I'm left wondering if maybe all the years I spend tinkering with Linux servers and self-hosted infrastructure are just about to pay off big time now that there is a massive move for governments and institutions to take control of their infrastructure... You still pretty much need a human to spin and maintain infrastructure, wire things securely, and monitor... Now I just need to wait until someone rebrands sysop into something cool sounding like Sovereign Re-orchestration Professional, or Reacquisition Specialist... Data Nationalisation Champion
Joking aside, there is a lot of contract work to help EU quasi-governative entities to move off US clouds. I have been on contract for the last 18 months to recreate some functionality of AWS on top of OVH for a client adjacent to the European Space Agency.
The catch is that being government contract you, the guy doing the actual work, are beneath three or four layers of companies and bureaucracy and you get over engineered yet somehow too vague specs and projects that take 6 months just to get approved. But hey, the pay is good, and it’s for one of the better causes.
My other EU client, a much smaller non-tech company for whom I host their servers, has recently wanted to know if we depend on any US services, to reduce their exposure.
I believe you can get decent work just by advertising yourself as an expert in migrating code and data out of the US.
That said, the job and economy situation is a big question mark and appetite to invest has lessened dramatically so YMMV
I am no economist nor work in sales so my opinion is worthless, but it’s both waiting to see where this AI nonsense leads us, the stock market being an absolute shitshow solely propped up by this AI nonsense while the rest of Europe is in a phase of stagflation, the geopolitical situation at home and with our crazy partner, plus companies readjusting after the end of ZIRP.
Fair to say investments and new projects are a bit harder to come by.
I do this at significant scale and you need a high tolerance for a lot of different negatives to last doing it for governments (and adjacent).
The only exception to this rule I would say is AWS GovCloud, which also might be one of the only chill teams to work at across Amazon. It turns out having "only one way to do it", a system proved through a rigorous vetting process and a thoroughly worked-through contracting process leads to a pretty fantastic work environment for practitioners.
Trying to reimplement that piecemeal is for tougher men than me though. I think I'd rather sit on hot nails.
I used to work for timbl's company Inrupt on Solid on the SDK team. Inrupt no longer appears to be doing solid (or at least it's very well hidden if it still exists).
AT Protocol achieved what Solid envisioned without the inane complexities of rdf and json-ld, which were the biggest learning blockers to people actually adopting Solid.
I like his vision. Can you recommend a pod? The UK based Solid Community ones (and others, apparently) are 'experimental'.
"To use this system, you must understand that we cannot make any guarantees regarding the security and privacy of data that you may store in a solidcommunity.net Solid pod, or concerning the system's functionality and availability."
So the "news" here is they're hosting their own PDS? I think that was the main point of Atmosphere and Bluesky was just a popular gateway to get people into it.
the only true centralized part is the did:plc registry and thats designed to be fully auditable. all canonical data is stored on your pds so if you self host that you get full control.
decentralization is not about the number of app instances but how easy it is to switch from one to another. on that metric bluesky is already better than fediverse.
That’s a very narrow definition of decentralisation. In any case - both atproto and fediverse are massively centralised compared to something like Nostr, and it’s not even close.
The fact that the PDS in practice owns your identity in the vast vast majority of cases is such a dumb trade off that it’s honestly laughable. Should Bluesky decide to splinter off of the network there would be like 50000 people left.
Stop telling people that it’s decentralised in any meaningful way and be honest about it instead. That’s the issue. The dishonesty and tricking users.
2. People who would try to figure exactly how decentralized something is.
If you are the latter, you would instantly question the data model of Bluesky and of Mastodon as well. If you are the former then that just sounds like a buzzword.
Follows work independent of which app you're using, so it works either way. Not an issue.
(Think of it this way: "I am following <username>" is a record stored in my own database, so it doesn't matter which app I click the button on that writes that record.)
This is great. The entire idea of AT is that users can move their data for any reason. We want more of this.
But I do think it's always worth pushing back a bit on this idea:
> "The way Bluesky is funded is at odds with the idea of decentralisation because the platform relies on venture capital and operates under a shareholder model."
Large decentralized infrastructure like the internet, DNS, email, and the web was largely built by VC-backed companies.
The most important open source project, Linux, is funded by major tech companies through the Linux Foundation, with $311 million last year.
Corporate incentives do create conflicts, so it makes sense to be paranoid and skeptical. But the idea that companies can't contribute to open and decentralized systems is exactly the wrong lesson to learn.
We want more VC-backed startups working on open social networks and protocols. It would be great if many of them were in Europe.
>The poor need the rich to start a company as banks are prevented (by the rich) from lending to them.
no. the banks hold the poor's money, and it needs to do so without risk because the poor need their money. lending money to start companies that are completly unsecured is too risky for banks, they lend money to buy houses which is secured debt.
Banks lend against homes as the state guarantees the housing market is too big to fail and will bail them out.
Banks often lend at low LTV ratios because the prices are inflated so people on normal salaries can't actually afford to put down a large deposit, which means a slight drop puts them into negative equity but the banks are not concerned as they are protected.
If the state chose to underwrite startups in the same way...
"Commercialized" is probably the word you want, and I'd agree with.
It turns out that commercialization is most of the work of creating a globally decentralized system. Which doesn't mean the non-commercial work wasn't critical.
There were famously government and university programs that played important early roles too. But it was largely people working for companies that actually built these systems.
What organizations do you think created the switches, routers, servers, software, fiber optic backbones? Who created the new protocols?
It was companies like AT&T/Bell Labs, Cisco, 3Com, Sun, UUNET, Netscape, AOL, the major telecoms, and a thousand other companies we don't remember.
Something like 1% inspiration from academia and government, and 99% perspiration by people working inside companies.
