit:
The downvotes I'm getting triggered the HN commenting rate limit, and I can no longer post comments. (Another form of censorship. Though I do appreciate everything HN does to be "high signal", there are some rough edges. I really want for systems that just get out of the way and let people communicate.)
Here's my response to a child comment:
> Which is entirely possible to do under ActivityPub.
Several Mastodon instances block people who federate or engage elsewhere. That's the kind of fucked up middle management that a first-principles distributed moderation system would solve.
For instance, I'm LGBT and I'd like to engage with the community. But I don't want the mods running the instance choosing what I can or cannot see because they don't like eg. Harry Potter. That's my individual decision to make.
Frankly, I have a thick skin and I like to be exposed to lots of different people and ideas. And I even enjoy talking with those that disagree with me. I respect people who have the opposite opinion about this, but I don't want to be caught up in their censorship blast radius.
Nobody should get to choose who talks to me except for me.
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Edit 2:
Look at how stupid this gets on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/al3r4q/co...
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/10kgo0y/a_subre...
https://www.reddit.com/r/infp/comments/18ynfaq/comment/kgc8x...
Platformization of the distributed web of the 90's and 00's was bad enough. Now we're empowering people to silence broad group participation over pettiness.
I hate this. And I don't hate very many things.
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Edit 3:
> find one that has people that share the same values you do.
That's a mismatch. In any group of people, there will never be 100% consensus. Yogurt lovers won't all like FroYo, and some will die on the hill of Kefir.
The correct thing to do is compose your interests and group memberships yourself. It's flexible. You'll overlap with other people, topics, and ideas naturally. Not every individual of every community you join will see eye to eye with the sum of the people in your circle. And that's okay.
Another analogy: perhaps your extended family don't all get along. But you don't typically ostracize an entire branch of the family because you can't put them all in the same room together.
The Reddit/Mastodon way is about labeling the individual. You have to be a card-carrying member. If you do things the management doesn't like, you're out.
The distributed approach is about an individual navigating their preferences themselves. It's fuzzy, organic, and matches the real world. It's not a dictatorship of ideology or ass-kissing.
Yes, such a phenomenon takes place there sometimes, mostly this problem occurs on some little servers with few active users. I don't think it's a big problem for fediverse, there are servers with adequate moderation you can choose or just run your own.
Personally I think "toot" is perfectly fine; no sillier than "tweet".
Toot is a fart
At least it's not as bad as Bluesky's skeet, I'll give it that
E: returning from a rabbit hole. Looks like Mastodon retired toot back in 2022 anyway (and skeet was never officially sanctioned by Bluesky)
The toot is moot.
If you want to follow me on Mastodon, BTW, you can find me at @masto@masto.masto.com.