This reminds me of when some NFTs were stolen and OpenSea delisted them. Like yeah, they still exist out there on the blockchain, but when a central authority can gatekeep peoples' ability to view them, how decentralized are they actually?
Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good essay [1] about "Web3" that highlighted a few of these kinds of issues, and I think it applies to anything like Bluesky claiming to be "decentralized" when it's prohibitively difficult to access it any way other than the biggest central service.
This is like grasping at a boogeyman web3 straw to make a point.
Concretely, Bluesky has an AppView that takes posts from relays and PDSes, subscribes to moderation labelers, filters posts that have labels which have certain labels, then displays them in the browser. Blacksky is the first independent implementation of relays and other large components of the system.
The default Bluesky AppView subscribes to the Bluesky Moderation labeler which cannot be disabled. No independent AppView has been made which can turn off the Bluesky Moderation labeler. That's all.
I have my concerns over the network, namely DAUs decreasing and community politics, but the tech is largely a matter of time I feel. It's true that the ActivityPub ecosystem has a lot more federation happening but ActivityPub is a much older system (which itself derives from OStatus which originated in 2012-ish.) Mastodon was released in 2016. It's bound to be more federated than Bluesky.
This just reads like not a response to the problem, but instead a description of technical implementations.
Concretely, nobody is going to subscribe to anything else in bsky but the default stack, anything else is unlikely to ever gain much adoption, and thus federation is basically meaningless and a technical implementation detail for how they wanted to manage their stuff.
Moderation labels are applied at the client level, not at appview level. Forks of the official client (e.g. deer.social) allow you to completely remove the official moderation labeller.
There are plenty of criticisms of Web3, but this doesn't seems like a particularly valid one. What could the people who designed the relevant blockchains and smart contracts have done differently to prevent one marketplace from becoming dominant?
Nothing. That's the point. This wasn't a contingent outcome; it was inevitable due to the nature of the difficulty of accessing it for anyone except the nerdiest 0.1% of the population. So any mass adoption by its nature tends towards a centralized popular method of accessing it.
It undermines the value of decentralization itself given intermediaries tend to pop up in all of these various platforms and become the dominant way to use them.
I much prefer Bluesky to X but have had a hunch this was coming due to everything I've read about the practicality of running a Bluesky protocol service.
I still think there's room for something better technically. Mastodon seems more true to the decentralized ethos but I've never quite gotten used to the server dependency experience.
Nostr appeals to me technically but every time I'm on it seems swamped completely by discussion of cryptocurrency.
I guess to me it feels like one of these catch 22 (necessary but not sufficient?) problems where you have to have the right technical base for a platform, which seems doable, but even then you have to have the right userbase also.
It always comes back to the userbase. I don't know how many times technologists need to learn the lesson that normal people simply don't care about ideological technical principles like decentralization and often actually prefer the benefits of centralized systems like ease of use and typically stronger moderation. And when it comes to social media, businesses are naturally going to end up prioritizing the desires of the majority of their userbase.
> It always comes back to the userbase. I don't know how many times technologists need to learn the lesson that normal people simply don't care about ideological technical principles like decentralization and often actually prefer the benefits of centralized systems like ease of use and typically stronger moderation.
The choice need not be limited to the familiar corporate hellscape vs decentralized usability nightmare dichotomy. Middle grounds can exist if we want them to.
I've seen a lot of general support for the criticisms and concepts described in this article:
> Mastodon seems more true to the decentralized ethos
I'm not sure that's true. It's important to note that these bans are from the Bluesky App View (one component of the infra), and that these users can continue to post under their identity (if they own it, which they can), and users on App Views that haven't banned these users could continue to follow them.
None of that works with Mastodon. An admin bans you from the instance, and you can no longer post, use your identity, interact on the platform, etc. You have to start from scratch.
In short, Mastodon reduces the blast radius, but the "blast" is the same as on any private platform. Bluesky/AT Proto changes the impact to a different, strictly lesser type.
It would be strictly lesser if there were a significant free choice of App Views. BlackSky doesn't have one. NorthSky doesn't have one. You can currently be a BlackSky user, but if BlueSky bans you, your posts become invisible.
ActivityPub's lack of portable identity is a pretty serious problem, but the fact that significant portions of ATProto still rely on centralized infrastructure with no credible path to decentralization is pretty clearly worse[1].
