https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...
Now in 2026, their transparency report says nothing about stackable moderation or moderation services. I guess nobody is using them, at least not in significant enough volumes that it would have a meaningful effect on the at least not enough for them to have a meaningful effect on the Trust & Safety team's job.
Likewise, they tout "thousands of Personal Data Servers operated by people across the federated AT Protocol network", but that's out of "41.41M users".
It's fine, I guess. It's just not meaningfully decentralized.
It’s spread out over subgroups and niches. I imagine the biggest independent moderation service is blacksky’s, and they’re not exactly best friends with bluesky.
I use about five different moderation services, and a handful of independent blocklists.
> It's fine, I guess. It's just not meaningfully decentralized.
It’s better than the situation on X.
i find it’s pretty toxic, in a militant way… that doesn’t get moderated of course.
That’s “free expression” when it’s about topics blueskyers all agree on.
waits to be called a nazi
Pretty shitty that ones choice of social media is so politicized but if you must pick a side... I will pick the non-nazi side, thank you very much!
Which is fine -- build what you want to be a part of -- but don't pretend it's the neutral position.
And no, I'm not talking about "1939 Germany" views.
"The deportations will continue regardless of the tantrums of the hysterical and mentally ill."
Which ironically is similar to some "1939 Germany" views.
That comparison is precisely the problem: it distorts history, inflates moral claims, and shuts down serious discussion.
This is also largely the standard level of rhetoric on Bluesky, which is fine -- but manufactured consensus on a heavily moderated platform is not the same thing as factual or moral authority.
You can't complain about content on bluesky because unlike every other platform you must choose which feeds you use.
I’m growing tired of those bans on legal content that isn’t inherently harmful (we are talking about fictional humanized animals here) but considered “icky” by platforms and payment processors.
So I don’t care if the AT protocol is technologically superior to ActivityPub (?) – the Mastodon community has a healthier moderation and mindset than Bluesky, in my opinion.
Furry art, including quite explicit furry art, is very common on bluesky and doesn’t seem be especially restricted by policy. I mean, unless they also happen to be depicting nonconsensual sexual interactions, an orthogonal concern to the furry aspect.
> I’m growing tired of those bans on legal content that isn’t inherently harmful (we are talking about fictional humanized animals here) but considered “icky” by platforms and payment processors.
Well, you are free to avail yourself of the forums that lack those policies. Now, I know you’ve complained that they are “harmful”, but... Maybe there is a reason that other forums choose to put bans in place.
Now there's an understatement. It's bloody impossible to get rid of. People here are sneering at all the political content but they're ignoring the curvaceous elephant in the room. I think maybe bsky has improved things now, but a while back their adult content filters were not up to the task. When I first made an account I almost gave up on it because until I got all the right filter words set up it was nothing but weird porn whac-a-mole (actually that's probably a poor choice of words...)
Small aside, consent also depends on the jurisdiction – in mine, it must be verbal, so it means that if I were to draw a situation which involves a character being forced to do something but showing their consent non-verbally, it would still be non-consensual, and thus, forbidden by Bluesky’s terms of service if the PDS was hosted in my jurisdiction.
Anyway, my point is that all those illustrations should be properly labeled, but not necessarily forbidden by Bluesky’s ToS. As I understand it, fictional non-con content being banned by Bluesky means that even hosting it on one’s PDS is a no-go.
But Twitter felt cringe to me long before it was consumed by Musk and politics. Messing with the feed has backfired all of the big platforms. First Facebook then Twitter and most recently Instagram.
They all became a closed loop of content that is force fed. Injecting an ad in the a feed we control wasn't ever enough.
so it's _not_ that hard.
It would be nice to see some more transparency around the decisions of whether an account gets verified or not. So far it’s feeling like a “cool club” with little rhyme or reason with regards to certain verification decisions.
Related to that is also the need to add more trusted verifiers. Are there any plans to allow third parties to provide verification services or is it always only going to be journalistic and educational institutions?
That's how Twitter started, and when the policy changed, the "cool club" members threw public tantrums (some of which still seethe to this day).
It's all very high-school cafeteria clique to me.
Anyone can put together a moderation service that labels accounts that they’ve vetted or blacklisted. It wouldn’t be that taxing to host one, but the labor to maintain it is a different story.
Worth keeping in mind, the original plan was to entirely rely on domain names being used as handles for verification. All ~500 .gov handled accounts on there are almost certainly who they claim to be, unless they are able to set DNS records on those domains.
But I remember the early days of MySpace and Facebook with a certain nostalgia, and I'm pained to see the current state of all these tools. Such a thorough report as this gives me a little hope that perhaps an acceptable middle ground can be found for Internet communities at large scales.
I don't think I'll be hopping back in any time soon, but perhaps the research and positive advancements in social media aren't over yet.
I have a look at Bluesky from time to time and there is (for me ofc) as much info/interesting stuff as I was getting from the other one before the acquisition.
it’s just people raging about trump and whatever brand they’re looking to try and cancel next.
it’s so far from the greatness of the original twitter. no tech community or content.
I dunno. It probably depends on what you’re looking for.
Although I still have a web/programming which I follow and have found some people interesting from Hackernews and others too in bluesky (emsh,simonw)
What is the HN consensus around lemmy? I really like lemmy and think that it might be better for tech stuff (almost similar to HN/reddit you can say and federated)
I used to follow lemmy c/technology but I do feel like HN is pretty unique in its own manner.
Regarding twitter alternative itself. Maybe mastodon too can be an alternative.
Another minor nitpick about bluesky is that its 200 characters limits actually really removes the tech community from too deep discussions imo. Although I guess twitter had that limit for long time too until it got removed but now I do see sometimes some tweets which are really long (sometimes even complete blog?)
