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Comment by emceestork | Hacker News Reader

I switched to Bluesky but then moved back to twitter. I'm glad that they are trying to compete with Twitter (Twitter is a conservative cesspool), but all of my non-technical friends have stayed on Twitter. So, I end up going where they are.

I think the reason my friends did not join Bluesky despite me inviting them is that it just isn't as good of a product as Twitter. You can't post videos or DM.

I am not a tech executive and have no idea about corporate strategy, but it seems like Bluesky should focus less on technical differentiators and more on building killer features that have mass appeal and a community that people want to join.

IMHO this milestone, while cool, means absolutely nothing to people outside of the hacker news crowd.

I'm rooting for Bluesky, but it seems to me it will die without a critical mass of users.

Again, I'm kinda dumb, so this may all be wrong.

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I think everything you said was fair, but you also mentioned Twitter being a conservative cesspool, and a lot these features like federation and composable moderation are designed to help prevent the whole "rich guy buys the company and turns it into something you don't like" scenario.

Federation is nice but when the platform only does one-third of what the platform you're trying to leave does then the whole thing feels like a toy

It's really unfortunate that the tech companies set the precedent in the first place by pushing hard political agendas into their policies and moderation biases. If it was truly neutral in the first place we would not be having this conversation. All the people complaining only now about Twitter doing this are part of the problem.

Of course people are going to complain about content they don't want. That's the product. Twitter changed their product to deliver different content, so its audience has changed.

Calling it 'The Problem' like climate change or the national debt gives it too much power. Just use something else. People use group chats for real relationships now anyway.

FYI a government can’t borrow a currency it issues, there is no national debt (or all money is debt).

There is no "true neutral" when it comes to moderation. There are a million examples, but the most obvious are of the form "you can have group X or people who hate group X and are dedicated to driving them off the platform". Somebody's not going to have "free speech" in that case. And even if you go for what most "true neutral" advocates want, which is a lack of rules, you'll quickly find that quite a lot of people don't want to hang out at the place that's filled with Nazis or scam artists or spammers or whatever.

So in practice you have to make choices, or you'll end up running the new 4chan and being sad about your life. As happened to the guy who ran the old 4chan: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/4chans...

True neutral means moderating consistently, judging behavior without regard to identity.

The ideal, platonic version of this would be that moderators only see an "identity scrambled" version of each tweet/post when they make their moderation decision. Like a screen that blinds orchestra musicians when they audition, the human would see a statement like "I hate New Yorkers" and not know if the original message said "I hate New Yorkers" or "I hate Floridians." So they would have to make a decision based on the general principle of whether a statement of this form is allowable.

Anywhere you want to draw the line is fine with me, as long as you draw it consistently.

That sounds like a very personal definition of "true neutral". And also an unworkable one.

Take the use of reclaimed slurs, for example. When used against the discriminated group by a dominant group, their intention is often to cause harm. When used within the group, the intention is to reappropriate the term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation

Similarly, harassers will use terms in ways that are plausibly read different ways depending on who they're talking to. So something that might sound innocuous or just odd when directed at me will be correctly read as a racist attack when directed at somebody else.

And that's not even counting when they'll just come up with new terms so they can be awful in ways that are novel enough that automated filters or out-of-date moderators won't catch. E.g.: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bv88a5/white-supremacists-ha...

In short, because there's a great deal of identity-based hate in the world, identity-blind moderation ends up being an aid to the identity haters out there.

The element of moderation that you consider essential -- the latitude to apply subjective judgments that rely on knowing the specific identities of the participants -- is precisely the element that I do not trust moderators to perform.

That this moderation strategy would prevent the use of all slurs (even reappropriated ones) sounds like a feature to me, not a bug.

"That this moderation strategy would prevent the use of all slurs (even reappropriated ones) sounds like a feature to me, not a bug."

You're proposing erring on the side of censorship to avoid some gray areas. While this is a reasonable position, it doesn't satisfy some ideal of neutrality and won't really avoid the gray areas, and so still would require subjective judgement.

For sure. While at the same time allowing the more clever variety of abuser to sail on past.

