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Comment by mm263 | Hacker News Reader

I think they nailed every Mastodon criticism that I've heard floating around and addressed it, however I'm especially curious to learn about the moderation layer in-depth.

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> I'm especially curious to learn about the moderation layer in-depth.

You'll want to read:

* "Composable Moderation," this is the core conceptual idea: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

* "Moderation in a Public Commons," which describes specific features that were added in pursuit of the previously-described goal https://bsky.social/about/blog/6-23-2023-moderation-proposal...

* "Bluesky 2023 Moderation Report," which discusses specifically how (what is now) the main instance was moderated last year https://bsky.social/about/blog/01-16-2024-moderation-2023

I cannot see how BlueSky's moderation system can ever work. Decoupling moderation and hosting means there's no onus to do the moderation that they describe: which makes me think it will be BlueSky Inc., and only other corporations, that have resources to throw employees at a now thankless, Facebook-style moderation job. And instances have to moderate anyway, in order to not host illegal content.

I hear you on some level. That said, we are already seeing people creating blocklists, and tools to share them with others. That is happening alongside the company's investment in paying people to work on T&S related issues on their instance.

I am not sure if it will succeed or fail, but I am interested to see how it plays out.

That relies upon the benevolence of corporations to much more of an extent than I am comfortable with. 20 years of social media has convinced me that that's a bad idea. And, I think, it removes much of the benefits of federation: if the only way to sustainably moderate is to rely upon gifts from BlueSky Inc., moderation is going to be necessarily dependent upon them.

To me, the company moderating their instance feels like additional moderation capacity, rather than replacing it.

I don't believe I subscribe to any blocklists on BlueSky. If I end up doing so, it is much more likely to be one run by someone I trust than by a company. Having the option of either seems worthwhile to me.

Blacklists feel more like reinforcing the echo chamber than moderation.

Then you are free to not subscribe to any of them, and see every post. It is under your control.

A lot of the popular users subscribe to the blocklists uncritically. It breaks the UX of the site if you get placed on one.

As the plaform matures so will the blocklist ecosystem. Hopefully blocklists with good appeal mechanisms will win mindshare.

Users are not entitled to the dissemination of their opinions. Either you let users block other users or you will turn your site into a cesspit.

No, I am talking about as a reader. If you are blocked, you cannot follow threads, even if you never post.

> Decoupling moderation and hosting means there's no onus to do the moderation that they describe:

I'm not sure this follows. There is a similarity to the reddit model of moderation. The host provides some base amount of moderation but supplemental moderation comes from members of the community. In the Bluesky model, a 'subreddit' is analagous to an indexer/aggregator (aka Relay/AppView) that provides a moderated and/or weighted feed of content. The same incentives for volunteer mods on Reddit will exist for volunteer mods on Bluesky.

One of difficulties with content moderation is it's been targeted by some as a tool available for the few to control and shape public opinions to far narrower degrees than legally required, which is harmful to free speech. I'm not completely sure but externalizing that part probably mitigates that issue a bit.

EU is moving towards requiring all social media obey EU laws, under loose notion that their laws is the least restrictive and most reasonable. No one is, and the sum of all ethical standards on Earth is not going to be something very popular, so that's nonsense. OTOH, it's perfectly reasonable that content served at scale in a region will have to be lawful; "this content you want removed is lawful in MY country" is sort of nonsense too. So moderation decoupling and, ahem, moderation localization is going to be necessary for social media. I suppose that's where they're going.

Interesting that you have picked EU, while sites like Twitter are already blocking or removing content on request of countries like Turkey, China or Russia.

I remember Turkey and China pressuring on political sides, and Russia as well as Germany kind of ignoring jurisdiction as well, but EU is the most recent and formalized approach of that so that came to mind first.

Communities are built on shared values and expectations of what is or isn't acceptable conduct. If a guest to your club house starts pooping on the carpet, you throw them out not only because you don't want that to happen in your club house but also because throwing them out demonstrates to the other people in your club house that they can expect there to be actual consequences to that kind of behavior, allowing them to feel safe knowing that they won't have to worry about it. Bluesky's solution apparently boils down to just telling everyone to ignore the poop guy and giving them the option to not be able to see him.