[1] There are only two credible relays, and only one credible app view, and building/running either requires hundreds of times more capital than spinning up a Mastodon instance.
That is true, but due to the smaller size and larger number of instances, it's easier to find a place where you won't get randomly banned without an admin taking the time to talk to you about what's wrong. My instance has about 1K active people on it and I've always been able to have a dialogue with the moderators and sysop. When things have gone wrong I had the opportunity to correct them.
I think there's a great value to the "small community" ethos that the fediverse supports much better than bluesky.
> I still think there's room for something better technically. Mastodon seems more true to the decentralized ethos but I've never quite gotten used to the server dependency experience.
There's more servers on Mastodon, yes, so in that way it is decentralized more. But as a user, I have a lot more sovereignty over my data on Bluesky than I get having my account on a Mastodon / fediverse. I can set up my own PDS quite easily, or move to another, or back to BlueSky hosting very easy. I appreciate this decentralization a lot.
And I have a much better chance of being able to analyze system behavior, understand propoganda networks on atproto/bluesky. Mastodon servers heavily discourage trying to view & understand the network, but Bluesky really lets everyday folks run and analyze the whole firehose, very very cheaply. Which is an incredible decentralization, a very powerful syndication that it's protocols enable, that's simply unmatched. Still, research is being done on both networks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45507566
Seems like the hard truth is all these alternate platforms that offer their technology as the reason to get on it ... it's just not a great selling point for someone who wants to post "woah watch out driving tonight, it's slippery out there" or cat pics. I think that's a lot of users.
The content of the posts and some level of moderation is the selling point.
Personally that's kinda a bummer, because IMO my biggest disappointment is that its just Twitter but little different. Same pithy posts and petty bickering:(
You know what they say, when you're explaining that you don't really wish death upon the CEO of the niche social network platform on which you depend, you're losing.
That’s a good observation about position. For those curious, the original (and arguably representative) Bluesky user said:
> “I want to be extremely clear I was not making a death threat or inciting violence,” he told me, saying that he had sent 12 separate examples of other people posting the same Kirk image as a reaction meme. “I don’t wish death on Jay, I wish for her and her team to grow a conscience. I disagree with the decision and how it was handled. My account was taken down without any explanation for almost a full day in what can only be viewed as a retroactive ban.”
Still the whole premise of blue sky being decentralized was that when one server bans you you could pop over to another community that doesn't consider memes a death threat, so this is a good test of how centralized bluesky remains (very)
That part actually still works, it's just that BlueSky imposes a moderation list that can't be disabled (which to me is the problem) in their aggregator. In theory this is fine because you can run your own with different rules but alternative communities don't. It seems very unlike BlueSky's general "you can turn off content filters" ethos to do this, I wonder why they don't just have everyone default subscribed to their list.
I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them.
The format is the problem. The medium is the problem. Poorly moderated groups of anonymous people voidscreaming as some “this will be monetized once we hit critical mass” exercise is the problem.
I believe that eventually people will sort ourselves out into the masses who never really understand or accept that, and those of us who choose not to subject ourselves to something so obviously poisonous.
100% it doesn't make any sense to expect different behavior out of the same format just because you make slightly different promises about what the rules will be
Bluesky has been drama central since the beginning, consisting mostly of people who thought Twitter wasn't censoring enough (or censoring the wrong people), the free speech crowd came later and, well, tested the waters and found transphobic speech was in fact not free, and that despite distributed promises, the town wasn't big enough for the two parties to coexist
Sure there's bad uses, but putting yourself out there, on the public record, and cherishing those others around us doing the same is, in my view, divine.
I can't imagine the mindset that wouldn't want to be capturing some of the amazing wonderful world about them & the thoughts in their head & sharing them with others. I find these views about walking away from putting yourself online, seeing only the harm, as being deeply nihilistic & running away from clear amazing basically spiritual human value.
>I’d argue that people lose the moment they sign up for an account, deluding themselves into believing that the problem with the last nth iteration of the same thing isn’t them.
> However, as time has gone by, Bluesky’s traffic has declined (X’s has as well) and some of its users have become increasingly upset at its moderation decisions, including allowing U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and anti-trans writer Jesse Singal to remain as users of the platform.
So the expectation is that the vice president of the United States should be banned because he says stuff people don't like? What's the benefit of ignoring reality like this? He's not going to magically disappear if Bluesky bans him - indeed he'll remain VP with all the power that entails.
