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Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

Jay was involved in the early days of Zcash, which makes me much more confident that BlueSky will be a place that cares about user privacy.

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The weakness in AT seems to be the relay servers. Data/posts may be edited or deleted on a PDS, but once published what is the mechanism to alter or delete in clients/relays downstream?

Also what’s the mechanism to prevent AT from turning into a firehouse of usenet bot spam?

> Allowing edits and arbitrary insertions also means you could easily pretend you posted something earlier than you did, or edit an earlier post to say something else [1]

[1] https://github.com/arcalinea/smor-serve

What does that even mean? Relays not being able to arbitrarily edit posts is by design, and why PDS updates like posts are signed by their authors. That's a strength, not a weakness.

The mechanism for spam filtering is the same as any other network. You can drop posts from low-trust PDSes, or use Bluesky's existing labeling system to apply advisory "spam likely" labels to accounts or posts that some heuristic decides are spam. This can be done in a composable way with their algorithmic feed aggregator and labels.

This is also a problem with ActivityPub. The 'delete' command is basically a suggestion.

I'm not sure I would describe that as a problem, just something people using federated networks should be aware of. It is inherent to any system that sends messages to a bunch of other peoples' computers unless it implements some sort of DRM, which is effectively incompatible with open source software.

> One person's bug is another person's feature

Zcash makes me scared.... Much more inspired by monero

Being banned is some of the best user privacy around. Can't beat that.

You'll always have X, Mr. Culonavirus.

And what did you do to get banned? Be specific

Your username is pretty sus.

But not mid?

Sounds like the door hit you on the way out.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

This xkcd comic makes the mistake of conflating the right to free speech and the 1st ammendment. The 1st ammendment exists to protect the right of free speech from the government, but the right is god given.

So is the right not to hear someone. Say anything you want in your own house, but if you spout vileness in my living room, I’m tossing you out the front door.

Why are these companies forced to carry your speeches?

I feel like the XKCD perfectly reflects the free speech arguments I see online.

Whoever you think gave you the right to feee speech, it cannot extend to forcing others to relay your speech or THEY don't have the right to free speech.

That's the problem with pretending it's merely a legalistic right rather than a general principle.

If a big chunk of your society make a habit of censuring people for disliked speech, organizations that are in the business of relaying speech make a habit of dropping customers over disliked speech, etc? Then your society is not practicing the principle of freedom of speech.

The thing is, there is a fundamental disagreement ablut what the “principle of free speech” is. The 1st Amendment is not, in fact, a restricted-to-government application of a broader principle that there should all speech should be treated equally and unimpeded. It was very much an implementation of a theory that speech should succeed or not as a result of decisions of others to choose to hear more of it or not, choose to repeat it or not, and that the government putting its finger on the scales go suppress or compel speech was a distortion that interfered with that. You seem to adhere to a very different principal that you call free speech, but which is not the same principal which animated the First Amendment. Which is understandable, there are an array of different principals people adhere to, and only a finite number of ways of arranging words to name them—but it is important not to conflate your principal of free speech with the one underpinning the Constitutional right, or to treat it as universally what people are talking about when they talk about “free speech” as a principal when it is different, and incompatible with, one of the more common understandings of not only the legal right to free speech, but the animating principal behind that right.

"the right is god given"

The stupidest thing I've read today

It's a human right. Some principles are so fundamental that they supercede governments and so-called norms, and free speech is one of those. You don't have to be religious to know that these rights are as fundamental to human life as breathing and something worth fighting for, rather than something that we merely practice at the pleasure of some privileged people who think they're better than us.

You can always join another PDS or host your own, and still be on Bluesky. So not really banned in the same way as being banned from Twitter.

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