Why Bluesky Remains the Most Interesting Experiment in Social Media, by Far
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
Perhaps my understanding is flawed? What is your take or how did you intend to use the phrase?
Sometimes I get the sense that true decentralization could get people to 90% of how they actually use things like Twitter/X, and federation (including major hubs) gets you to the remaining 10%.
What I often see is people following a certain number of people, often those they "know", either in real life or online, supplemented by a smaller number of bigger, more distant sources. Along these lines, what I could see working is something that's like Matrix, but where explicit groups/rooms aren't there, and defined implicitly by social networks. A bridge between something like bluesky and matrix.
I think the "dark forest" part comes in with the idea that maybe a certain lack of knowledge is ok, or inevitable, just like the real world, and therefore is an acceptable cost to allow even more truly decentralized systems?
I'm just thinking out loud, so maybe I am really off. But I often feel real world social dynamics are some kind of decentralized peer to peer and federated hybrid, and a platform with those characteristics could be successful if it got key elements right.
On twitter that was straightforward as there is a single server.
For federated models it requires the search engine to be able to discover everything, not just to what it is connected
There's a very palpable tension and oscillation between these two extremes in everyday life: school is designed in the mode of a panopticon - a place where you are watched and examined for your benefit - while a dimly lot nightclub is more of a forest, a place where you can stay lost in the crowd and it's not clear how attractive you are. Applying the wrong degree of legibility to the situation is not beneficial - for example, schools in many countries have moved away from publicly posting everyone's exam scores to avoid the negative effects of humiliation, while drinking establishments know that they have to kick out creeps that make other customers uncomfortable, so they do monitor things discreetly.
Socially speaking, we just did the panopticon online, that was 2010's social media - a moment where you were encouraged to post with your legal name, photograph, job title, age, etc. The dark forest was the thing we had in little niches of the Internet before that, and the thing we might be looking towards again.
Imagine there's a checkmark: "only stuff I agree with". At least it would be explicit that way. Or have a slider of how often am opposing view comes by, so you can control how often you get worked up. One can dream...
The term "conspiracy theory" was invented by the CIA after Kennedy's head exploded shortly after he started to move to withdraw from Vietnam.
It was later used on people who didn't buy the Iraq WMD story.
It was used on people who suspected mass government spying before Snowden proved them right.
Recently it was used for people who thought a US funded biolab experimenting with making bat coronaviruses miles from the epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak was suspicious.
You can try to censor untrue things but censoring "conspiracy loonies" means sticking to the mainstream narratives, for that you can go on Reddit and watch CNN.
Yeah, and “conspiracy theory” has a meaning, which, in bad faith, currently encapsulates, “Things I disagree with broadly, which can be linked to and invalidated by the existence of other people online who are either trolls or extremely stupid.” That way I can say that anyone who engages in wrongthink—perhaps, that a healthy 30-year-old might be allowed the choice to take a vaccine or allow natural immunity to take effect, without being threatened with loss of employment for choosing the latter—is lumped in with idiots or trolls who think that they’re making vaccines with microchips in them. Now they’re all “conspiracy theorists.”
I don’t believe even 5% of the people using the term are doing so in good faith.
ooh, a recursive conspiracy theory. neat!
You remember all those? Strange. Thst seems to be blocked from you reading it.
The issue is, given the power inherent to moderation, how is that power best managed? Do you want it applied by whoever happens to own the platform (previously “liberal” publicly owned Twitter, Elon owned Twitter, etc?), or do you want to have decentralized control over that power?
You talk about getting “viewpoints widened”, as though all speech has inherent value to all people. I’m not sure the evidence bears that out. Simply being exposed to other people’s viewpoints doesn’t necessarily lead to a mind opening experience, especially when that exposure is little more than shouting over text, piling on, and mudslinging. Discourse requires a base level of accepted rules of engagement and norms of behavior that lead to some level of mutual respect.
I’m personally optimistic that blue sky’s approach is closer to the ideal.
Tribalism seems endemic to humanity though given physical reality sees us dispersed across the globe.
