The curated feed, now run by a team of six moderators, is the meeting ground for hundreds of thousands of Black users on Bluesky. Is it ready to meet the moment?
Do you think this is a systemic problem, or just the happenstance of today? Is there something about Bluesky’s architecture or governance that makes it more resilient against that (particularly in the long term)? Or will they have all the same problems as they gain more users and enable more federation with other servers?
I mean, it is a systemic problem in that society is racist, social media reflects that. It could be the one to change that in part if people cared enough to fix things both online and off. But they don’t, they’re so dedicated to upholding the structures of white supremacy and remaining willfully ignorant that they end up caring just about themselves.
Having said that, whilst Bluesky may or may not care about moderation on a global level (I’ve heard mixed things), I think this kind of community building and user level block lists is a good thing, so it may work out for now.
Like all commercial ventures into anything online I do expect it’ll become enshitified eventually, but for now may it long continue and hopefully drive the devs, moderators and actual users of the fediverse to care and introduce better moderation features or actually care about doing it and stopping the many white supremacists etc on the network through various means.
Thanks for the info. I was not aware that Bluesky had public, shareable block lists. That is indeed a great feature.
For anyone else like me who was not aware, I found this site with an index of a lot of public block lists: https://blueskydirectory.com/lists . I was not able to load some of them, but others did load successfully. Maybe some were deleted or are not public? I’m not sure.
I’ve never been heavily invested in microblogging, so my first-hand experience is limited and mostly academic. I have accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, though. I would not have realized this feature was available in Bluesky if you hadn’t mentioned it and I didn’t find that index site in a web search. It doesn’t seem easily discoverable within Bluesky’s own UI.
Edit: I agree, of course, that there is a larger systemic problem at the society level. I recently read this excellent piece (very long but worth it!) that talks a bit about how that relates to social media: https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/ . Here’s a relevant excerpt:
If this truly is the case—if the only way to improve our public internet is to convert all humans one by one to a state of greater enlightenment—then a full retreat into the bushes is the only reasonable course.
But it isn’t the case. Because yes, the existence of dipshits is indeed unfixable, but building arrays of Dipshit Accelerators that allow a small number of bad actors to build destructive empires defended by Dipshit Armies is a choice. The refusal to genuinely remodel that machinery when its harms first appear is another choice. Mega-platform executives, themselves frequently dipshits, who make these choices, lie about them to governments and ordinary people, and refuse to materially alter them.
Do you think this is a systemic problem, or just the happenstance of today? Is there something about Bluesky’s architecture or governance that makes it more resilient against that (particularly in the long term)? Or will they have all the same problems as they gain more users and enable more federation with other servers?
I mean, it is a systemic problem in that society is racist, social media reflects that. It could be the one to change that in part if people cared enough to fix things both online and off. But they don’t, they’re so dedicated to upholding the structures of white supremacy and remaining willfully ignorant that they end up caring just about themselves.
Having said that, whilst Bluesky may or may not care about moderation on a global level (I’ve heard mixed things), I think this kind of community building and user level block lists is a good thing, so it may work out for now.
Like all commercial ventures into anything online I do expect it’ll become enshitified eventually, but for now may it long continue and hopefully drive the devs, moderators and actual users of the fediverse to care and introduce better moderation features or actually care about doing it and stopping the many white supremacists etc on the network through various means.
Thanks for the info. I was not aware that Bluesky had public, shareable block lists. That is indeed a great feature.
For anyone else like me who was not aware, I found this site with an index of a lot of public block lists: https://blueskydirectory.com/lists . I was not able to load some of them, but others did load successfully. Maybe some were deleted or are not public? I’m not sure.
I’ve never been heavily invested in microblogging, so my first-hand experience is limited and mostly academic. I have accounts on Mastodon and Bluesky, though. I would not have realized this feature was available in Bluesky if you hadn’t mentioned it and I didn’t find that index site in a web search. It doesn’t seem easily discoverable within Bluesky’s own UI.
Edit: I agree, of course, that there is a larger systemic problem at the society level. I recently read this excellent piece (very long but worth it!) that talks a bit about how that relates to social media: https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/ . Here’s a relevant excerpt: