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Comment by kdrvr | Hacker News Reader

Feels like Bluesky is single-handedly making the Internet an open for new ideas again

I hesitate to give one corporation or entity too much credit, but at least for the moment, the community on Blueksy is pretty fun. Admittedly, I was a fan of the Twitter of old, and that seems to be the crowd that is most active on Bluesky now. We'll see where it goes.

"Protocols, not platforms." As the kids say, "build mode" but building what can't be captured, enshittified, etc.

Well no, it’s basically a Threads with slightly more open integration options. You probably mean ATProto, perhaps.

Unless of course you say something that pisses off the BS mod cabal, or you are deliberately mass-reported by some clique of users, then your account will be immediately banned. Or even worse, your account made it onto some pre-shared blacklist so you'll be invisible before you say a word.

BS is an attempt to recreate an even more toxic environment than old Twitter ever was.

Which is all very high school cafeteria-drama.

> Or even worse, your account made it onto some pre-shared blacklist so you'll be invisible before you say a word.

The various blocklists are opt-in; you’ll only be invisible to their respective subscribers. Only the default bluesky moderation list is global, and they only adjudicate ToS violations (like every other social network).

Community moderation is quite distributed and egalitarian on bsky, perhaps even more so than the benevolent dictatorship used here (which obviously doesn’t scale).

> BS is an attempt to recreate an even more toxic environment than old Twitter ever was.

On Bsky I have yet to have anyone out of the blue, with no prior interaction, call me a slur or racial epithet. Can’t say the same about my old Twitter account.

> Only the default bluesky moderation list is global

And of course it's also opt in as well. Just the default bluesky client does that by default. Any third party client (ex: https://deer.social or https://zeppelin.social) can opt-out of "default moderation". And technically you could use a userscript or even potentially a ublock rule/filter to disable default moderation (just like you can to disable regional moderation or age verification).

Yep, this is true, thanks for the clarification.

> And of course it's also opt in as well. Just the default bluesky client does that by default.

This means it's opt-out. Not opt-in.

Sorry, I should clarify. The system is designed to have moderation be opt in. It isn't opt-in or opt-out on the default client. On the default client it is mandatory.

The reason I said it's opt-in is because moderation is added client-side by including the moderation service's DID in the `atproto-accept-labelers` HTTP header when sending requests to the appview.

So it is by-design opt-in, just in practice the "first party bluesky client" makes the choice for you for legal compliance reasons, and with an increasing hint-hint-nudge-nudge from the devs to use third party or forked clients to bypass the various legal restrictions countries keep trying to impose on them.

I was considering creating a censorship free bluesky pds. The showstopper is that bluesky can cut off read access to the content firehose relay. I suspect they would do that, or be forced to do that if a true free speech platform were to emerge.

> Or even worse, your account made it onto some pre-shared blacklist so you'll be invisible before you say a word.

Seems to me like people who subscribe to a blocklist that I'm on aren't people I want to be visible to/communicate with.

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