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Comment by femiagbabiaka | Hacker News Reader

I know that some folks dislike it, but Bluesky and atproto in particular have provided the perfect tools to achieve this. There are some people, largely those who migrated from Twitter, who mostly treat Bluesky like a all-liberal version of Twitter, which results in a predictably toxic experience, like bizarro-world Twitter. But the future of a less toxic social media is in there, if we want it. I've created my own feeds that allow topics I'm interested in and blacklist those I'm not -- I'm in complete control. For what it's worth, I've also had similarly pleasant experiences using Mastodon, although I don't have the same tools that I do on Bluesky.

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I personally dont feel like an ultra filtered social media which only shows me things I agree with is a good thing. Exposing yourself to things you dont agre with is what helps us all question our own beliefs and prejudeces, and grow as people. To me, only seeing things you know you are already interested in is no better than another company curating it for me.

I think it's less about content topic and more meta content topic. EG I don't want to remove pictures of broccoli because I don't like broccoli, I'm trying to remove pictures of food because it makes me eat more. Similarly, I don't want to remove Political Takes I Disagree With, I want to remove Political Takes Designed To Make Me Angry. The latter has a destructive viral effect whose antidote is inattention.

Echo chamber is a loaded term. Nobody is upset about the Not Murdering People Randomly echo chamber we've created for ourselves in civilised society, and with good reason. Many ideologies are internally stable and don't virally cause the breakdown of society. The concerning echo chambers are the ones that intensify and self-reinforce when left alone.

I've mentioned this a few times in the past, but I'm convinced that filters that exclude work much better than filters that include.

Instead of algorithms pushing us content it thinks we like (or what the advertisers are paying them to push on us), the relationship should be reversed and the algorithms should push us all content except the content we don't like.

Killfiles on Usenet newsreaders worked this way and they were amazing. I could filter out abusive trolls and topics I wasn't interested in, but I would otherwise get an unfiltered feed.

I’m at risk of sounding like an atproto shill at this point, but check out https://www.graze.social/.

I think every social media platform should allow something like this. You can make filters that work in either direction.

At least when you do this you are aware of it happening. Algorithmic feeds can shift biases without you even noticing.

> I personally dont feel like an ultra filtered social media which only shows me things I agree with is a good thing. Exposing yourself to things you dont agre with is what helps us all question our own beliefs and prejudeces, and grow as people.

You are the one who gets to control what is filtered or not, so that's up to you. It's about choice. By the way, a social media experience which is not "ultra filtered" doesn't exist. Twitter is filtered heavily, with a bias towards extreme right wing viewpoints, the ones it's owner is in agreement with. And that sort of filtering disguised as lack of bias is a mind virus. For example, I deleted my account a month or so ago after discovering that the CEO of a popular cloud database company that I admired was following an account who posted almost exclusively things along the lines of "blacks are all subhuman and should be killed." How did a seemingly normal person fall into that? One "unfiltered" tweet at a time, I suppose.

> To me, only seeing things you know you are already interested in is no better than another company curating it for me.

I curate my own feeds. They don't have things I only agree with in them, they have topics I actually want to see in them. I don't want to see political ragebait, left or right flavoured. I don't want to see midwit discourse about vibecoding. I have that option on Bluesky, and that's the only platform aside from my RSS reader where I have that option.

Of course, you also have the option to stare endlessly at a raw feed containing everything. Hypothetically, you could exactly replicate a feed that aggregates the kind of RW viewpoints popular on Twitter and look at it 24/7. But that would be your choice.

For example, I deleted my account a month or so ago after discovering that the CEO of a popular cloud database company that I admired was following an account who posted almost exclusively things along the lines of "blacks are all subhuman and should be killed."

It seems like you're better off knowing that. Without Twitter, you wouldn't, right?

A venue that allows people to tell you who they really are isn't an unalloyed Bad Thing.

That's a good way of thinking about it, thank you, legitimately.

> Exposing yourself to things you dont agre with is what helps us all question our own beliefs and prejudeces, and grow as people.

I have another wise-sounding soundbite for you: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." —Voltaire. All this sounds dandy and fine, until you actually try and examine the beliefs and prejudeces at hand. It would seem that such examination is possible, and it is—in theory, whereas in practice, i.e. in application of language—"ideas" simply don't matter as much. Material circumstance, mindset, background, all these things that make us who we are, are largely immutable in our own frames of reference. You can get exposed to new words all the time, but if they come in language you don't understand, it's of no use. This is not a bug, but a feature, a learned mechanism that allows us to navigate massive search spaces without getting overwhelmed.

So far my experience is that unless you subscribe to the general narrative of the platform, the discover algorithm punishes you with directing the mob your way.

I had two of my Bluesky posts on AI being attacked by all kinds of random people which in turn has also lead to some of those folks sending me emails and dragging some of my lobster and hackernews comments into online discourse. A not particularly enjoyable experience.

I’m sure one can have that same experience elsewhere, but really it’s Bluesky where I experienced this on a new level personally.

I saw that, and I'm sorry it happened. I thought both the response to your original post and the resulting backlash to both you and everyone who engaged with you sincerely were absurd. I think that because of atproto you have the flexibility to create a social media experience where that sort of thing cannot happen, but I also understand why you in particular would be put off from the whole thing.

I don’t think this is a technical problem but a social problem. I think the audience defines itself by being the antithesis to Twitter instead of being a well balanced one.

I was pretty optimistic in the beginning but Bluesky doesn’t have organic growth and those who hang out there, are the core audience that wants to be there because of what the platform represents. But that also means rejection of a lot of things such AI.

In many ways I agree with you. In particular the conglomeration of high percentages of atproto users onto Bluesky owned and moderated algorithms and feeds and the replication of Twitter-style dogpiling combined with the relative lack of ideological diversity on Bluesky has created the perfect environment for toxicity, even if it doesn't reach the depths that Twitter does.

But conversely, that's the only place I disagree with you. Everything that is bad about Bluesky is much worse on Twitter. It's a -- larger -- red mob instead of a blue one (or vice versa I guess depending on how one assigns colors to political alignment), and some of the mob members are actually getting paid to throw bricks!

I tried Bluesky and wanted to like it. My account got flagged as spam, still no idea why. Ironically it could be another way of loosing ones voice to an LLM :)

> My account got flagged as spam, still no idea why.

This happened to me too, 3 weeks ago. The email said why I got flagged as spam, I replied to the email explaining I actually was a human, and after some minutes they unflagged my account. Did you not receive an email saying why?

If you follow certain people, various communities will, en mass, block you and report you automatically with software "block lists". This can lead to getting flagged as spam.

Well that's the thing -- you might be flagged as spam in the Bluesky PDS, but there are other PDS's, with their own feeds and algorithms, and in fact you can make your own if you so choose. That's a lot of work, and Twitter is definitely easier, but atproto means that an LLM cannot steal your voice.

I enjoy Mastodon a lot. Ad-free, algo-free. I choose what goes in my feed, I do get exposed to external viewpoints by people boosts (aka re-tweets) and i follow hashtags (to get content from people I do not know). But it's extremely peaceful, spam and bots are rare and get flagged quickly. There's a good ecosystem of mobile apps. I can follow a few Bluesky people through a bridge between platforms and they can follow me too.

That's truly all I need.

Doesn’t Bluesky have a set of moderation rules that guarantee that it will turn into bizarro-world Twitter?

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