Every attempt at a singular hivemind of social and economic thought has failed as generational churn costs awareness of the origins of a social norm; generational tribalism is even a thing.
How do we defeat physics? Still waiting for those who stare deeply into the machine to answer that. Mathematical generalization of computer behavior is not really upending the time-space continuum but keep staring and believing, I guess.
The reason being is that you can exist in multiple such communities. The individual experiences the diversity and not the community.
It is the premise of an argument I laid out some time ago for why social media has been destructive to diverse views even without the algorithmic manipulations.
Social media posts are at the most simple level a blog post without a title field. Messages are written by an author, they are given a timestamp, and they contain some kind of content. To create a distributed social media product, we need authored posts with timestamps.
Now one big problem with distributed blogs is authors go back and modify their content in all kinds of ways after the fact. How many times have you been to a blog where they've taken off the timestamps so that their most popular post doesn't appear to be from 2010, for example.
Secure-Scuttlebot tried to solve this issue by using ed25519 signing key cryptography to create append-only logs of content. This is great, and as acknowledged in the Nostr original readme, it might ultimately be better than Nostr. But append-only logs syncing from post 0 until 1000 leads to UX-level problems for new users, which can be overcome with the right dev team.
Nostr uses the same cryptography as Bitcoin, and has no association between the posts. This means you send a request for a pubkey to a relay and the relay sends you some stuff authored by that pubkey. It's kind of up to the relay what it sends. I've experienced UX issues with Nostr clients where I am being blasted 10,000 messages by a relay to my client just so I can render a thread. This probably can be fixed, but it would help if there was some kind of protocol level ordering to/relationship with the posts.
But Bluesky managed to make it so identities do not really exist outside of your PDS. The PDSes hold onto your private keys for you, and until there is an option to sign your own messages your posts and your identity do not really exist outside of a PDS. The Bluesky PDS has authority over you, and then if you switch to another PDS the Bluesky PDS still has authority over you because they can still decide not to show your posts to mainline Bluesky people.
For those of us who got into distributed social media because some anonymous server-side admin 'took action' against our account without getting in touch to correct the behavior first, Bluesky begins to raise all kinds of red flags with the way they've made it hard to separate yourself from the moderation team. Really Bluesky has redeveloped a very similar problem to the criticisms the original Nostr readme had about Mastodon.
And don't get me started about Truth Social, which is what happens when you have a Mastodon PDS that does not talk to other Mastodon PDSes!
It's not too late to fix these issues of course. I mean the PDS has your keys, so you can always rewrite the whole network!
If there's anything I'd like to encourage Bluesky commenters to do is to keep speaking about how to solve this social media issue in a way that allows a global conversation, and also lets people not see content that they have reasons to not want to see.
I'm happy to discuss this forever, for you social media dorks out there. Call me/email me/etc.
> solve this social media issue in a way that allows a global conversation
"Mainline bluesky" is just one of the instances. You can't have a community without moderation and you can't have moderation without upholding some norms so yeah there will always be some norms. If you think there can be some single global conversation that specifically caters to your norms then I hope you understand you're out of luck?
> The Bluesky PDS has authority over you, and then if you switch to another PDS the Bluesky PDS still has authority over you because they can still decide not to show your posts to mainline Bluesky people.
I don't use bluesky but I heard you can run your own PDS. Those who can't will have to trust someone. Like you can build your own phone from scratch but if you can't you have to trust someone to build it. You won't make the trust problem go away by inventing more and more intricate systems...
One blind spot that I hadn't thought about was when people share non-consensual content about you.
Right now I don't see any recourse for coordination problems that need the whole network to co-operate.
As a result, I think that there will always be a force that centralizes networks. Not just because big-brother, but because citizens don't accept some types of behavior, even if you do it in your own home.
People didn't want to ban Trump from twitter because they didn't want to see him. They didn't want anyone to see him because they didn't want him to galvanize his base. The trick is that he still had the option of going to other websites (that no one uses) but obviously that came at the cost of losing most of his audience. Switching moderators or such won't do that.
Didn’t see it mentioned in the article surprisingly
Also most of it is off the blockchain, just accounts are on chain
wouldn't a database be more efficient :-)