This is worse than performative activism, it's like some kind of political denialism. You can't change reality by pretending it doesn't exist.
I don’t use bluesky and was never really on Twitter that much if at all but does bluesky not have an ignore feature? If you don’t want to hear from Vance can you not just “ignore” / “unfollow” them? Seems like a pretty basic feature of a communication platform… I think even fark.com allows users to ignore other user’s comments.
What is this for kind of logic. So if you have a store, and you happen to have a client that smashes someone else's head in your shop, then that means in your logic that you as a shop owner are guilty of violence.
But I guess you say you should know the reputation of every person coming into your shop, and if their reputation is deemed inappriopriate by a certain group, they should not be allowed into the shop to prevent them from harassing any other customers.
But how are you gonna regulate that? Who is gonna decide who is inappropriate and who isn't?
I think we already have a fairly well organized system for that: law & order. If someone breaks laws, they are punished for it. So if someone is violent, whether it's inside or outside a shop, they can be punished for it.
And you as a shop owner don't have to also individually take the effort to investigate and punish the individual. Although if you want to you have the freedom to; it's your shop in the end.
Speech is not violence, guilt by association is undemocratic, and this hypothesis of de-platforming as a tactic to limit uncouth ideas was thoroughly tested over the last ~15 years and demonstrably shown to be false: Trump, Alex Jones, and many others were banned across platforms. One of these people now sits in the White House, in part because of backlash to the deplatforming of him and others with similar politics.
All social media moderation is "banning people for saying stuff people don't like". Most people don't like e.g. spam, or death threats, or racism, so social media offer communication platforms where those kinds of speech are restricted, with varying degrees of effort and success. The goal of banning Vance would be to have a social media site that moderates against the kinds of things Vance says.
This makes some sense if Vance was a minor, fringe figure. But he was on a ticket voted for by ~50% of US voters. This is effectively saying that the goal is to have a social media site where half the country is not welcome.
The problem with that is two-fold. One, it neuters any political impact - you're effectively driving away the very voters you need to convince. And two, it creates an echo chamber that distorts reality because everywhere you look people are agreeing with you. Then 2028 rolls around and you're shocked that "the bad guys" won again.
I definitely have my concerns over the decreasing DAUs on the platform and the crabby, toxic community that has come to really define Bluesky these days but I don't think the tech is the problem. For folks who keep pointing at Mastodon, remember that ActivityPub's predecessor OStatus originates from 2012 and Mastodon itself was kicked off in 2016. Mastodon is 9 years old at this point. Bluesky is only a few years old.
In AP land, for better or for worse microblogging is dominated by the ad-hoc set of standards that Mastodon pioneered, and too much of the community just treats AP as "HTTP+REST JSON APIs for social" and ignores the semantic components that AP can use to interoperate.
Yeah. I’m not a big short form social media person, so a world with or without Bluesky (or Twitter) changes little. Bluesky has good people and communities within it, but a lot of the people on it are just a mirror reflection of the American Right. Devoid of critical thinking, they follow whatever the left cause of the day is.
While that’s much preferable to Twitter in 2025 (and the right)… it’s not encouraging as for the future of, frankly everything.
Aheming about "the right" aside... there exists people across the political spectrum that think the way they do because of a variety of reasons. Some because they read the literature and arrived at the conclusion, some because that is the economically or socially advantage position to be in, and some because that is just their political position tautologically.
I do wish there was a community that encouraged thoughtful positivity over negativity (granted I would not "ban" it) and some level of limited posting ... or something like that.
It's a pipe dream I know, but on the surface social media could be really cool.
There is, it's almost every successful advertisement-driven social media site. Youtube, reddit, facebook, etc. have all adapted to remove negative and controversial comments and leave positive/advertiser-friendly comments.
> I do wish there was a community that encouraged thoughtful positivity over negativity
Yeah, it's called the real world. We have millions if not billions of years of experience in dealing with in-person differences, tentative contacts with members of neighbouring tribes and smoothing out conflicts. One will find the risk of getting smacked over the face for being an absolute idiot to be a very effective motivator to remain on our best behaviour with strangers.
On the internet these days, you can only choose between an echo chamber, or all-out culture war.
I think the core Bluesky team has been discussing ways to limit toxicity so I definitely think this is on their radar. Substack also leans into the idea that their platform manages social media toxicity better than other platforms, at least in their marketing copy. I think in 2025+ toxicity is a major dimension to evaluate social platforms on.