I am sure that DARPA, BBN, USC Information Sciences Institute, and many others will be overjoyed to learn that they've been erased from history by the new narrative that Venture Capitalists Built Everything. (-:
Initially, yes, and then they became an important commercial internet service and backbone provider. They were quickly joined by a huge wave of other private companies, almost all VC-backed.
Honest question: Bluesky was touted as the next distributed, uncensorable, truly-free social network, but in practice I see all posts from right-of center users obscured, much more than old Twitter or, in practice, any other social network (look at the Babylon Bee account, which is a satirical website leaning to the right, censored to oblivion: https://bsky.app/profile/realbabylonbee.bsky.social). Will Eurosky be the same? If yes, why ATProto is "cool" if, in practice, the social networks built upon it are the most sectarian places on the Internet?
You might want to answer two questions before we start this discussion:
1. "Censored" by whom, and for whom?
2. "Censored" for which "right of center" views?
P.S. I should also mention that I can see the posts on that account, even if they all have flags for intolerance by the default moderation service (a service you can opt out of by the way).
"Censored" I mean "flagged", sure. In practice, they're all hidden from the casual user. But really, I'm interested on why ATProto was touted as revolutionary while in practice it powers a standalone heavily politically biased social network where moderators are extremely active flagging everything that's on the right. In that respect, Mastodon is more "revolutionary" - you handle your instance, you provide your moderation, you optionally integrate with other instances. Mastodon itself is used, in practice, to moderate a highly diverse ecosystem of social networks, from the gay-friendly ones to Gab. Nostr, although it's not so widely used, is even more tailored against sectarism by default.
From what I see, Bsky is a single instance of one of the most politically aligned social media in existence; in practice, you can achieve that with any proprietary implementation, you don't need ATProto. I honestly thought that the protocol was engineered to prevent an echo chamber, but in reality it powers an enormous standalone echo chamber that is not moving anywhere, so I was wondering what's the difference.
The protocol has a notion of moderation accounts, sometimes called "labelers" because they can apply labels to your account. Users generally [1] subscribe to the moderation that they want to see. They can then set those labels to make the application to "show", "warn" (collapse by default, click to expand), or "hide" based on the labels.
1: People using the bluesky app cannot unsubscribe from the bluesky moderation service, but that is a policy choice of the bluesky app, not a protocol level choice, other clients can do as they choose.
What you are describing is, bluntly, not happening.
Bluesky moderators take down abusive and harmful posts. There is a daily uproar on the left about how they do this to "kiwifarms but leftishly" behavior under the guise of being "anti-trans". If right-wing centered posts are getting taken down, it is because they are abusive and harmful.
Bluesky popularized subscriber lists, like blocklists. A large portion of the network mass-mutes or mass-blocks anyone on the big right-wing block lists. This is user behavior, not the platform censoring right wing people.
@phillipcarter: of course it's users (and mods) doing that, but in the end, if you open bsky today you see a single, huge, left-biased social media. If you look at Mastodon, you see at a lot left-leaning trans-and-furry-friendly instances, true, but you also see a bunch of right wing instances plus Gab. What happens with bsky today (single instance, echo chambered) is simply something I don't expect from a "distributed" social network. Why is that?
Gab doesn’t federate, so isn’t really part of the fediverse. They’re just using the software; they’re their own thing, not part of a distributed social network. One could make an atproto island that didn’t federate, I suppose, but it would be a lot of work for no obvious reason.
(There are a few other far-right mastodon instances, but then there are pockets of the far-right on bsky, too)
Isn't the answer kind of obvious - much more weight of the developers in comparison to the random people from open source community. Also timing: Mastodon and ActivityPub appeared in the tail end/transitional period when there was still some common public square mindset (at least among random people not radicalized in any way), and tech inclined people had protocols vs. centrally managed platforms in relatively fresh memory. So in the mid-2010s you'd get all sorts of people flocking to the promise of free internet.
When Bluesky was taking traction, the cultural expectation among its audience was already for the platform to heavily shape the narrative. Paradoxically, AFAIK the Bluesky devs themselves are pretty serious about it being an open standard, though I'm basing this on what I heard. So I mostly believe people that the echo chambering you mention is structured in a way that it's technically not centralized. Though in practice, it's way easier to amplify left wing messages on closed websites like YouTube, Facebook, X (I'm basing this on algorithmic recommendations I'm getting and experience of people I know) than the other way around on Bluesky. But this is just the weight distribution of the audience.
Even then non-left supervised Mastodon ecosystem is something of a deep cut. I mean you're right it exists and now I recall hearing about some drama years ago, but not a part of the front and center info about them, for any common person. So I'm not fully buying the contrast you're trying to build here.
Elon Musk took over Twitter and made it rabidly right-wing. As a result, a lot of left-wing people went to Blue Sky.
Social networks are just groups of people: if such a network starts with a core group that leans heavily on a particular end of the political spectrum, the network will also (even with zero bias from the network itself) lean that way.
They made a transphobic joke 3 times and the bluesky users that enabled their intolerance filter never saw it. What exactly is the problem? The posts weren't deleted. Nobody liked the joke because it's a bad joke.
I don't use bluesky, but out of interest is this "intolerance" filter effectively a political filter, or an actual "intolerance" filter?
Like if someone is talking about "white fragility" and being intolerant towards white people, or being xenophobic about American culture, would that be likely to result in them being flagged for intolerance also?
Asking because while I don't mind the concept, I find in practice most of the time platforms add these filters and rules as a way to enforce ideological consensus.
It's dreadfuly simple - Bluesky users can choose what content they want to see - including selecting feeds, algorithms, moderation services etc. This situation is intolerable to people who believe that their right-wing views must be forcefully shoved down users' feeds, because not liking and not wanting to see their shitty content is considered an attack on freedom of speech.