It actually really (pissed?) me off so much that I ended up making a tampermonkey script which can actually write a long message automatically and split a message into 200 messages chunk and post them in a thread of sorts you can say although its very hacky and messy and it starts to glitch around 10 threads from what I remember.
I think there's a few tweetlonger-type services that people have tried to make, but with atproto they can at least embed that extra text into the post (100kb limit), so the site only needs to stick around to view it.
I'm not sure about that. I'd rather decide for myself what I want to read and what I do not. I'd love to not delegate this important decision to corporate overlords.
I can moderate my own feed -- the majority of people don't need, want, or enjoy an overtly paternalistic hugbox, and especially if moderation tends to be unidirectionally skewed in one political direction. It's not surprising that growth is slow.
It doesn't seem to be as bad anymore, a quick glance at the public feed suggests that the percentage of political posts has gone down, but considering how many times the word "toxic" appears in this linked blogpost, I'm guessing they're still banning anyone who expresses the "wrong" opinions, so the userbase is unlikely to grow much further in the future. It seems to have plateaued at around 1.2M daily likers.
Source for the stats: https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
The US does not have a "far left" in any significant numbers, and never has. At least not in a self-aware sense.
Maybe you meant to say liberal, to which I'd agree.
That's not to say there isn't a "left" or "far left" on Bluesky, but there's no way it's a majority.
I agree echo chambers are a problem there, which is why I only posted there briefly before leaving. One feature that seemed to exacerbate the formation of echo chambers was users sharing and blindly trusting mass block lists to silence things they didn't want to hear (leftists and liberals alike).
There's really a problem that needs to be solved here. I really think anonymous or phony posting needs to stop. It's not helpful here. All it does is amplify false talking points with a "Fake it til you make it", "the loudest voice wins" methodology.
But unfortunately, engagement is financially incentivized now. So the big corps reap $$$$$ while the public burns itself down.
Can you explain what exactly you mean by "local nazis"? Are you getting ads for Nazi barber shops? Sieg Heil Heating & Cooling? Hitler Juice Bar and Bubble Tea?
If this was such a huge problem I'm sure we would have heard of it before.
Bluesky does, however. Clearly they've made that their target market, but that's also why growing beyond that base seems to be difficult for them,
Again, that's not to say lefists don't exist, but they are a tiny fraction, and always were a tiny fraction no matter what platform.
Don't rule out bots that exist in numbers to make the actual left appear like a deranged spectacle as a form of controlled opposition. Both parties of capital interests have a role in and benefit from these.
As for bots or “controlled opposition”: you don’t need conspiracy theories to explain why a heavily moderated platform with explicit cultural norms converges on a particular worldview. I’m disinclined to apply anything beyond Occam’s razor when accounting for “deranged spectacle” behavior; ordinary selection effects are sufficient.
This isn't in conflict with my original comment.
> As for bots or “controlled opposition”: you don’t need conspiracy theories to explain why a heavily moderated platform with explicit cultural norms converges on a particular worldview. I’m disinclined to apply anything beyond Occam’s razor when accounting for “deranged spectacle” behavior; ordinary selection effects are sufficient.
These aren't conspiracy theories, and they pre-date and extend beyond Bluesky. They are easily observable patterns in most modern news media and social media. For one, silos are much easier to advertise to. Follow the money, like everything else.
If anything, the mistake is treating the "reasonable", aspirational version as more real than the people who consistently show up, organize, and speak — and then assuming the most visible expressions must be "controlled opposition."
Once again, we seem to be in agreement on this.
> The underlying attitudes -- maximalism, moral absolutism, tolerance for disruption, and readiness to analogize opponents to historical evil -- are not artifacts of bots or manipulation. They’re characteristic features of a political subculture.
These things are not mutually exclusive. It's both, and people (and their bots) across the entire political spectrum are guilty of involvement.
From the left's perspective, the liberals deserve muting and are spam, and same from the other way around. It's siloed echo chambers everywhere.
Part of it is unrealistic expectations of users thinking they're right about their world views. But part of it is platforms making features that amplify the former.
Are they just disproportionately powerful then? Because the US does definitely have consistent far left trends and movements that overtake the mainstream. The OK hand gesture hysteria is maybe an evident example, but land acknowledgments? DEI statements? Fatphobia? Defund the police? All of these originate from far left positions.
You might be confused because several forces want you to be exactly that:
1) The right lumps/conflates everything from centrist liberal to far left as "the far radical left" with no in-between, which blurs many lines.
2) Center liberals who want a social media veneer they can feel good about will literally pose as leftists/marxists, but if you look at their other beliefs and behaviors (were they trying to sink Bernie, or not?) then it becomes immediately obvious they're ultimately loyal to the Dem party, and that means center liberals serving capital interests.
But I can't blame you or anyone else for falling for the above unless you've seen enough to know, like following both of Bernie's presidential runs and how he was systematically smeared by both liberals and their corporate media.
Identity politics / DEI / etc are a liberal obsession. Class politics is the focus of the actual far left.
...No? Bernie was super popular specifically with this audience. The more liberal people described themselves as, the more they supported Bernie: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-defines-the-sander...
You can take the stance that nobody knows what any of these terms mean I guess, but then the picture gets kind of absurd, left-wing materialism loses all meaning, the church loses all relationship with the right, hell, from that standpoint Donald Trump campaigned as a leftist I guess? He did have a recurrent discourse around jobs and the working class.
They also perform age checks because they are evil and complicit with obviously detrimental local laws, not because they want to protect the children.
If it makes you feel any better, it's more trivially bypassed than any website age-gate I've ever seen. (that's more complicated than a checkbox)
Of course they can comply and then in five years nothing more than cat pictures gets posted online.
(Not that this would be inherently bad)