Moderation is a crucial aspect of any social network. However, traditional moderation systems often lack transparency and user control, leaving communities vulnerable to sudden policy changes and potential mismanagement. To build a better social media ecosystem, it is necessary to try new approaches.

Today, we’re releasing an open labeling system on Bluesky. “Labeling” is a key part of moderation; it is a system for marking content that may need to be hidden, blurred, taken down, or annotated in applications. Labeling is how a lot of centralized moderation works under the hood, but nobody has ever opened it up for anyone to contribute. By building an open source labeling system, our goal is to empower developers, organizations, and users to actively participate in shaping the future of moderation.

In this post, we’ll dive into the details on how labeling and moderation works in the AT Protocol.

  • @ElectroVagrantOPEnglish
    11•8 months ago

    I’m still not sure what I think of this to be honest, but I appreciate some more detail on how this is designed to operate on the frontend and the backend, e.g.

    In the AT Protocol network, various services, such as the PDS, Relay, and AppView, have ultimate discretion over what content they carry, though it’s not the most straightforward avenue for content moderation. Services that are closer to users, such as the client and labelers, are designed to be more actively involved in community and content moderation.
    […]
    Infrastructure providers such as Relays play a different role in the network, and are designed to be a common service provider that serves many kinds of applications. Relays perform simple data aggregation, and as the network grows, may eventually come to serve a wide range of social apps, each with their own unique communities and social norms. Consequently, Relays focus on combating network abuse and mitigating infrastructure-level harms, rather than making granular content moderation decisions.

    (Emphasis mine.)

    • @[email protected]English
      5•8 months ago

      Haven’t gone through the whole spec, but based on interviews with the CEO, the main advantages are the ability for users to move easily from one node to another without losing anything, and better moderation tools.

      Since at the moment there’s only one BSKY server out there, it’ll be hard to verify the first claim.

      On the content moderation part, Mike Masnick of TechDirt who is deep into the moderation weeds made it sound like their system is pretty well thought out.

      But ultimately, adoption will come down to the community and where they land.

    • AdaEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      Consequently, Relays focus on combating network abuse and mitigating infrastructure-level harms, rather than making granular content moderation decisions.

      This is something people only do if they’re a) a tech bro with too much money or b) looking for financial gain.

      Which means that the core infrastructure on Bluesky will be hosted by people who are either hostile to my existence or make money off of people who are hostile to my existence.

      I think I’ll pass…