That's not true though. If many people or the mods flag a post, other people cannot see it without clicking - it's covered by a banner. I have a new user on bsky, I never touched any configuration knob and by default I can't see certain posts. Someone decided for me.
If I were truly able to decide what I see I would see every single post as a new user. Then I would have the optuon to opt in to lists, banning / hiding other users etc.
Instead, I'm forcefully opted-in to not seeing what someone else decided I shouldn't see from the start, and I must find the way to opt out.
Didn’t you just say you can click to see it? So you can see it.
It’s hardly any different than those placards they used to put over the swimsuit magazines in the checkout line at the grocery store. No one was stopping you from buying it and seeing all the titties you wanted.
What do you mean by ‘obscured’ here? Bluesky users can voluntarily sign up to blocklists (as could Twitter users before Melon broke the API, though they were never a first class feature there). But they’re not _mandatory_?
Like, if you want to consume tedious transphobic ‘jokes’ on bsky, you can. Personally, I’m kind of bored of their one joke, and opt not to.
Right-wingers are so reliably sore winners. X is still comfortably the dominant microblogging platform on the internet, Facebook and Youtube happily boost and feed right-wing content and concerns. Tiktok has been brought to heel. ATproto hasn't found a way to encode communism - just like activitypub could be used for Truth Social - the ATmosphere will turn right once the ecosystem is in anyway relevant politically or commercially. But you could always start quatrechan while we wait
My question was in good faith tbh; I see other protocols (Mastodon, nostr) not being really commercially relevant but being much more politically diverse than bsky. I was wondering why is that - is something inherent to the protocol (e.g. I heard that it's extremely hard to set up your "alternative bsky" if you don't have resources, unlike Mastodon instances, so you're not really incentivized to just do it and see how it goes) or is it just bad luck?
Hrm, I’d have said that Mastodon, if anything, was leftier than bsky (unless you count Trump’s mastodon instance, but as it doesn’t federate you probably shouldn’t). It would certainly have a larger hard-left representation. Nostr, being vaguely crypto-flavoured, is messier.
Given that Twitter has been taken over by a far-right lunatic, one might reasonably expect the alternatives to lean a bit left.
The left-leaning vibe is a historical accident reinforced by user-managed moderation.
Bluesky came at the right moment to pick up lots of people fleeing Twitter after Musk's overbearing edgelord enshittification of Twitter.
Now, Bluesky's robust moderation tools allow users to subscribe to user-curated block lists. Users are empowered to decide they don't want to hear certain viewpoints. You don't want to see cat videos? Subscribe to a block list.
Right wing folks mostly don't care to try Bluesky because they have Twitter, but those that do try don't get much traction because no one sees their posts. Trolling and rage-baiting become unsatisfying when you're talking to yourself.
Yes, AT proto is about making data available to the public via replication. There's no privacy at all, but it's useful for some things. Hacker News comments don't have any privacy either.
There's another protocol in the works that should be useful for syncing private data:
> "Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, we have been missing a digital village square where public debate can take place in (relative) safety."
The ironic thing is Twitter is actually the square of public debate and Bluesky is just a echo chamber just like Reddit. Just try having a debate on these platforms. You will literally get banned, your post deleted or muted.
I’m not entirely sure if believe a person that writes about “the USAID cuts, which I call a ‘Silicon Valley Genocide’ in my book.” about the specific reason they were banned from X, given how many anti capitalism, left, radical Islamic and even pro Hamas accounts happily exist on the platform.
Threatening violence? Yes you’ll get banned. Otherwise nobody cares.
You have to be pretty spicy if you are getting banned from Reddit, as opposed to being modded. In the later case, you can set up your own subreddit, surely?
>You have to be pretty spicy if you are getting banned from Reddit, as opposed to being modded.
Not really. You can be banned for stating that transgender people are not the gender they identify as. They consider it “promoting hate based on identity.”
I got banned from my local subreddit for saying “as an Asian we actually tend to like cars from this brand” in a politically charged post about a certain car brand. Didn’t seem very spicy to me. “If you support this brand you’re supporting Nazis” was allowed and upvoted, of course.
On the bright side that was the impetus for me to finally stop giving my valuable attention to that site.
I wasn't banned from the whole site but I definitely was perma-banned from the local subreddit. That's how reddit works. Moderators get to moderate as they see fit, and short of some egregious terms of service violations, reddit admins won't interfere.
I was also quickly banned from participating in my local sub. It is a shame that the local subs are the ones that are the most over moderated- they are effectively isolating those in the community that don't have an "acceptable" viewpoint on any given topic
> the local subs are the ones that are the most over moderated
The local subs are by nature ghost towns, and the first people to get them rolling will often establish some weird culture that will never be uprooted.
I disagree, though. The most over-moderated are any having to do with any product or service (especially particular websites or pieces of hardware or software), liberal-left subs, or subs related to any industries that are dominated by particular companies. This happens because companies make sure to control the modding of (what they consider) their own subs.
In the case of liberal-left subs, the Democratic Party has prioritized controlling all political discussion amongst the people whose votes it feels entitled to post-2016, when H. Clinton's campaign press released that it was assigning a budget of millions to "Correct the Record" anonymously online. In that year, the party apparatus was indistinguishable from Clinton's campaign organization, and those people continue to do the same thing except the budgets have gone way up. This was also when the Democrats and the CIA/FBI started to become mutual admiration societies (which I think has worn out to a certain extent after Gaza and ICE) but you can see how the personnel and tactics diffused over the past decade until their effects became overwhelming today.
Might be better to say that the local subs are the most organically over-moderated, but even then sometimes that first little clique that gets them rolling are actually connected in their local area, and engaging in the same kind of thoughtful, collaborative, profit-motivated manipulation as above.
He said from a subreddit, not the whole site. There is a much lower and more variable threshold for banning from subreddits. Its very believable. People get banned from subreddits for being subscribed to different subreddits. Hence the “echo chamber.”
