The honeymoon period is definitely starting to wear a bit more thin as Bluesky speedruns the history of Twitter. There's a thread where one of the key people behind Skywatch, a popular labeler for content users might find negative, despairs that Bluesky is not doing enough to remove bad actors.
Nothing on Bluesky is *actually* private, but the main thread is marked as only available for logged in users only, so I'll instead link to my replies: https://bsky.app/profile/dustyweb.bsky.social/post/3ld4arouqnc2c
I laid out the general scope of concerns and start of the shape of answers in a document called OCapPub a while ago https://gitlab.com/spritely/ocappub/blob/master/README.org
The actual work is happening at
@spritely
One short note: the "global town square" model is a broken design, IMO. It's also very millenial.
More or less I tend to think that both Bluesky and the present-day fediverse are caught up in chasing the dreams of social networks built by Millenials, for Millenials, on the hopes and dreams that a "global town square" would work.
Very "early web 2.0 zeitgeist" thinking. Doomed, IMO.
It's not that anyone is foolish for taking this route, because of course it's the way we've been, as a global aggregate, assuming social networks would go for the last 20 years. There's a global, context-free space, everyone puts content into it, somehow it's moderated
I do think that public broadcast of content makes sense to some degree, but trying to make the "global context collapse firehose" healthy doesn't feel, to me, where efforts should go.
It's fine for people to keep working on it, but I'm more interested in contextual communication, public and private
The fediverse has a *bit* of a better time with it, because of the moderation-at-borders stuff, but it's wearying and results in the "Nation State'ification of the Fediverse" parts I outlined in OCapPub. Not the right direction either, IMO.
So what's the answer? Contextual communication, including contextual governance. Building systems, both broadcast and private, that *aren't* a global context collapse firehose.
More and more communication is moving to private, locally governed chat rooms, and I think this is related
I don't spend too much time thinking about how to "fix" the current sort-the-global-firehose systems, because I don't think it's where the future is. That's for others to figure out, if they can.
But there's a lot of *opportunities* in contextual communication! So I am excited about that work.
Anyway, Bluesky's attempt at separating "speech vs reach" I think is maybe about as good of a job as you can do with this kind of sift-through-the-global-public-context-collapse-firehose system, but... I think we'll see that users end up being not very happy with it. That's my expectation, anyway.
@cwebber (we are already seeing the failure of this system on Bsky imo; Jesse Singal's recent arrival on that platform has really highlighted the limitations both of the T&S team and the lack of widely used composable moderation)
@cwebber
> Bluesky's attempt at separating "speech vs reach"
what is that?
@Forbearance @cwebber thank you!
@cwebber Have you written somewhere how you understand contextual communication and how that would be implemented? I'd love to read more about this.
@cwebber so we're returning to irc?
@eniko I love IRC and Spritely does have an IRC channel but I think we need a bit more than that :)
@cwebber i still use irc every day but yeah it is a bit uh, classic at this point
@cwebber "maybe we shouldn't put the 2024 Accounting for Optometrists conference and the 2024 Krampus Punk Cosplay Con in the same hall and force them to share the same mic and stage"
@cwebber When we talk about “contextual communication,” what kind of context are we talking about? My inference is the “context” of Fediverse comms is the “context” of which instance you use and the moderation that comes with it.
So in that way my mind jumps to the forum model (e.g. Reddit, kbin, lemmy) where content is aggregated and moderated by topic. Would that be considered “context” the way you use it in this thread? In my head this is not a “contextless firehouse” but idk
@LandoDev Read the OCapPub writeup linked above, because it talks about how the "instance" level is absolutely the wrong abstraction to put communities on
@cwebber Ooh ok my bad, I’ll go read it; thank you. Sorry about that!
@cwebber I keep criticizing all the time that everything happening in a global context is the main reason why there's so much conflict on Twitter-like platforms. This design is fundamentally broken.
@cwebber I love this whole thread! I keep thinking how Reddit sits somewhere between these in practice, albeit highly centralized on the tech side. You have the contextual bits in sub-Reddits which still can horribly collapse/provide discovery when hitting r/all (for better and worse)?
@cwebber is that like having a bunch of "persona" that you use in particular contexts?
Like.. using some basic opsec to keep work at $Job detail different from my every day stream of consciousness profile
@cwebber I agree. A lot of people recoil at the idea of publishing content to a bunch of strangers online, and history has shown their concerns to be valid.
I think the other side of the coin is, a lot of these programmers myself included are rarely/never invited to the cool group chats. They surely exist, but I'm not cool enough. I've been working to build little communities I can thrive in for over a decade and I still struggle. So I think there is value to semi-public, but it is real hard...
@cwebber I've also noticed that the compelling "Google circles" idea is cool in theory but in practice it seemed like most people don't really want to think about it. People want to mentally hop digital contexts but practically will either not (discussing personal plans in public chat, say) or will make an ad hoc group text and then maybe reuse it beyond that ad hoc context without rethinking it
@cwebber ehh. I'm perfectly happy to sit in a circle around the fire with my handful of online friends.
IMO extensive defederating, possibly allowlisting, and manually approved signups are the way to go. It's not our duty as server teams to provide a worldwide public.
@cwebber I think there's risk in conflating a town square - with the connotation of want for exchange of views, debate, etc., with a place to find social connection - which is at least what I and the folks close to me have wanted from these places. Not to speak on behalf of all millennials, 'course, but at least *as* one myself wanted to draw the distinction
@cwebber GenX believed this as well: Usenet and smtp and AIM had so few glimmers of thought about moderation. I still remember getting flamed by a PhD neuroscientist about how heavy a neuron was on an early listserv.
@cwebber the point about the flame is that the scientist was from a different country and while I felt shame I was also thrilled.