In practice, almost any nominally "neutral" position ends up allowing an enormous amount of abuse. Which is why you'll see most platforms that start with a free-speech maximalism approach coming up with a lot of nuance and exceptions over time. And those that don't turn into cesspools.

Most people are pretty great, but moderation has to be built for the worst-case attacker.

If detecting abuse requires knowing the identities of the people involved, it sounds like another way of saying that some behaviors are fine if they are directed at certain people, but "abuse" if directed at other people.

Which is ultimately what I object to.

And also “what’s a slur” alone is very subjective. For instance on Twitter Elon has decided “cis” and “cisgender” are slurs, but “trans” and “transgender” aren’t. But in gender discussions the terms come up all the time, and they are just terms.

Moderation is full of gray areas, and they are unavoidable.

No, I'm proposing erring on the side of consistency. I think it's likely that this strategy would result in less "censorship" in some cases, and more in others.

What we have now is a system where, on many platforms, moderators often put their thumbs on the scale and decide that certain groups need more protection than others. Generalizing about or disparaging certain groups is ok, but the sensitivities of other groups are considered sacrosanct and must be deferred to.

Like I said, draw the line anywhere you like. If it applies to everyone equally, I am happy. I am fine with things that require subjective judgment, as long as that subjective judgment is behind a screen that conceals identity.

truly neutral = post anything? there exist such platforms and they're cesspools because human nature

I don't see how - I'm not sure how Bluesky works but there must be moderation - otherwise the whole website would succumb to bots and gorespam, so there are people in charge who decide what you get to see.

If the end result is politically unbiased, it's due to their conscious decisions, not some magic algorithm.

I think moderation is per server/community - like mastodon (or, conceptually, reddit)

As opposed to centralized moderation (twitter, FB, IG, etc.)

This is not the case, moderation is decoupled from each server. Users choose how they want moderation to work, and can share those tools with others.

See here for more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471973

It's a fair point and we definitely debated it, but it was too important to us that we complete the mission.

Debated videos and DM? Mastodon has those features; if you're not doing them at all you may want to reconsider.

Debated prioritizing them before federation, not debated their existence. They are a must-have for social.

We definitely want to implement these features, the question was whether they should hold back releasing support for federation or not. Since federation is a core constraint on any features we'd like to build, the team felt that there is no reason to hold federation back, and that releasing it as it's ready makes sense.

We're thinking about Bluesky as both a product and a protocol (informing each other's design), and you're 100% right that for the end user, the product itself is what matters. Because we've taken on the decentralization constraint, we take longer to "catch up" to features that centralized platforms tend to have from the start, but it's definitely going to be a major area of focus for us going forward. (Ofc Mastodon isn't centralized, but note that it's had a few years of head start on feature development. We'll get there.)

Mastodon DMs have absolutely no privacy: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079

For a decentralized protocol doing things right is much more important than doing things fast, it is very difficult (and in a lot of cases impossible) to break backwards compatibility.

DMs on any other service also have no privacy. Signal or Telegram could read your DMs by simply releasing an update to their code, for example. You always have to trust the person running the service you use. (Unless you have E2EE/something like OTR, in which case you have to trust the persom who makes that code!)

The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that you don't have to trust the people running the service you use.

If Signal releases a malicious update (and they don't provide reproducible builds), it is very much possible for you to know about it, as everything is on your device. Even if the binaries are different from the source code, decompilers, analyzing network traffic, etc. gives the community a good chance at catching malicious updates. Mastodon admins can simply pull up your plaintext DMs on their servers and no one will ever know.

> The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that you don't have to trust the people running the service you use.

Well then I guess it's pointless because it doesn't accomplish that.

(The actual point, FYI, is that you don't have to trust all of: them, their hosting providers, your ISP, the ISPs between, the government, and their mom.)

> it is very much possible for you to know about it

"Possible" != "done"

> analyzing network traffic

How are you gonna do that? Surely if they wanted to sniff it would still just look like any other encrypted data

> gives the community a good chance at catching malicious updates

Sure, when the same application is used by everyone, which is not true in either the Mastodon world or the new Bluesky-small-instances world

I think Mastodon has a pretty good balance here – when you try to send a DM it explicitly tells you that it will not be encrypted: https://u.ale.sh/Vo1ahx.png

And the linked privacy policy goes into further detail (at least on my instance, mstdn.io):

> Please keep in mind that the _operators of the server and any receiving server may view such messages_, and that recipients may screenshot, copy or otherwise re-share them. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon.

