Bluesky: Moderation in a Public Commons

The tooling we’re building for moderation tries to take into consideration how social spaces are formed and shaped through communities.

Today, we’re publishing some proposals for new moderation and safety tooling. The first focuses on user lists and reply controls which can be used for community-driven moderation. The second will focus on moderator services and how they can handle problems that small communities can’t. The third is for Hashtags, which are not directly related to moderation but can have a large effect on customizing what you see. (We wanted to include this to distinguish between the labeling proposal, which is intended to address moderation, and mechanisms for discovery.)

The goal of Bluesky is to rebuild social networking so that there’s not a lock-in to the founding company, which is us. We can try to provide a cohesive, enjoyable experience, but there’s always an exit. Users can move their accounts to other providers. Developers can run their own connected infrastructure. Creators can keep access to their audiences. We hope this helps break the cycle of social media companies coming into conflict with the open web.

The post goes on and is all good reading.