This is the culture we have tried to foster over at Discuit (small open source feed-style social media site).
Granted, we had a huge Imgur user migration, so that's the current flavor of the content, but the OG userbase was aiming for a culture that is perfectly defined by "thoughtful positivity."
> While the ATProto system has been criticized as overly complicated compared to the ActivityPub system that powers the Fediverse, it has one key feature that ActivityPub lacks: the ability to transfer servers while keeping all of your followers and posts.
FWIW, it looks like Mastodon software has some features for moving servers, including bringing your followers, but not your posts:
My understanding is Mastodon requires the server to be complicit with the transfer (online and redirecting requests to the new destination). If your host server is offline or not willing to migrate your data, you can't move.
In the AT protocol, your identity isn't tied to a server. You don't need the older server's consent or support to have a new identity somewhere else.
> In the AT protocol, your identity isn't tied to a server.
It kinda is. Your identity is in the hands of whoever controls the PLC Directory. You can argue this is better than having your account and identity on the same place, but it still a third party that you depends on.
I know, that's a terrible image, and I should be the last person suggesting such an image.
I was mentioning one use case that's a showstopper that much of HN would appreciate, and which forces a lot of the people who attract other people to be on the proprietary platforms.
Of course a risk of making Fediverse become more popular is ruining it for those people who want very small-neighborhood community. And who don't mind that, on any given topic, they're basically stuck with the handful of people who happened to be there, not those who would be most interested.
I'd still like to make Fediverse more welcoming to more people, to get more people on it.
I have an optimistic belief that a more popular Fediverse could be better than any of the commercial alternatives. Though it would become more like them in some ways, as it grows.
>But HN members who aren't mass-marketing could change that, by moving to the Fediverse -- giving it their endorsement, and network effects.
Why? Why should HN members, or anyone else, move to another network with the same kinds of fragmentation and mutual mass bannings (and/or demands for mass bannings) that we are talking about here with Bluesky? See, for example, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>
The irony of that example is that it is not the same as BlueSky here. There were huge parts of the FediVerse entirely untouched by what happened at Mastodon.LOL .
The only major decentralized forms of social media that I'm aware of that have confronted philosophical questions of how handle moderation have been Mastodon, Bluesky, and arguably Lemmy.
I don't know of any sense in which Mastodon has increased centralization, I think its blocking tools have been distributed essentially since the beginning, not something that has iterated toward centralization over time in response to an unfolding debate. Although it does have a complicated history and as possible that new things have happened I'm not aware of.
BlueSky though, to your point, is a good example of centralization not being reliable in terms of not being accountable to users. Or for a different way of saying the same thing, the lack of accountability has served to reveal how centralized it truly is.
It does seem to be simple enough that people don't get confused about using it, but it doesn't seem to walk the actual walk of decentralization.
The big example that comes to my mind is Matrix, where most homeservers use Mjolnir to apply centralized public blocklists of other servers/people they don't like.
So if for example #archlinux disagrees with your opinion and they decide to ban you for it, you are now banned from many other unrelated channels.
I have also seen subreddits that auto-ban users that have ever posted in specific other (unrelated) subreddits.
ML could potentially provide a decentralized mechanism for filtering unwanted content, or even hybrid approaches. IMO the worst of content filtering (gore or other psychologically disturbing content) will soon be an automated job.
It already is and has been for a long time. The kinds of content you have to moderate are not things anyone wants to look at. The worst ones are far worse than you can imagine and the average ones are nudes of people you don't want to look at all day.
This is actually today's controversy on Bluesky because the #1 attribute of its power users is they're terrified of "AI" and the idea that "companies will steal their posts to generate AI slop", which means they think the ML moderation is stealing their posts.
Oh, but the ML can't be decentralized because the training datasets are illegal.
Centralization eventually ends up with a single entity in charge of everything, which eventually does (or doesn't do) something that causes it's value to collapse.
The real solution here is federalization: A bunch of independent self-govening entities that co-operate with other entities to assist each other in moderation.
A good non-social network example here would be adblockers.
- Each adblocker uses at least one ad tracking list, with most adblockers allowing for multiple lists to be used and a sensible default for their own users to use.
- Each list has it's own moderators that add/update/remove entries on their list based on their own values.