Why in the world would you say this to a stranger about the account of a completely mundane event? I've seen people banned from subreddits for e.g. mentioning the wrong brand names, and even worse, been happy that they were banned because those brands were not the subject of the subreddit (and were a constant distraction because mentioning them was something provocative and easy to post if you didn't really know anything about the subject.)
And you think that "asian people like this brand of car" is something so obviously impossible to be banned for that you would denigrate a stranger with zero evidence, under your own name. I'm honestly shocked by people's bravery sometimes; if this is a professional account, people reading it who know you might think less of you (and will never mention this to you.)
It's also funny because the statement isn't even controversial and people still get insanely ass-mad about it.
Also consumer car buying by ethnicity is tracked data and billions of dollars in investment & marketing are allocated around this metric...It's an absolutely ridiculous thing for anyone to feel a certain way about being stated.
You do know that for a few years now Reddit has an automated system that checks every comment right after posting and will delete the comment, give you a warning and the next time ban your account without any chance to appeal, right? Not subreddit-level, but side-wide. And these filters are pretty aggressive.
Few years ago, I replied to a comment asking if a crime in a news story was punishable by death. I replied that yes, the law allowed the death penalty and linked the law in the state where the crime happened. (I also added a parenthetical that I oppose the death penalty.)
I got a two week ban for inciting violence.
I imagine some automod type of tool flagged my comment, no human could have been stupid enough to think I was inciting violence.
You're proposing a fiction that there is functionally any difference. Migrating a subreddit is a large community effort and rarely if ever happens over just one ban.
If you're banned from a subreddit for X, which famously happens for often the thinnest of reasonings, you're effectively out of the online community around X. For some subreddits this even has real-world implications. You don't have to be the least bit spicy to do this. Often you just have to have commented (at all) in a different subreddit that a mod doesn't like.
Happened to me, the mod did not like the fact that I had engaged with a sub that he does not politically agree on, It was a university centric sub that I got banned from. Could never take that site seriously, ever.
I've seen this in just about every online space for 40 years now, but it is particularly bad there. I was deeply involved in several subreddits up until about '09-'10 and it slowly dawned on me just how far off the reservation the average mod was. I didn't even have any moderation issues personally, just from seeing it happen to others and the way they would approach rules and their day-to-day.
I quit the site entirely and have not looked back, but as an outsider everything I still hear about reddit moderation doesn't make my impression any more favorable. Quite the opposite.
> You have to be pretty spicy if you are getting banned from Reddit
I was banned from Reddit for saying that a (well
recognised as terrorists) terrorist group should be destroyed. That is a fairly mainstream opinion.
Other people are banned from Reddit for disagreeing with trans ideology to the same extent as today's supreme court decision. The court decision isn't particularly surprising and neither is people saying the same thing on Reddit.
...As opposed to Twitter where I was banned for expressing an opinion that wasn't in line with the site owner's personal opinions. At least with Bluesky, you can opt out of their moderation.
Twitter is the eternal September. The other places populated by the few who were discerning enough to leave are just normal online communities like we used to have before they reached internet culture war scale.
Hosting CSAM material? What? I've never seen CSAM on Bluesky, but I have seen it generated by Grok on Twitter.
I've seen plenty of people cheer for murder on Twitter as well, both from the left and right. Cheering for the killing of a protester is no better than cheering for the killing of a federal agent.
I'm left wondering if maybe all the years I spend tinkering with Linux servers and self-hosted infrastructure are just about to pay off big time now that there is a massive move for governments and institutions to take control of their infrastructure... You still pretty much need a human to spin and maintain infrastructure, wire things securely, and monitor... Now I just need to wait until someone rebrands sysop into something cool sounding like Sovereign Re-orchestration Professional, or Reacquisition Specialist... Data Nationalisation Champion
Why not - eventually it will be The Year Of The Linux Desktop.
SDS, Sovereign Data Specialist ;)
> Sovereign Data Specialist
It immediately makes me think of sovereign citizens and I get twitchy.
Joking aside, there is a lot of contract work to help EU quasi-governative entities to move off US clouds. I have been on contract for the last 18 months to recreate some functionality of AWS on top of OVH for a client adjacent to the European Space Agency.
The catch is that being government contract you, the guy doing the actual work, are beneath three or four layers of companies and bureaucracy and you get over engineered yet somehow too vague specs and projects that take 6 months just to get approved. But hey, the pay is good, and it’s for one of the better causes.
My other EU client, a much smaller non-tech company for whom I host their servers, has recently wanted to know if we depend on any US services, to reduce their exposure.
I believe you can get decent work just by advertising yourself as an expert in migrating code and data out of the US.
That said, the job and economy situation is a big question mark and appetite to invest has lessened dramatically so YMMV
> That said, the job and economy situation is a big question mark and appetite to invest has lessened dramatically so YMMV
Could you elaborate perhaps a bit more on this on actually why the appetite for investment has lessened? I'd be curious to know more, thanks!
I am no economist nor work in sales so my opinion is worthless, but it’s both waiting to see where this AI nonsense leads us, the stock market being an absolute shitshow solely propped up by this AI nonsense while the rest of Europe is in a phase of stagflation, the geopolitical situation at home and with our crazy partner, plus companies readjusting after the end of ZIRP.
Fair to say investments and new projects are a bit harder to come by.
I do this at significant scale and you need a high tolerance for a lot of different negatives to last doing it for governments (and adjacent).
The only exception to this rule I would say is AWS GovCloud, which also might be one of the only chill teams to work at across Amazon. It turns out having "only one way to do it", a system proved through a rigorous vetting process and a thoroughly worked-through contracting process leads to a pretty fantastic work environment for practitioners.
Trying to reimplement that piecemeal is for tougher men than me though. I think I'd rather sit on hot nails.
