When your platform advertises itself as decentralized, and a simple “host bluesky instance” search results in articles telling you to join the main instance’s waiting list… that sounds too stupid for me to give them the time of day.
I am surprised anyone uses or takes them seriously.
Bluesky is still in beta. It’s intentionally not open to the general public because federation hasn’t yet been opened up and they only have one instance running.
The nice thing about Bluesky’s architecture (over ActivityPub) is the fact your content and identity is portable. So you can move over to a different instance as they start to come online.
I think the important takeaway from articles like this is the fundamental misunderstanding of decentralized social protocols. It shouldn’t be on one central authority how things are moderated globally. These kinds of articles kind of prove the point.
You cite Bluesky account portability as an advantage over ActivityPub, but that’s not really accurate. Nothing in Bluesky is portable. There’s only one instance. There’s nowhere to port to. You can’t move anything.
Any “Decentralized” Solution that is not F.O.S. free and opensource was never “Decentralized” at all.
https://github.com/bluesky-social
Even their web and mobile clients are FOSS
The FUD and misinformation on here about Bluesky an AT is wild
MIT≠FOS
GNU is Free and forever free software… MIT not so much.
https://fossbytes.com/open-sources-license-type/
Point being, any forks of GNU will have a free version available, MIT carries no such limitation… making it a corpo favorite.
You can call it open source, but Free and Open source is questionable.
I feel like we’re splitting hairs here. MIT is an extremely permissible license. The fact someone could take this and make a closed source fork doesn’t affect the existence or openness of the MIT licensed releases
“We do not condone death threats and will continue to remove accounts when we believe their posts represent targeted harassment or a credible threat of violence. But not all heated language crosses the line into a death threat,” Graber said in a weekend thread. “Wisely or not, many people use violent imagery when they’re arguing or venting. We debated whether a “death threat” needs to be specific and direct in order to cause harm, and what it would mean for people’s ability to engage in heated discussions on Bluesky if we prohibited this kind of speech.”
Well I was curious about Bluesky (they’re still on a waitlist when I check so even their beta has bad actors lol) but a space that hems and haws about death threats? You can be the rudest son of a bitch and never threaten harm! This reminds me of that stupid decision by the Supreme Court that “oh well they didn’t REALLY intend to kill you”. If someone threatens me, it becomes my job to decide if it was real or not? Wtf?
Goddamn free speech absolutism has taken some crazy pills. I remember ‘fighting words’ concept, a death threat used to be understood as almost enough to warrant self-defense preemptively. Now everyone does it and “don’t really mean it”. 🙄
And extremist right-wingers do mean it. Naturally they’ll claim they don’t because most other people aren’t sociopaths, but it’s no accident that the majority of political violence comes from the right.
yup! I also know there are some in ‘safe’ social groups who make the threats because they, as a member of that group, never (or so rarely they aren’t ACTUALLY worried) get attacked. But the groups they use death threats against DO experience such violence, (a fact that the free speech absolutist will argue against, while not even listening to the facts of the matter) and at the very least, I know I second guess the effort of engaging anyone who is willing to threaten to hurt me specifically. Or a question the value of talking with someone like that.
So that is why free speech absolutists LIKE being allowed to make death threats: those who experience violence disengage (or leave) and no one arguing makes them feel in the right. “No one is disagreeing, it means I am correct! It has nothing to do with the shotgun I put in the face of anyone who talks to me!”
It is horrifying.
As long as it’s a for profit and funded by VCs, then it’s subjected to pressure to chase profit by the investors. And as long as it’s pressured to chase profit, then it wouldn’t want to alienate the sizable far right population.