The Antisocial Network

[Mongrel]

Going in a direction that pisses off Dorsey but not many others was definitely a positive sign.

[Thad]

Masnick: Bluesky Is Building The Decentralized Social Media Jack Dorsey Wants, Even If He Doesn’t Realize It

I think he makes a convincing argument that what's put Dorsey off is that Bluesky's built both the protocol stack and the reference implementation, which was not the original plan but became necessary when Musk ruined Twitter.

To a certain extremely limited extent, Dorsey's actually wary about the same thing I am: that the entire point of Bluesky was supposed to be decentralization, and as of right now all they've done is build another centralized social media site.

Masnick's a lot more sympathetic and deferential to Dorsey than I would be -- he's worked with him, and in fact the reason Bluesky exists in the first place is that Dorsey read Masnick's "Protocols, Not Platforms" -- but as the headline implies, he's a lot more bullish on Bluesky's future and thinks Dorsey's missed the reality of the situation it's currently in and how much has had to change because of Musk taking over Twitter. On top of the obvious stuff Dorsey's wrong about.

But the interesting thing about where Bluesky has gone over the past year is that, now that it’s building both the protocol and the service layer, the team there is actually thinking deeply about how moderation can work effectively in such a world. How it can use this different structure to actually look for ways to minimize the very real harms that happen in internet communities, but without being as heavy handed and all controlling as a centralized service would be. Jack was trying to offload that because he didn’t like taking the blame for it, but that doesn’t mean the harms aren’t real. And some people do need to think about how to try to minimize them. And to do that in a way that still builds a platform people want to use without having to worry about all the details.

[Thad]

Masnick is joining the Bluesky board.

I think that's a positive development. I'm still skeptical of Bluesky as a protocol-based approach with only one site actually implementing it, but I'm hoping that changes and it becomes an actual distributed platform; of the various options, it seems to be the one that's moving in the right direction.

(I'm still enjoying Mastodon okay but I've read enough Black posters complaining about racism, and white techbro reply-guys responding that they don't see any racism and you must just be Mastodoning wrong, that I'm becoming a little disillusioned at its approach. Bluesky seems to understand the need for robust moderation tools -- that's the exact thing Dorsey quit over -- and Mastodon still seems to be struggling with that concept.)

[Mongrel]

It's honestly strange how Mastodon seemed to end up taken over by techbros considering the development of it initially seemed to be the most progressive among Twitter successors. I initially felt like my going to Bluesky was a lazy move because I didn't want to bother sorting out Mastodo's federated system. I guess in fairness to myself, it wasn't so much a choice as it was my friends choosing BSky and me going with them, but there wasn't any reason not to at least try Mastodon.

Bluesky is a bit odd in that compared to the other Twitter successors, its base is still on the small side. None of us know if the current actually-pretty-decent vibe will survive scaling up to a larger base, but the company seems to be positioning itself to try and do so. I mentioned the events with Bouie, and that seems to be a sign that they're definitely aware of the value of "anchor tenants" in setting the tone (and plain old celeb power attracting users).

[Thad]

It's honestly strange how Mastodon seemed to end up taken over by techbros considering the development of it initially seemed to be the most progressive among Twitter successors.

It's a bunch of FOSS devs and enthusiasts and IME it's pretty representative of that cohort -- lots of queer folks and furries, but also a lot of white, largely European reply-guys who believe they are experts on every topic and *of course* racism is bad but they're not seeing any so obviously if you think Mastodon has a racism problem you must be wrong, and why are you so obsessed with race in the first place?

There's diversity, but there are also a bunch of white guys (often self-described progressives) who think if they haven't experienced something personally, it must not be that important, and the way to equality is just not to talk about race, gender, etc. in the first place, blah blah meritocracy.

And I'm a brobdingnagian fan of not-for-profit FOSS projects on general principle, but one thing that commercial projects have going for them is an incentive to address things that their users are asking them to address, regardless of whether the devs personally find them interesting.

[Mongrel]

WSJ published an article on Twitter debt and the funniest shit is that the loans have gone so sour that they cut the acquisition team's total comp at Barclays bank by 40% as punishment and 25% of the bank's directors have now left as a direct consequence.

[Mongrel]

Meta has hired Dustin Carmack, a former adviser to DeSantis’s doomed presidential campaign and an ex–Project 2025 employee as their new director of public policy in the South.

[Mongrel]

With post-Twitter Brazil seemingly deciding to move to Bluesky, the user numbers are unlike anything that site's ever seen, and IMO it reflects pretty well on whoever's doing the backend stuff that there have been no visible service disruptions.

Average 96-hour period for Bluesky before last week, versus the most recent 96-hours:

13M likes -> 104.6M likes
1.4M follows -> 100.8M follows
1.3M reposts -> 11M reposts
26k new users -> 2.11M new users

[Grath]

My understanding is that some small peripheral things have fallen over (images were broken at one point during the height of Brazil's arrival, some of the third-party feeds and things that have been hooked up to the Raw Firehose Of Data have been unable to cope with that 10-100x increase in activity.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, I've heard there were tiny things, but like, those are nightmare numbers for a site admin. By and large everything is perfectly fine. Maybe they had infrastructure set up for a large influx out sheer optimism? Who knows? I mean, I doubt anyone would have predicted the Twitter vs Brazil spat, but it seems reasonable to still be working on the assumption that Twitter could go completely belly-up at any time.

A little cheeky, but they also reposted Mastodon's proud declaration of having signed up over 4200 (wow!) new users.

(which incidentally answered my question about if there was significant division in the Great Brazilian Migration of 2024. People who end up on Threads can of course be discounted entirely, lol)

[Mongrel]

I don't want to overpromote Bluesky, but good work deserves credit: A wave of British TERFs and other transphobes have been showing up on the site and the grassroots solidarity in trolling them combined with strong and unambiguous moderation has left the TERFs very loudly whinging and leaving in a huff, and honestly that's how you do it.

[Mongrel]

A paper out of New York University on social media finds "0.1% of users shared 80% of fake news," and "74% of all online conflicts are started in just 1% of communities"



"The internet was a mistake" is a solvable problem.

[Friday]

This reminds me of the whole "destroying ki**fa*** won't stop them, they'll just gather somewhere else" that people believe. It turns out that blowing up gathering spaces for fascists and psychos actually does work.

Tl;dr: moderation to remove bad actors and the places where bad actors gather is effective and always has been

[sei]

FML, I read that censorship as "kike faggots" instead of the New Zealand Ranches. Thanks, world.

I'm kinda surprised cloudflare dumped NZR while keeping stormfront.org.

[Thad]

I'm kinda surprised cloudflare dumped NZR while keeping stormfront.org.

I thought they'd kicked Stormfront off years earlier, but I guess I was thinking of the Daily Stormer.

[Mongrel]

FML, I read that censorship as "kike faggots" instead of the New Zealand Ranches. Thanks, world.

FWIW, that was my read too. I was like, "That can't be right, but for the life of me I'm not sure what she's referring to." it didn't click at all until you mentioned agriculture.

This is not a criticism of you or your post, Friday, just one of those funny things when you're deciphering **************