Overall, I think it's safe for most chit-chat, and for anything more serious you can add link to Matrix or your email and PGP key in your profile.

As a sidenote, I'd also like to point out that a lot of serious communication nowadays still happens over unencrypted email. You can consider it whataboutism, but it's still worth remembering IMO. (And of course, like others pointed out, DMs on Twitter aren't encrypted, too, so it's the status quo here.)

Just make ci releases with daily updates. Good luck reverse engineering and auditing that.

If the protocol is not open, you have to rely in the clients provided by the vendor, and you can slip a backdoor throigh easily.

When did you last audit your Signal client? Where is “the commjnity” organizing this effort and publishing the results?

Debian shipped an entropy lowering in house patch despite the “many eyeballs” fos years (for OpenSSL). Don’t lure yourself into false feeling of security bevause of the “community” might be doing something. Only count on defenses surely in place, with traceable operation and output history, with responsibles who are allocated resources for the work and having stakes at its outcomes.

I think it's sensible to have at the very least federation function as intended ahead of DM's as I imagine DM is another part pretty contingent on federation due to the privacy issues becoming approximately 10x more complicated with federation. ;-) Twitter is having it easy.

Videos might be more of a resource issue. Hardly a good time to launch videos almost at the same timeframe as they spike their user base by going public.

Ah yeah, I get that. I don't mean to be cynical on the day you complete that mission.

Congrats on launching! Excited to see what y'all do next.

this is the correct order of operations for sure

You guys made the right call. You're not trying to become the next TikTok.

Not sure I agree. Being the thing that the tech folks find cool isn't a bad starting position at all. And it's significantly harder to achieve than DM's.

I've been using Bluesky for a week and I'm impressed. I actually appreciate that there is less media, it's more about conversation. So far it feels very much like Twitter before it became a cesspool. I'm conversing with local journalists, prominent scientists, sci-fi authors, etc... It's wonderful.

This whole thread is oof. Modern politics, to include both sides of the spectrum, has devolved rapidly. It feels like a real-life version of the Spiderman meme.

If anything, modern politics is better.

No video in 2024 is a total deal breaker for most users. That's insane.

Video is also prohibitively expensive outside of Google-scale endeavors and will likely crush both third-party BGSes and PDSes. Everyone doing video is either selling you ads (whether it's in that video or around it), selling you the video itself, or is losing money. Possibly all three.

As it is, og-embeds do work for video and audio from a few different providers.

Great. But without video you lose most of your users.

I am increasingly of the mind that this is a feature, not a bug.

If you want to be Twitter, you'll end up being Twitter. We already have one of those, it sucks, and we don't need another one.

Social networks go to crap above a certain scale. If everyone can see your posts, you'll write posts to be seen by everyone. Which, as it turns out, ends up benefiting no one. The magic comes when there is a community, where you give a shit about the people you're sending messages to, and they give a shit about you. If the community is too small, then nobody bothers with it and it dies. If the community is too large, then it ends up being old men screaming at clouds, and (see above) we already have one of those. So a platform that is good enough to use, but limits the number of disaffected members, is the only thing worth creating.

If something I'm saying requires a video, then I can always link to one. If something someone else is saying requires a video, and it requires the video to be immediately visible while I'm reading whatever they're saying, then there's a good chance I'm better off not seeing it anyway, even if I think I want to.

(Ironically, in this post I am an old man screaming at clouds...)

I agree with this--and also, again, you have video, if you upload it to YouTube. Or stream via Twitch. Like, you don't need on-platform video. Google makes more money than God; let them pay for the perturbed bits.

That gives me a great idea: If you self-host your PDS you can have video but moochers don't get it.

Sure, but that's Scary(tm), because an unexpected viral skeet is going to cost you a lot of money. In this case I'd expect almost all video to be fraudulent--either in terms of pirated egress or in terms of disinfomation scams.