The problem with censorship isn't the enforcement of rules. The problem with censorship is the enforcement of rules the individual that has to enforce them doesn't agree with. Free speech absolutism on social media is often argued for with appeals to "the town square" but the difference between social media and an actual town square is that if you make a complete ass out of yourself in an actual town square, eventually someone will punch you.

wtf. The problem with censorship is censors are subservient to his nation and don't get to pick victims at his will? "demonstrates ... that they can expect there to be actual consequences" ? You really must hate the concept of a modern nation and social contract.

Post 18th century world started with peasants beheading kings and gutting his body into pieces so no single individual shall have any meaningful parts of it. The fact that kings had the power to throw anyone out of "his" club, deemed no longer his simply by volume of peasants within, at his king's discretion without the newly established ultrabureaucratic people's approval processes, was the problem they had enough of.

I'm not even sure in which part in the history of humanity your definition of free speech and censorship problems could come from. I don't think even ancient Roman Senate honored that kind of view as I've never heard they held sessions with bags of stones around. That isn't an anarchist view either, since it will lead to their minority views alone justify such "consequences".

Just wtf?

Sure, telling people who openly advocate for the death of people in your group to take their opinions elsewhere is exactly like peasants beheading kings or kings throwing people they didn't like into the pit. I'm not even sure how to begin responding to such a creative interpretation of what I said.

> throwing them out demonstrates to the other people in your club house that they can expect there to be actual consequences to that kind of behavior, allowing them to feel safe knowing that they won't have to worry about it.

> telling people who openly advocate for the death of people in your group to take their opinions elsewhere

These parts of your comments imply your default model of safety is a safe haven in a barbarian land with perimeter walls and armed guards and a benevolent property owner. Clearly your thinking is privatized violence is integral to safety. You might be thinking that's what freedom of speech is, as in freedom implemented in speech domain, but that is wrong. Freedom of speech as this phrase is used is something different from that.

Freedom of speech means speech is always taken as unserious as practically possible. Absolute freedom of speech would mean even advocating for death, or however terrible the messaging might be, are taken as weird jokes until an action is taken.

This is not the matter of thresholds and analogies, your model of freedom is just wrong.

It'd be nice to see an updated version of those that describes how those ideas and tools relate to a self/third-party hosting. The best I can tell, this is the model:

My understanding is that each host has control over what they host and can subscribe to third party content filtering services to help do so.

Then various indexes/aggregators (potentially third party) crawl hosts and provide services to find content. This is where voting or toxicity checks can be applied to manipulate reach.

This content is also tag-able via third party services (and may be used by indexes/aggregators).

The user is then able to select/configure indexes/aggregators and filter based on tags.

I'm kind of tired of social networks in general, but this is attractive to me just because of that. I like Mastodon, but the underlying ActivityPub protocol was rather underwhelming.

Is the AT protocol is superior in your opinion?

I don't know enough about it to give feedback. However Martin Kleppmann's[1] involvement is a huge selling point to me. It's also, seemingly, good enough that they're building very useful things on top of it like PDS, migrating users, etc.

ActivityPub (AP) felt a bit like "good enough to get something done", which is amazing on one hand - people can do a lot with it. But it also means some harder problems are totally ignored[2], so the landscape between instances felt rocky to me. I also heavily disliked how federation worked in AP, ie how the protocol felt like it favored centralized instances because small instances were less likely to be pinged, were lower priority, in general was very spammy, etc. Not that the AP proto did anything to cause that.. it just didn't do anything to address it in my view, it was just data.

Does AT fix my concerns over AP? No idea. But i appreciate a proto that had a bit more time in the oven and being used to (maybe) solve the harder problems that i experienced with AP.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03239 [2]: These are only my opinions from a very brief stint in trying to write an AP client to federate with Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin. I did not dive deep into AP, so please don't judge it from my experience.

> I don't know enough about it to give feedback. However Martin Kleppmann's[1] involvement is a huge selling point to me.

Oh, so it's just hype.

It's interest, yes. Notably because the existing solution (AP) has been a negative to me.

Not sure how you call that hype. Is everything hype until you understand it well to you?

Rather underwhelming from which point of view?

From the point of view of a small federated client developer, exploring the ActivityPub protocol. Far from thorough or objective.

There is barely any project that supports client to server ActivityPub protocol, so from that point of view is underwhelming, yes. If you tried to implement a Mastodon compatible client, that's a different thing though.

What's nice about the architecture most fedi software including Mastodon follow is that if a better protocol than ActivityPub comes along (like perhaps, Spritely) they can add support for it and concurrently federate with both protocols. Mastodon used to do this with OStatus.

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