- Adblockers (and their users) can collaborate on requesting changes to lists, resulting in faster reactions to advertising changes on the web, and in turn faster updates passed down to users of those adblockers who participate.
- If an adblocker can't do their job anymore (e.g. their owners/workers can't do their job anymore, the owner sells out, etc...) users can switch to (or create) a new adblocker.
- If a list fails, adblockers can switch to other lists (or create a new one).
No adblocker and no list holds all the power. Adblocking as a whole is strengthened by always having viable alternatives that can be switched to, and methods to quickly create new alternatives if the need arises.
That's the power of federation: the strengths of centralization without the weaknesses.
The social media version of a federated twitter is mastodon. A whole bunch of groups running their own mastodon servers that can interact with each-other as if they were a centralized mastodon website, with similarly aligned servers sharing co-operatively maintained bad-actor lists.
Old internet was most decentralized but since the platforms weren't scaling up to ridiculous heights moderation wasn't that big of a deal. It was also "gatekept" in a self-selecting way; now, everyone is online. Conspiracy beliefs have drastically shot up in adoption, through social media exposure.
People always had irrational populist and conspiratorial beliefs, but that was mediated by popular media generally not platforming kooks. Now you have the top 10 podcasts allowing people to mainline validation for conspiracies.
I don't see how centralization helps. Allowing (or demanding) that a media provider to regulate more could lead to less platforming for conspiracy theorists and populists.
Readit News
Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good essay [1] about "Web3" that highlighted a few of these kinds of issues, and I think it applies to anything like Bluesky claiming to be "decentralized" when it's prohibitively difficult to access it any way other than the biggest central service.
1: https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
Concretely, Bluesky has an AppView that takes posts from relays and PDSes, subscribes to moderation labelers, filters posts that have labels which have certain labels, then displays them in the browser. Blacksky is the first independent implementation of relays and other large components of the system.
The default Bluesky AppView subscribes to the Bluesky Moderation labeler which cannot be disabled. No independent AppView has been made which can turn off the Bluesky Moderation labeler. That's all.
I have my concerns over the network, namely DAUs decreasing and community politics, but the tech is largely a matter of time I feel. It's true that the ActivityPub ecosystem has a lot more federation happening but ActivityPub is a much older system (which itself derives from OStatus which originated in 2012-ish.) Mastodon was released in 2016. It's bound to be more federated than Bluesky.
Concretely, nobody is going to subscribe to anything else in bsky but the default stack, anything else is unlikely to ever gain much adoption, and thus federation is basically meaningless and a technical implementation detail for how they wanted to manage their stuff.
It is a serious concern for cryptocurrency that most users don't even get the touted benefits because of reliance on exchanges.
I still think there's room for something better technically. Mastodon seems more true to the decentralized ethos but I've never quite gotten used to the server dependency experience.
Nostr appeals to me technically but every time I'm on it seems swamped completely by discussion of cryptocurrency.
I guess to me it feels like one of these catch 22 (necessary but not sufficient?) problems where you have to have the right technical base for a platform, which seems doable, but even then you have to have the right userbase also.
The choice need not be limited to the familiar corporate hellscape vs decentralized usability nightmare dichotomy. Middle grounds can exist if we want them to.
I've seen a lot of general support for the criticisms and concepts described in this article:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
Anyone who builds what they describe there can expect it to take off faster than ever.
And for social media that isn't their userbase.
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I'm not sure that's true. It's important to note that these bans are from the Bluesky App View (one component of the infra), and that these users can continue to post under their identity (if they own it, which they can), and users on App Views that haven't banned these users could continue to follow them.
None of that works with Mastodon. An admin bans you from the instance, and you can no longer post, use your identity, interact on the platform, etc. You have to start from scratch.
In short, Mastodon reduces the blast radius, but the "blast" is the same as on any private platform. Bluesky/AT Proto changes the impact to a different, strictly lesser type.
ActivityPub's lack of portable identity is a pretty serious problem, but the fact that significant portions of ATProto still rely on centralized infrastructure with no credible path to decentralization is pretty clearly worse[1].
[1] There are only two credible relays, and only one credible app view, and building/running either requires hundreds of times more capital than spinning up a Mastodon instance.
I think there's a great value to the "small community" ethos that the fediverse supports much better than bluesky.