Cloud repatriation engineer, infra sovereignty strategist. Are sysadmins back? Too early to tell imho.
https://xkcd.com/705/
You win. Cloud repatriation engineer.
Better job titles than any AI CEO could come up with!
Tim Berners Lee has Solid
I used to work for timbl's company Inrupt on Solid on the SDK team. Inrupt no longer appears to be doing solid (or at least it's very well hidden if it still exists).
AT Protocol achieved what Solid envisioned without the inane complexities of rdf and json-ld, which were the biggest learning blockers to people actually adopting Solid.
I like his vision. Can you recommend a pod? The UK based Solid Community ones (and others, apparently) are 'experimental'.
"To use this system, you must understand that we cannot make any guarantees regarding the security and privacy of data that you may store in a solidcommunity.net Solid pod, or concerning the system's functionality and availability."
So the "news" here is they're hosting their own PDS? I think that was the main point of Atmosphere and Bluesky was just a popular gateway to get people into it.
Unless I'm missing something else...
That's the plan, but to get to actual decentralization, one of the steps is for more people to actually move their PDS's somewhere other than Bluesky.
(They are not self-hosting; Eurosky is doing it.)
You won’t have decentralisation on Atproto because the protocol itself incentivises centralisation.
the only true centralized part is the did:plc registry and thats designed to be fully auditable. all canonical data is stored on your pds so if you self host that you get full control.
decentralization is not about the number of app instances but how easy it is to switch from one to another. on that metric bluesky is already better than fediverse.
That’s a very narrow definition of decentralisation. In any case - both atproto and fediverse are massively centralised compared to something like Nostr, and it’s not even close.
The fact that the PDS in practice owns your identity in the vast vast majority of cases is such a dumb trade off that it’s honestly laughable. Should Bluesky decide to splinter off of the network there would be like 50000 people left.
Stop telling people that it’s decentralised in any meaningful way and be honest about it instead. That’s the issue. The dishonesty and tricking users.
> The fact that the PDS in practice owns your identity
This is incorrect.
1. a PDS stores data, it does not own the identity.
2. Your identity is controlled by a DID, of which most users use DID:PLC.
3. This means the PLC directory controls who owns the identity.
4. Users can upload their own keys into the directory to ensure they have control.
5. At this point, the threat vector is "PLC directory lies", which is why there are transparency logs and independent mirrors.
There are two kinds of people.
1. People who have no idea what decentralized is.
2. People who would try to figure exactly how decentralized something is.
If you are the latter, you would instantly question the data model of Bluesky and of Mastodon as well. If you are the former then that just sounds like a buzzword.
But... if Waag are not self-hosting, and they're not, how likely is it that normal people will start doing so in relatively large numbers?
An important part of how this works is that you don't have to make that choice right away.
I've been meaning to move to my own PDS for a few months now. Still haven't. Whenever I decide to get around to it, it'll be fine.
I don't think that's the goal? If we got to the point where no service hosts the majority of accounts, that would be a pretty good milestone.
But ... they have a "Follow us on BlueSky" link that goes to bsky.app not esky.something?
Follows work independent of which app you're using, so it works either way. Not an issue.
(Think of it this way: "I am following <username>" is a record stored in my own database, so it doesn't matter which app I click the button on that writes that record.)
On atproto your PDS and the appview you use are not linked. Your data is stored on your PDS and available to any app that handled Bluesky records.
Ah, thanks for the explanation.
This is great. The entire idea of AT is that users can move their data for any reason. We want more of this.
But I do think it's always worth pushing back a bit on this idea:
> "The way Bluesky is funded is at odds with the idea of decentralisation because the platform relies on venture capital and operates under a shareholder model."
Large decentralized infrastructure like the internet, DNS, email, and the web was largely built by VC-backed companies.
The most important open source project, Linux, is funded by major tech companies through the Linux Foundation, with $311 million last year.
Corporate incentives do create conflicts, so it makes sense to be paranoid and skeptical. But the idea that companies can't contribute to open and decentralized systems is exactly the wrong lesson to learn.
We want more VC-backed startups working on open social networks and protocols. It would be great if many of them were in Europe.
>Large decentralized infrastructure like the internet, DNS, email, and the web was largely built by VC-backed companies.
The poor need the rich to start a company as banks are prevented (by the rich) from lending to them.
The rich like VC as it's a tax write-off, they invest in VCs and get even more richer.
Most startups fail, the VC's investors get any leftovers and poor founder walks off empty.
>What about when things go wrong?
In general, if you lose money on an investment, you can offset that “capital loss” against a capital gain you have from something else.
https://www.venturesouth.vc/write-offs
>The poor need the rich to start a company as banks are prevented (by the rich) from lending to them.
no. the banks hold the poor's money, and it needs to do so without risk because the poor need their money. lending money to start companies that are completly unsecured is too risky for banks, they lend money to buy houses which is secured debt.
Banks lend against homes as the state guarantees the housing market is too big to fail and will bail them out.
Banks often lend at low LTV ratios because the prices are inflated so people on normal salaries can't actually afford to put down a large deposit, which means a slight drop puts them into negative equity but the banks are not concerned as they are protected.
If the state chose to underwrite startups in the same way...
> the internet, DNS, email, and the web were largely built by VC-backed companies
Really ?
Yeah that raised my eyebrow as well. "Popularized" maybe, but "largely built" I think is a mis-characterization.
"Commercialized" is probably the word you want, and I'd agree with.
It turns out that commercialization is most of the work of creating a globally decentralized system. Which doesn't mean the non-commercial work wasn't critical.
There were famously government and university programs that played important early roles too. But it was largely people working for companies that actually built these systems.
What organizations do you think created the switches, routers, servers, software, fiber optic backbones? Who created the new protocols?
