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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.
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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.)
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.
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…
What benefits/negatives does blue sky have in comparison to mastodon?
As I understand it so far:
Broad strokes general pros/cons:
Bsky’s pros:
- Some more influential/popular, and creative people have joined.
- Full account migration across instances.
- Initially at least: lower population/exclusivity, meaning less noise and fewer personality clashes, fewer trolls, so “better vibes”.
- More focused interfaces providing smoother user experience.
Somewhere in-between:
- More social algorithm friendly, i.e. feeds with posts from what your followed accounts are liking or commenting on.
- Quote posting (this one I’m counting as in-between because some Mastodon people really dislike them).
- Full text search by default (see second point as to why I have this here.*)
Bsky’s negatives (as of writing):
- Fewer people overall, so can seem dead.
- Some report phone number requirement for sign-up.
- No post editing.
- No video/gif posting.
- No audio posts.
- No direct/private/mentioned only messages.
*-Note: Mastodon now has a form of full text search but it must enabled by instance admins and one must opt their account’s posts into search visibility for them to show up. This is the result of the years of back & forth over the feature and is an interesting compromise approach.
Broad strokes technical pro/cons compared to Mastodon:
Bsky/Bluesky’s tentative benefits:
- Full account migration across instances (Personal Data Servers).
- Personal Data Servers may have lower resource costs compared to Mastodon instances, enabling more self-hosting.
- The underlying protocol (Authorized Transfer Protocol/ATProto) enables custom feeds to help one find what they want to see and only view that.
- As this post details, it may enable more distributed moderation so that your host/instance isn’t necessarily the final say in what you can see.
Tentative negatives:
- Relays may have higher resource costs, reducing how decentralized/distributed it is.
- Currently Bsky’s federation/decentralization is only with self-hosted Personal Data Servers, while so far as I’m aware, they’re still operating the only Relay.
- While the protocol may enable distributed moderation, this may also be viewed as a downside as it increases complexity in regards to which moderation services/moderators to subscribe to, who to report anything to, etc.
- Custom feeds may also create a similar problem as distributed moderation in terms of choice paralysis/confusion, and further entrenching people into echo chambers more than existing social media arguably already enables.
Worth noting when compared to Mastodon:
- Mastodon has partial account migration.
- Mastodon allows post editing, video/gif/audio posts, and direct/mentioned only messages.
- Each instance’s local feed, and even its federated feed, may be viewed as providing a sort of custom feed produced by those on the instance.
- Probably closer to what Bluesky means: Mastodon also allows one to make lists of others to create a distinct feed, follow hashtags, and one may pin a hashtag in a column then add others to include/exclude to create a custom hashtag feed in the advanced web interface.
- Also although it’s clunkier in Mastodon, one may export their lists, block/mute lists, and share these with others to import to their own account.
- Bluesky also talks about different AppViews, which I think may be understood in relation to some of the different web interfaces, or apps one may use with Mastodon (one may understand this on Lemmy in a similar way, e.g. Alexandrite/Voyager~Thunder, etc.).
Do you know how many more users are on Mastodon compared to Bluesky? I struggle to find content on Bluesky.
Kind of hard to say given the structure of it. Going off the approximate data from FediDB’s charts, we may be looking at around 2 to 3 million more user accounts (around 8 million to 7.25 million), as compared with data from Stats for Bluesky of 5.24 million.
Although I’m not sure how each is measuring this, a better point of comparison may be active users and daily posters. FediDB uses the former, and shows about 940,000 to 920,000 active users, compared to Bluesky’s about 220,000~215,000 to 190~195,000 daily posters. The latter is honestly being kind of generous, as going off the data there posting has been declining. Interestingly liking has stayed somewhat higher, hovering between 240,000 to occasional peaks of 260,000 recently.
According to their CEO just before they opened registrations they had 1.6 million monthly users, so maybe if you run the numbers differently it looks better…But the raw stats don’t paint a great picture, at least as I read them.
Going off Join Mastodon’s servers page (under network health), we see a figure of 942,000 monthly active users, which would suggest Bluesky should arguably have slightly more activity going off the monthly active users figure, but… 🤷♀️
I believe that Bluesky will fail. Which is sad because I feel they are trying to make things better.
The people who wanted to leave Twitter have pretty much left. The ones who are left are going to stay. Bluesky have spent too long living in the weeds, with designing and building, and the momentum has been lost.
I hope I’m wrong. And this is only my opinion.