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There's more servers on Mastodon, yes, so in that way it is decentralized more. But as a user, I have a lot more sovereignty over my data on Bluesky than I get having my account on a Mastodon / fediverse. I can set up my own PDS quite easily, or move to another, or back to BlueSky hosting very easy. I appreciate this decentralization a lot.
And I have a much better chance of being able to analyze system behavior, understand propoganda networks on atproto/bluesky. Mastodon servers heavily discourage trying to view & understand the network, but Bluesky really lets everyday folks run and analyze the whole firehose, very very cheaply. Which is an incredible decentralization, a very powerful syndication that it's protocols enable, that's simply unmatched. Still, research is being done on both networks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45507566
The content of the posts and some level of moderation is the selling point.
Personally that's kinda a bummer, because IMO my biggest disappointment is that its just Twitter but little different. Same pithy posts and petty bickering:(
> “I want to be extremely clear I was not making a death threat or inciting violence,” he told me, saying that he had sent 12 separate examples of other people posting the same Kirk image as a reaction meme. “I don’t wish death on Jay, I wish for her and her team to grow a conscience. I disagree with the decision and how it was handled. My account was taken down without any explanation for almost a full day in what can only be viewed as a retroactive ban.”
The email, verbatim read:
> A reply with an image; alt text reads:
> 'Charlie Kirk sitting in a white T-shirt that says "Freedom." A negative consequence follows!
[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/aliafonzy.blacksky.app/post/3m2jm7u...
The format is the problem. The medium is the problem. Poorly moderated groups of anonymous people voidscreaming as some “this will be monetized once we hit critical mass” exercise is the problem.
I believe that eventually people will sort ourselves out into the masses who never really understand or accept that, and those of us who choose not to subject ourselves to something so obviously poisonous.
Bluesky has been drama central since the beginning, consisting mostly of people who thought Twitter wasn't censoring enough (or censoring the wrong people), the free speech crowd came later and, well, tested the waters and found transphobic speech was in fact not free, and that despite distributed promises, the town wasn't big enough for the two parties to coexist
I can't imagine the mindset that wouldn't want to be capturing some of the amazing wonderful world about them & the thoughts in their head & sharing them with others. I find these views about walking away from putting yourself online, seeing only the harm, as being deeply nihilistic & running away from clear amazing basically spiritual human value.
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Indeed. As you said, it's the people, not the technical details of the "protocol" or "platform". My "favorite" Mastadon example: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>
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So the expectation is that the vice president of the United States should be banned because he says stuff people don't like? What's the benefit of ignoring reality like this? He's not going to magically disappear if Bluesky bans him - indeed he'll remain VP with all the power that entails.
This is worse than performative activism, it's like some kind of political denialism. You can't change reality by pretending it doesn't exist.
But I guess you say you should know the reputation of every person coming into your shop, and if their reputation is deemed inappriopriate by a certain group, they should not be allowed into the shop to prevent them from harassing any other customers.
But how are you gonna regulate that? Who is gonna decide who is inappropriate and who isn't?
I think we already have a fairly well organized system for that: law & order. If someone breaks laws, they are punished for it. So if someone is violent, whether it's inside or outside a shop, they can be punished for it.
And you as a shop owner don't have to also individually take the effort to investigate and punish the individual. Although if you want to you have the freedom to; it's your shop in the end.
Decreasing the reach of his propaganda. And reality isn't ignored since posts about him and his words/actions aren't removed
The problem with that is two-fold. One, it neuters any political impact - you're effectively driving away the very voters you need to convince. And two, it creates an echo chamber that distorts reality because everywhere you look people are agreeing with you. Then 2028 rolls around and you're shocked that "the bad guys" won again.
In AP land, for better or for worse microblogging is dominated by the ad-hoc set of standards that Mastodon pioneered, and too much of the community just treats AP as "HTTP+REST JSON APIs for social" and ignores the semantic components that AP can use to interoperate.
While that’s much preferable to Twitter in 2025 (and the right)… it’s not encouraging as for the future of, frankly everything.
It's a pipe dream I know, but on the surface social media could be really cool.
Yeah, it's called the real world. We have millions if not billions of years of experience in dealing with in-person differences, tentative contacts with members of neighbouring tribes and smoothing out conflicts. One will find the risk of getting smacked over the face for being an absolute idiot to be a very effective motivator to remain on our best behaviour with strangers.
On the internet these days, you can only choose between an echo chamber, or all-out culture war.