It was companies like AT&T/Bell Labs, Cisco, 3Com, Sun, UUNET, Netscape, AOL, the major telecoms, and a thousand other companies we don't remember.
Something like 1% inspiration from academia and government, and 99% perspiration by people working inside companies.
How many of those organizations you named were VC-backed?
Cisco, backed early by Sequoia.
3Com, raised $1.1M from three venture capitalists in 1981.
Sun, a Kleiner Perkins portfolio company.
UUNET, raised from Accel, Menlo, and NEA in 1993.
Netscape, backed by Kleiner Perkins.
AOL, backed by Kleiner Perkins.
I am sure that DARPA, BBN, USC Information Sciences Institute, and many others will be overjoyed to learn that they've been erased from history by the new narrative that Venture Capitalists Built Everything. (-:
BBN was a private company...
A private company doing DARPA-funded research.
Initially, yes, and then they became an important commercial internet service and backbone provider. They were quickly joined by a huge wave of other private companies, almost all VC-backed.
Honest question: Bluesky was touted as the next distributed, uncensorable, truly-free social network, but in practice I see all posts from right-of center users obscured, much more than old Twitter or, in practice, any other social network (look at the Babylon Bee account, which is a satirical website leaning to the right, censored to oblivion: https://bsky.app/profile/realbabylonbee.bsky.social). Will Eurosky be the same? If yes, why ATProto is "cool" if, in practice, the social networks built upon it are the most sectarian places on the Internet?
You might want to answer two questions before we start this discussion:
1. "Censored" by whom, and for whom?
2. "Censored" for which "right of center" views?
P.S. I should also mention that I can see the posts on that account, even if they all have flags for intolerance by the default moderation service (a service you can opt out of by the way).
"Censored" I mean "flagged", sure. In practice, they're all hidden from the casual user. But really, I'm interested on why ATProto was touted as revolutionary while in practice it powers a standalone heavily politically biased social network where moderators are extremely active flagging everything that's on the right. In that respect, Mastodon is more "revolutionary" - you handle your instance, you provide your moderation, you optionally integrate with other instances. Mastodon itself is used, in practice, to moderate a highly diverse ecosystem of social networks, from the gay-friendly ones to Gab. Nostr, although it's not so widely used, is even more tailored against sectarism by default.
From what I see, Bsky is a single instance of one of the most politically aligned social media in existence; in practice, you can achieve that with any proprietary implementation, you don't need ATProto. I honestly thought that the protocol was engineered to prevent an echo chamber, but in reality it powers an enormous standalone echo chamber that is not moving anywhere, so I was wondering what's the difference.
I'm not fully aware of the tech here, are those posts flagged as 'Intolerant' by bsky or by the protocol itself?
By Bluesky.
The protocol has a notion of moderation accounts, sometimes called "labelers" because they can apply labels to your account. Users generally [1] subscribe to the moderation that they want to see. They can then set those labels to make the application to "show", "warn" (collapse by default, click to expand), or "hide" based on the labels.
1: People using the bluesky app cannot unsubscribe from the bluesky moderation service, but that is a policy choice of the bluesky app, not a protocol level choice, other clients can do as they choose.
What you are describing is, bluntly, not happening.
Bluesky moderators take down abusive and harmful posts. There is a daily uproar on the left about how they do this to "kiwifarms but leftishly" behavior under the guise of being "anti-trans". If right-wing centered posts are getting taken down, it is because they are abusive and harmful.
Bluesky popularized subscriber lists, like blocklists. A large portion of the network mass-mutes or mass-blocks anyone on the big right-wing block lists. This is user behavior, not the platform censoring right wing people.
@phillipcarter: of course it's users (and mods) doing that, but in the end, if you open bsky today you see a single, huge, left-biased social media. If you look at Mastodon, you see at a lot left-leaning trans-and-furry-friendly instances, true, but you also see a bunch of right wing instances plus Gab. What happens with bsky today (single instance, echo chambered) is simply something I don't expect from a "distributed" social network. Why is that?
Gab doesn’t federate, so isn’t really part of the fediverse. They’re just using the software; they’re their own thing, not part of a distributed social network. One could make an atproto island that didn’t federate, I suppose, but it would be a lot of work for no obvious reason.
(There are a few other far-right mastodon instances, but then there are pockets of the far-right on bsky, too)
Isn't the answer kind of obvious - much more weight of the developers in comparison to the random people from open source community. Also timing: Mastodon and ActivityPub appeared in the tail end/transitional period when there was still some common public square mindset (at least among random people not radicalized in any way), and tech inclined people had protocols vs. centrally managed platforms in relatively fresh memory. So in the mid-2010s you'd get all sorts of people flocking to the promise of free internet.
When Bluesky was taking traction, the cultural expectation among its audience was already for the platform to heavily shape the narrative. Paradoxically, AFAIK the Bluesky devs themselves are pretty serious about it being an open standard, though I'm basing this on what I heard. So I mostly believe people that the echo chambering you mention is structured in a way that it's technically not centralized. Though in practice, it's way easier to amplify left wing messages on closed websites like YouTube, Facebook, X (I'm basing this on algorithmic recommendations I'm getting and experience of people I know) than the other way around on Bluesky. But this is just the weight distribution of the audience.
Even then non-left supervised Mastodon ecosystem is something of a deep cut. I mean you're right it exists and now I recall hearing about some drama years ago, but not a part of the front and center info about them, for any common person. So I'm not fully buying the contrast you're trying to build here.
"Why is that?"
Elon Musk took over Twitter and made it rabidly right-wing. As a result, a lot of left-wing people went to Blue Sky.
Social networks are just groups of people: if such a network starts with a core group that leans heavily on a particular end of the political spectrum, the network will also (even with zero bias from the network itself) lean that way.