Obviously you should choose a hosting provider that doesn't allow bandwidth overages.

In such a case you absolutely should! At the same time, it makes sense that bsky, as the protocol stewards, might not want to make that pit too easy to fall into.

Why must we insist on calling these things after an euphemism for ejaculation?

Never going to be taken seriously by the public.

Because it's funny.

If storage is a problem, couldn’t Blusky add a size limit to video uploads?

It's not storage, it's bandwidth. Most system providers, for Bad Reasons, charge a lot for egress; even relatively good ones like Cloudflare have particular payment shenanigans around video. Size uploads could help in that situation, but it's a bandaid on a bullet wound when the video still gets played a million times, y'know?

> It's not storage, it's bandwidth.

A size limit affects both equally.

> even relatively good ones like Cloudflare have particular payment shenanigans around video

That's only for the web service. Workers and R2 let you do video just fine. And small videos don't need any fancy logic, just toss them over http.

> Size uploads could help in that situation, but it's a bandaid on a bullet wound when the video still gets played a million times, y'know?

No, I legitimately don't know. Why is it different from an image that gets a million views?

Then people are going to link to YouTube and benefit of getting lesser copies is small. The rest of media that works within a limit on a microblogging are junk.

How does Mastodon do it?

By externalizing costs onto server owners, the same way they do everything.

It's not a good way to do it, though, and it's worse for Bluesky because it implies that in order to move your PDS (one of the best features of the design), you'd have to pick up the freight for video that already exists. If PDS mobility is important, attaching large economic strings to that is a big disincentive.

> By externalizing costs onto server owners, the same way they do everything.

I mean that's the whole point of the Fediverse, a federated network of independent nodes. Of course the nodes take care of the functionality.

Feature requests opened since 2023-07-24:

GIF support: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/1047

Audio/video support: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/1052

I'm not sure what kind of "cesspool" Bluesky is, but it's unbearable. It's like 2015-era Tumblr but worse, somehow. Twitter, by contrast, feels like a breath of fresh air.

I'm wondering if you really mean "2015-era Tumblr" or are trying to evoke pre-Trump liberals on Tumblr (i.e. "manspreading is a micro aggression" pop feminism and teenagers creating fan lore about gender identities) by referring to it as that.

If anything, my experience of Bluesky has been the inoffensive vapid thought leadering of peak Twitter alongside the playful air-headed liberal self-help that is also fairly reminiscent of peak Twitter. In one word: bland. Being able to paint over the offensive things like nazis and porn by sweeping them under your personal rug rather than blocking or banning them only adds to this impression for me.

Twitter, your breath of fresh air, on the other hand is overrun by ChatGPT spam bots and shovelware drop shipping ads worse than the crypto "giveaway" scams and paid tweets of the immediate pre-Musk days and every even moderately left-leaning political tweet is filled with replies describing the violent acts they want to do to that person in excessive detail by accounts that openly post literal neo-nazi propaganda videos of Adolf Hitler denouncing "degenerate art" as a Jewish plot to weaken the German volk and national spirit and going "I don't agree with everything he did but he had a point". Political discussions about the Middle East in turn are split evenly between right wing calls for genocide of all adults and children in Palestine and right wing defenses of Palestinians for being victims of the international Jewish conspiracy to exterminate the white race through mixed breeding with brown refugees.

We used to always call Twitter "the bad place", "hellsite" or "cesspool" before Musk but it certainly deserves those names now more than ever, arguably rivaling 4chan in its political takes although the depictions of gore are mostly limited to uncensored war footage and the porn is decidedly more tame.

The reason Twitter is called a "right-wing cesspool" is not because it's full of right-wing people (that would just make it a "pool"), it's because of the vicious explicit threats of violence and celebration of human suffering propagated by those people. For all its faults, the bland libs on Bluesky don't do much of that.

Granted, my experience of Twitter might be tainted by the fact most people I used to follow in the old days have either left or are no longer active and any time I visit the algorithmic timeline hits me at full blast. And a lot of the edgier posts (not replies) by right wing folks the avalanche of drama RTs throw my way are clearly created to farm engagement in the hope of striking it big if the bluecheck authors make the payout lottery.