Granted, we had a huge Imgur user migration, so that's the current flavor of the content, but the OG userbase was aiming for a culture that is perfectly defined by "thoughtful positivity."
FWIW, it looks like Mastodon software has some features for moving servers, including bringing your followers, but not your posts:
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
In the AT protocol, your identity isn't tied to a server. You don't need the older server's consent or support to have a new identity somewhere else.
It kinda is. Your identity is in the hands of whoever controls the PLC Directory. You can argue this is better than having your account and identity on the same place, but it still a third party that you depends on.
As I found with one marketing experiment, this makes it terrible if your goal is to reach as many consumers as possible in a niche.
But HN members who aren't mass-marketing could change that, by moving to the Fediverse -- giving it their endorsement, and network effects.
https://joinmastodon.org/
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Amazing. Another great reason to be there as a person trying to interact with other people.
I was mentioning one use case that's a showstopper that much of HN would appreciate, and which forces a lot of the people who attract other people to be on the proprietary platforms.
Of course a risk of making Fediverse become more popular is ruining it for those people who want very small-neighborhood community. And who don't mind that, on any given topic, they're basically stuck with the handful of people who happened to be there, not those who would be most interested.
I'd still like to make Fediverse more welcoming to more people, to get more people on it.
I have an optimistic belief that a more popular Fediverse could be better than any of the commercial alternatives. Though it would become more like them in some ways, as it grows.
Why? Why should HN members, or anyone else, move to another network with the same kinds of fragmentation and mutual mass bannings (and/or demands for mass bannings) that we are talking about here with Bluesky? See, for example, <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195>
Between my single-user-instance and Facebook's billion-user Threads, ActivityPub is genuinely decentralised.
I don't know of any sense in which Mastodon has increased centralization, I think its blocking tools have been distributed essentially since the beginning, not something that has iterated toward centralization over time in response to an unfolding debate. Although it does have a complicated history and as possible that new things have happened I'm not aware of.
BlueSky though, to your point, is a good example of centralization not being reliable in terms of not being accountable to users. Or for a different way of saying the same thing, the lack of accountability has served to reveal how centralized it truly is.
It does seem to be simple enough that people don't get confused about using it, but it doesn't seem to walk the actual walk of decentralization.
So if for example #archlinux disagrees with your opinion and they decide to ban you for it, you are now banned from many other unrelated channels.
I have also seen subreddits that auto-ban users that have ever posted in specific other (unrelated) subreddits.
This is actually today's controversy on Bluesky because the #1 attribute of its power users is they're terrified of "AI" and the idea that "companies will steal their posts to generate AI slop", which means they think the ML moderation is stealing their posts.
Oh, but the ML can't be decentralized because the training datasets are illegal.
Centralization eventually ends up with a single entity in charge of everything, which eventually does (or doesn't do) something that causes it's value to collapse.
The real solution here is federalization: A bunch of independent self-govening entities that co-operate with other entities to assist each other in moderation.
A good non-social network example here would be adblockers.
- Each adblocker uses at least one ad tracking list, with most adblockers allowing for multiple lists to be used and a sensible default for their own users to use.
- Each list has it's own moderators that add/update/remove entries on their list based on their own values.
- Adblockers (and their users) can collaborate on requesting changes to lists, resulting in faster reactions to advertising changes on the web, and in turn faster updates passed down to users of those adblockers who participate.
- If an adblocker can't do their job anymore (e.g. their owners/workers can't do their job anymore, the owner sells out, etc...) users can switch to (or create) a new adblocker.
- If a list fails, adblockers can switch to other lists (or create a new one).
No adblocker and no list holds all the power. Adblocking as a whole is strengthened by always having viable alternatives that can be switched to, and methods to quickly create new alternatives if the need arises.
That's the power of federation: the strengths of centralization without the weaknesses.
The social media version of a federated twitter is mastodon. A whole bunch of groups running their own mastodon servers that can interact with each-other as if they were a centralized mastodon website, with similarly aligned servers sharing co-operatively maintained bad-actor lists.
People always had irrational populist and conspiratorial beliefs, but that was mediated by popular media generally not platforming kooks. Now you have the top 10 podcasts allowing people to mainline validation for conspiracies.
I don't see how centralization helps. Allowing (or demanding) that a media provider to regulate more could lead to less platforming for conspiracy theorists and populists.