They made a transphobic joke 3 times and the bluesky users that enabled their intolerance filter never saw it. What exactly is the problem? The posts weren't deleted. Nobody liked the joke because it's a bad joke.
I don't use bluesky, but out of interest is this "intolerance" filter effectively a political filter, or an actual "intolerance" filter?
Like if someone is talking about "white fragility" and being intolerant towards white people, or being xenophobic about American culture, would that be likely to result in them being flagged for intolerance also?
Asking because while I don't mind the concept, I find in practice most of the time platforms add these filters and rules as a way to enforce ideological consensus.
Maybe the only way to figure this out is to try being xenophobic about American culture on there and see if you get censored?
It's dreadfuly simple - Bluesky users can choose what content they want to see - including selecting feeds, algorithms, moderation services etc. This situation is intolerable to people who believe that their right-wing views must be forcefully shoved down users' feeds, because not liking and not wanting to see their shitty content is considered an attack on freedom of speech.
That's not true though. If many people or the mods flag a post, other people cannot see it without clicking - it's covered by a banner. I have a new user on bsky, I never touched any configuration knob and by default I can't see certain posts. Someone decided for me.
If I were truly able to decide what I see I would see every single post as a new user. Then I would have the optuon to opt in to lists, banning / hiding other users etc.
Instead, I'm forcefully opted-in to not seeing what someone else decided I shouldn't see from the start, and I must find the way to opt out.
Didn’t you just say you can click to see it? So you can see it.
It’s hardly any different than those placards they used to put over the swimsuit magazines in the checkout line at the grocery store. No one was stopping you from buying it and seeing all the titties you wanted.
What do you mean by ‘obscured’ here? Bluesky users can voluntarily sign up to blocklists (as could Twitter users before Melon broke the API, though they were never a first class feature there). But they’re not _mandatory_?
Like, if you want to consume tedious transphobic ‘jokes’ on bsky, you can. Personally, I’m kind of bored of their one joke, and opt not to.
'One' joke? It's a satirical website, even a cursory check shows that your tally is off base
Right-wingers are so reliably sore winners. X is still comfortably the dominant microblogging platform on the internet, Facebook and Youtube happily boost and feed right-wing content and concerns. Tiktok has been brought to heel. ATproto hasn't found a way to encode communism - just like activitypub could be used for Truth Social - the ATmosphere will turn right once the ecosystem is in anyway relevant politically or commercially. But you could always start quatrechan while we wait
My question was in good faith tbh; I see other protocols (Mastodon, nostr) not being really commercially relevant but being much more politically diverse than bsky. I was wondering why is that - is something inherent to the protocol (e.g. I heard that it's extremely hard to set up your "alternative bsky" if you don't have resources, unlike Mastodon instances, so you're not really incentivized to just do it and see how it goes) or is it just bad luck?
Hrm, I’d have said that Mastodon, if anything, was leftier than bsky (unless you count Trump’s mastodon instance, but as it doesn’t federate you probably shouldn’t). It would certainly have a larger hard-left representation. Nostr, being vaguely crypto-flavoured, is messier.
Given that Twitter has been taken over by a far-right lunatic, one might reasonably expect the alternatives to lean a bit left.
The left-leaning vibe is a historical accident reinforced by user-managed moderation.
Bluesky came at the right moment to pick up lots of people fleeing Twitter after Musk's overbearing edgelord enshittification of Twitter.
Now, Bluesky's robust moderation tools allow users to subscribe to user-curated block lists. Users are empowered to decide they don't want to hear certain viewpoints. You don't want to see cat videos? Subscribe to a block list.
Right wing folks mostly don't care to try Bluesky because they have Twitter, but those that do try don't get much traction because no one sees their posts. Trolling and rage-baiting become unsatisfying when you're talking to yourself.
And what does this do safety/privacy-wise?
Nothing, except make it more available.
This is why I often argue against (or at least want to point out the dangers of) the ATProto/Bluesky model.
It's an absolute boon for people who want heavy surveillance, government or otherwise.
The looseness and "unreliability" of protocols like Mastodon ironically make them safer.
Yes, AT proto is about making data available to the public via replication. There's no privacy at all, but it's useful for some things. Hacker News comments don't have any privacy either.
There's another protocol in the works that should be useful for syncing private data:
https://github.com/bluesky-social/proposals/pull/94
I am genuinely confused. Isn't the point of public social media to be... public? Or do you use BlueSky to talk to your friends, instead of Signal?
> "Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, we have been missing a digital village square where public debate can take place in (relative) safety."
The ironic thing is Twitter is actually the square of public debate and Bluesky is just a echo chamber just like Reddit. Just try having a debate on these platforms. You will literally get banned, your post deleted or muted.
Banned from Twitter for a 2-word response:
https://bsky.app/profile/gilduran.com/post/3mky5taqg3222
Plus news organizations are punished for including links in their content.
https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/04/do-links-hurt-news-publish...
I’m not entirely sure if believe a person that writes about “the USAID cuts, which I call a ‘Silicon Valley Genocide’ in my book.” about the specific reason they were banned from X, given how many anti capitalism, left, radical Islamic and even pro Hamas accounts happily exist on the platform.
Threatening violence? Yes you’ll get banned. Otherwise nobody cares.
You have to be pretty spicy if you are getting banned from Reddit, as opposed to being modded. In the later case, you can set up your own subreddit, surely?
>You have to be pretty spicy if you are getting banned from Reddit, as opposed to being modded.
Not really. You can be banned for stating that transgender people are not the gender they identify as. They consider it “promoting hate based on identity.”
Might you get banned on bluesky for saying that?
I don't mean banned from the site Reddit, I mean banned from subreddits. Go into /r/politics and post an opinion that not far left.