> Twitter is a conservative cesspool

I disagree. If anything now it's more balanced, every "right of Portland-liberal" is no longer hidden and shadow-banned or worse. I like it a lot more!

Now you can actually read and learn about stuff you care about.

Yeah, maybe we just have different politics and I'm too dismissive of alternative worldviews.

Still though, I get like Matt Gaetz' tweets recommended to me. Does anyone like that dude? How is this happening? Why on earth would I want that? I feel like all this conservative stuff is surfaced by the application to me.

[Proof](https://ibb.co/ypHS8fN)

I got notifications, on my dang phone, for the dumbest fucking takes. I don't get them for liberal people. Possible I am just in the demographic of people they think would swing conservative so they target me.

This is funny to read since this is basically what conservatives experienced for the last ten years on Twitter pre-Elon.

It’s not just you. I echo your sentiments.

I use Twitter for tech, but my feed is now conservative politics, gore video, & tech tweets intermingled.

Navalny’s wife was just banned and then shadow banned. There are countless examples of leftist accounts getting banned just for being critical about Musk.

It’s absolutely conservative cesspool. Nazis can are literally posting 14 words propaganda all day long and there are no consequences.

To think that Navalny or his wife are in any way leftists is insane. They were leaning more towards nationalism (just for Russia instead of the US).

In the face of current events though, that can be overlooked as it is not a narrative that serves western interest.

But to give an anecdote about an alternative, I rarely see any bigotry on Mastodon. Instances which allow that or don't moderate it correctly get block listed by instances I like. These instances may defederate into their own bubble in which they can still exist but cause no harm to the general timeline. Yet everyone still remains the freedom to express themselves. I like this because it's just a natural way of how to solve this problem for the end user.

There are other reasons than being vocally left-wing [1] or being a journalist [2][3] that get you suspended or banned on Twitter these days.

Musk is grandstanding about "free speech", but what Twitter actually does now is fold and cave to demands for censorship from any authoritarian government that asks [4][5].

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-leaked-internal-mess...

[2] https://theintercept.com/2022/12/20/elon-musk-twitter-banned...

[3] https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-suspends-insiders-li...

[4] https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...

[5] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/15/once-again-free-speech-a...

They’re left of Putin so I dunno what you’re talking about.

Putin is a fascist dictator and Navalny wanted democratic rule.

How do you get shadow banned after getting banned ?!?

They publicly claimed to unban her so they could convince people it was a mistake, and then they shadow banned her.

I agree. I now see both extremes(horseshoe) and in-between as much. While before it was heavily leaned towards the left.

> Twitter is a conservative cesspool

Interesting. I see it as the de-facto journalist platform, which to me (as a non american) make it very left leaning. But then again, I don't use X.

American journalism isn't left-leaning. At best it is "click" leaning, and say what they need to do to get eyeballs on their content. This is why they helped normalize trump so hard, and repeatedly fail to call out the extremist right wing in the US.

This is what a lot of people don't get about the "pop feminism" era of online "journalism" in the pre-Trump era: it wasn't feminism, it was clickbait. At best it sold an idea of feminism but the emphasis was always on the selling part and not anything ideological. "Girlboss feminism" helps no-one except the bosses.

The same is true about most so-called "left-wing" journalism. Some journalists may be true believers but the platforms exist to make money, not to be any threat to the systems those ideologies explicitly oppose.

Heck, this even goes for political parties like the Democrats: the Texas governor literally rejected the authority of the federal government and legislative system by deploying his military at the border and the Democrat president's response was to propose a bill that would have created a legal avenue for what the treasonous governor was trying to make happen. Decorum is used as an excuse to keep intentionally ceding ground to the supposed political enemy.

Speaking of, the political compass places 2020 Trump as somewhat more authoritarian than 2020 Biden, and barely more on the right :

https://politicalcompass.org/uselection2020

It was. In the last year it’s become largely conservative, and not in a standard reasonable small-government, etc. way. It’s like reading Facebook posts from your dumbest uncle.

It didn't become, just suppressing what was already there is gone.

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