I know Jay IRL and can attest to her being a very good person, and I have strong faith in her ability to be a competent leader for Bluesky and to deliver on the project's potential.
Just an anecdote but I wanted to contribute it. A big reason I ended my Twitter involvement and switched to Bluesky is simply because I expect them to succeed and replace it, indifferent of the ideological alignment of either platform.
Bluesky has a really neat approach to composable moderation. You can subscribe to one of the many labellers and decide how you want your feed to be moderated. e.g. to hide US Politics https://bsky.app/profile/uspol.bluesky.bot or spoilers https://bsky.app/profile/mod.shawn.party or transphobia https://bsky.app/profile/asukafield.xyz. I haven't used any of these, so I can't attest to their quality, but it's a unique approach. Personally, I subscribed to one that hides the engagement-farm follow bots that works.
Of course the other part is Bluesky's PDS (the 'instance' hosting content for those who sign up on bsky.app) - they're free to moderate their infrastructure however they see fit. You might find yourself banned from there, but you can always host your own PDS and still be followable on bluesky.
One of my favorite design decisions in Bluesky is that you can set any label from any labeler to off, warn, or hide, including @moderation.bsky.app. If you think that labeler applies the "Intolerance" label incorrectly, just turn it off.
One design drawback/bug is that at any point a labeler you subscribe to (even if you set it to !warn) can start issuing labels that are set to !hide and you will not even be notified, posts will just start disappearing.
Yeah, I like that too. Technically there’s a lot of really great design decisions that were made, but I’ve seen people take screenshots of the app and crying “censorship!” not understanding it’s a setting that can be changed or that a different client could be implemented against aproto.
I don’t think they’re wrong either based on past precedent and their mental model of how most social networks work.
I’d propose that Bsky instead asks the user if they want to view the content or block it, allowing them to change the setting right then and there (and not have to dig), instead of outright saying “Intolerant” and making them jump through hoops every time they want to view it.
I think anyone who wants to make a social thing popular with a mainstream audience is strongly incentivized to ensure that newcomers don't encounter Nazi shit. I think most of us know the parable of the Nazi bar.
Of course anyone who wants to stick around should eventually learn a bit about how the moderation works so they can decide what they want to see and what they don't.
There’s a huge gap between “nazi shit” and bad satire. I don’t think the content being labeled as “Intolerant” is funny, but I do care about how history rhymes.
Reddit hit a decent balance by calling it “NSFW” and letting people change the setting as they encounter it.
I think I wasn't clear enough. Bluesky has a strong incentive to hide extremist content by default, but I do not claim their moderation service applies the intolerance label correctly.
I think 'intolerant' is good enough. I know I am intolerant/insensitive on some stuff and I would accept that a post I would make mocking animal death (not proud but I did that) to be flagged as intolerant or whatever. Honestly it's often low-brow anyway, nothing of value is lost.
I think they are wrong. We are fleeing X because a lot of right winger's mental model for appropriate political discussion with liberals is mostly mean trollish harassment, purposefully putting people down and trying to make people feel bad so they can "drink liberal tears". It's not good faith counterpoints. Avoiding that is not censorship of ideas.
By googling “your body my choice” I can find pages of left wing news articles but no examples whatsoever.
Did you miss the fact that X is a platform based on free speech? People are allowed to out themselves as whatever they want, which is a good thing. The examples you’re linking to have 0 likes on them, so I wouldn’t be all that worried about anonymous teenager provocateurs who are trying to get a reaction out of people.
Personally I’m spending less time there not because of overt racism specifically, but because even innocent posts end up pulled by trolls into adversarial, low-information stupidity.
I’m not trying to convince you to join Bluesky though, if you prefer X I think both Bluesky and X are better if you continue to spend your time there!
> Did you miss the fact that X is a platform based on free speech?
How can you say this with a straight face? I am genuinely baffled by people who hold this view.
Just because you say that your platform is all about “free speech” doesn’t mean it is and there are clear actions that X/Elon took which go against that claim.
The primary of which being that posting “cisgender” gets your post flagged and demoted in the algorithm and that Elonjet was banned. How can you seriously claim free speech absolutism when there are direct examples showing the very opposite.
They don't owe the repo any updates, if there are none. As long as you have no evidence of foul play, you're just a run of the mill conspiracy theorist.
Is this the Babylon Bee? Like, it posts a lot of transphobic stuff. What would you call that, if not intolerance?
There’s an odd tendency amongst the modern far-right to want to (a) be openly bigoted but (b) not to be judged for it. I feel like this ‘snowflake bigot’ phenomenon was born a couple of decades back, with some homophobes getting very upset about the term ‘homophobe’, not because they felt it was inaccurate as such, but because they felt it cast their thing as a _bad_ intolerance, like racism.
Just an anecdote but I wanted to contribute it. A big reason I ended my Twitter involvement and switched to Bluesky is simply because I expect them to succeed and replace it, indifferent of the ideological alignment of either platform.