I got banned from my local subreddit for saying “as an Asian we actually tend to like cars from this brand” in a politically charged post about a certain car brand. Didn’t seem very spicy to me. “If you support this brand you’re supporting Nazis” was allowed and upvoted, of course.
On the bright side that was the impetus for me to finally stop giving my valuable attention to that site.
You almost certainly are lying and were not banned for saying that.
I wasn't banned from the whole site but I definitely was perma-banned from the local subreddit. That's how reddit works. Moderators get to moderate as they see fit, and short of some egregious terms of service violations, reddit admins won't interfere.
I was also quickly banned from participating in my local sub. It is a shame that the local subs are the ones that are the most over moderated- they are effectively isolating those in the community that don't have an "acceptable" viewpoint on any given topic
> the local subs are the ones that are the most over moderated
The local subs are by nature ghost towns, and the first people to get them rolling will often establish some weird culture that will never be uprooted.
I disagree, though. The most over-moderated are any having to do with any product or service (especially particular websites or pieces of hardware or software), liberal-left subs, or subs related to any industries that are dominated by particular companies. This happens because companies make sure to control the modding of (what they consider) their own subs.
In the case of liberal-left subs, the Democratic Party has prioritized controlling all political discussion amongst the people whose votes it feels entitled to post-2016, when H. Clinton's campaign press released that it was assigning a budget of millions to "Correct the Record" anonymously online. In that year, the party apparatus was indistinguishable from Clinton's campaign organization, and those people continue to do the same thing except the budgets have gone way up. This was also when the Democrats and the CIA/FBI started to become mutual admiration societies (which I think has worn out to a certain extent after Gaza and ICE) but you can see how the personnel and tactics diffused over the past decade until their effects became overwhelming today.
Might be better to say that the local subs are the most organically over-moderated, but even then sometimes that first little clique that gets them rolling are actually connected in their local area, and engaging in the same kind of thoughtful, collaborative, profit-motivated manipulation as above.
He said from a subreddit, not the whole site. There is a much lower and more variable threshold for banning from subreddits. Its very believable. People get banned from subreddits for being subscribed to different subreddits. Hence the “echo chamber.”
Why in the world would you say this to a stranger about the account of a completely mundane event? I've seen people banned from subreddits for e.g. mentioning the wrong brand names, and even worse, been happy that they were banned because those brands were not the subject of the subreddit (and were a constant distraction because mentioning them was something provocative and easy to post if you didn't really know anything about the subject.)
And you think that "asian people like this brand of car" is something so obviously impossible to be banned for that you would denigrate a stranger with zero evidence, under your own name. I'm honestly shocked by people's bravery sometimes; if this is a professional account, people reading it who know you might think less of you (and will never mention this to you.)
It's also funny because the statement isn't even controversial and people still get insanely ass-mad about it.
Also consumer car buying by ethnicity is tracked data and billions of dollars in investment & marketing are allocated around this metric...It's an absolutely ridiculous thing for anyone to feel a certain way about being stated.
You do know that for a few years now Reddit has an automated system that checks every comment right after posting and will delete the comment, give you a warning and the next time ban your account without any chance to appeal, right? Not subreddit-level, but side-wide. And these filters are pretty aggressive.
Not really.
Few years ago, I replied to a comment asking if a crime in a news story was punishable by death. I replied that yes, the law allowed the death penalty and linked the law in the state where the crime happened. (I also added a parenthetical that I oppose the death penalty.)
I got a two week ban for inciting violence.
I imagine some automod type of tool flagged my comment, no human could have been stupid enough to think I was inciting violence.
Yeah sometimes they ban for suggesting someone deserves the death penalty.
Meanwhile Luigi Mangione threads…
You really don't
You're proposing a fiction that there is functionally any difference. Migrating a subreddit is a large community effort and rarely if ever happens over just one ban.
If you're banned from a subreddit for X, which famously happens for often the thinnest of reasonings, you're effectively out of the online community around X. For some subreddits this even has real-world implications. You don't have to be the least bit spicy to do this. Often you just have to have commented (at all) in a different subreddit that a mod doesn't like.
Happened to me, the mod did not like the fact that I had engaged with a sub that he does not politically agree on, It was a university centric sub that I got banned from. Could never take that site seriously, ever.
I've seen this in just about every online space for 40 years now, but it is particularly bad there. I was deeply involved in several subreddits up until about '09-'10 and it slowly dawned on me just how far off the reservation the average mod was. I didn't even have any moderation issues personally, just from seeing it happen to others and the way they would approach rules and their day-to-day.
I quit the site entirely and have not looked back, but as an outsider everything I still hear about reddit moderation doesn't make my impression any more favorable. Quite the opposite.
> You have to be pretty spicy if you are getting banned from Reddit
I was banned from Reddit for saying that a (well recognised as terrorists) terrorist group should be destroyed. That is a fairly mainstream opinion.
Other people are banned from Reddit for disagreeing with trans ideology to the same extent as today's supreme court decision. The court decision isn't particularly surprising and neither is people saying the same thing on Reddit.
Hamas? Hezbollah?
...As opposed to Twitter where I was banned for expressing an opinion that wasn't in line with the site owner's personal opinions. At least with Bluesky, you can opt out of their moderation.
Did your opinion call for the use of violence ? That is a no go zone.
Twitter is the eternal September. The other places populated by the few who were discerning enough to leave are just normal online communities like we used to have before they reached internet culture war scale.
Twitter? The CSAM and Nazi propaganda app?
Bluesky is also where you had people cheering for the assassination of federal agents and hosting CSAM material ?
When I hear someone uses bluesky a lot, I cant help but feel suspicious of them
Hosting CSAM material? What? I've never seen CSAM on Bluesky, but I have seen it generated by Grok on Twitter.
I've seen plenty of people cheer for murder on Twitter as well, both from the left and right. Cheering for the killing of a protester is no better than cheering for the killing of a federal agent.