🦋 Bluesky Social

Taurus Shield will expand the scope of their responsibilities as a result.

The level of control Bluesky gives users with custom feeds is simply incredible. I could recreate the Mastodon newsfeed without any coding whatsoever.

! !

All I had to do was create a feed on Skyfeed that

• Inputs @aendra.com's list of verified news agencies (+ a couple of unofficial news accounts)
• sort using the HackerNews ranking algorithm

That's all I needed to do. Here is my tweaked version of this (no login necessary)..

I am Germany originated as a Twitter account in 2012, and has been going for 12 years. I am the latest curator and we're trying to see if we can revitalise the concept on Bluesky as well!

> Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has been interviewed in Pirate Wires by Mike Solana about social media and why he left the Bluesky social network site and the Bluesky company board. [Pirate Wires, archive] > > Solana works at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, so Pirate Wires is the sort of reactionary twaddle you would expect from such a background. The “culture” section, goodness me. > > Dorsey got Bluesky started, originally as the reference implementation for a distributed protocol to serve as a new backend for Twitter. He supplied a pile of cash and hired the original team. > > The thing that really upset Dorsey: Bluesky users demanded moderation and Bluesky put it into place. Yeah, that was the whole issue. > > ... > > Ordinary users who want to talk to their friends and make new friends don’t like wading through poop. A social network’s product is its content moderation. > > Dorsey took care to hire on for the Bluesky staff a collection of LessWrong rationalists, neoreactionaries, VibeCamp anti-wokeist race scientists and crypto developers. And Bluesky still had to asymptotically approach a tolerable degree of moderation and — eventually, despite the CEO and several devs being followers of the test case offender — ban the Nazis. > > There is not a single mention in that Dorsey interview of what the real-world market of people who want to socially interact might want from a site that exists for social interaction. There are only Dorsey’s hypothetical ideas for a perfectly spherical social network in a vacuum. > > Actual users have long just not wanted what Jack is selling here. > > ... > > The Pirate Wires interview talks a lot about uncensorable, truly decentralised protocols — but somehow fails at any point to mention Mastodon or ActivityPub. The network commonly called “Mastodon” or the “Fediverse” has a few large nodes, but it also has thousands of smaller and personal nodes and three independent major lines of software (Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey and their forks) implementing most of the shared protocol. You can just put up a server and join in. > > The Mastodon network has millions of users. Its structure makes it unlikely to replace Twitter for a user base in the billions — the decentralisation means that so much of it just isn’t and can’t be a smooth experience. > > But Mastodon is also unlikely to go away. It’s run by the sort of people who have opinions on Linux distributions. When Twitter and Bluesky suffered rolling overloads in 2023, Mastodon kept ticking along. True decentralisation is robust. > > Despite its genuine decentralisation, Mastodon has also implemented a server covenant that does a pretty good job of excluding the far-right extremists by a purely social process — if you keep horrible arseholes on your server, you’re liable to be shunned. [Mastodon] > > This has led to a “dark” Fediverse of sites that don’t go along with the covenant but still talk to each other. Gab is such a site, for example. > > If you want untrammelled free speech social networks, they’re right there, right now! > > For some reason, neither Pirate Wires nor Dorsey are interested in these existing real-world examples. > > This is because these guys only care about their assumed right to force people who aren’t interested to listen. “Free speech” is when they can say awful stuff and you can’t answer back. When Dorsey calls Twitter — Twitter! — “freedom technology,” that’s the freedom he means. They can’t live without unwilling ears to bash.

TLDR:

• DMs
• Video
• Improved custom feeds (including in-app feed creation!)
• Improved anti-harassment features
• OAuth

Good riddance.

You can opt into it by following @ap.brid.gy from Bluesky or @[email protected] from Mastodon/Plemora/Threads/Lemmy.

IFTAS is a non-profit that helps coordinate moderation decisions between Mastodon/Lemmy instances, and also provides moderation-as-a-service.

About IFTAS

I have been looking for some of this on the internet but I can't find any information about it.

Composable moderation will allow individual users to launch "moderation services" to flag posts that others can use to hide.

One excerpt I find concerning about this project: > The company is set up as a “public benefit corporation”, which basically means (in my non-US layman understanding) that it is a business and it’s meant to make profit, but that profit is not it’s only and main goal. It can and should have other, more noble goals that benefit the public, as the term implies, in this case: creating a protocol for decentralized social apps that everyone can build on. > > At the moment, they don’t have a clear plan on how the company is going to make money on the platform – the general idea is to build some extra paid services on top for users and developers. They said they don’t plan to ever add ads and they promise they won’t “enshittify” the service in future. In any case, they’re explicitly building the network to be resilient even in the unlikely scenario that they themselves “turn evil” in the future – the network is meant to be “billionaire-proof”, impossible to completely take over by one guy with too much money.

!A multi-panel comic. Two characters stand amidst a pile of rubble. One says, 'I think it's time to leave old social. This keeps happening. I have to start over again. I'm tired.' The two characters board a boat. Jay says, 'Don't worry! Better things are ahead at Bluesky!' They arrive to a beautiful, festive area that has buildings labeled News, Discover, Art, Science, and more. !A multi-panel comic. Jay says, 'At Bluesky, you choose what you want to see instead of being held to the whims of a blackbox algorithm. There are already tens of thousands of feeds! Anyone can make or subscribe to feeds!' A troll appears. Jay says, 'And for things you don't want to see, you can stack additional layers of moderation as easily as following a new account.' Poof! Fences go up and the troll disappears. Jay continues to describe Bluesky's open network. 'With Bluesky, everything is connected. Dock at any port — you can explore the entire network. And wherever you go, your whole network comes with you.' !A multi-panel comic. One character says, 'At Bluesky, I can customize my own experience and if I move, everything comes with me?!' Jay smiles and says, 'Yes, it's the last social account you'll ever have to create!' The two run across a bridge towards a magical mountainside. They say, 'Come on, let's go explore!'

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/11551248

> Reposted without article text