Why Bluesky Remains the Most Interesting Experiment in Social Media, by Far
Comments
laurex
0xEF
I keep seeing people use "dark forest" and I think I may have a different understanding which leaves me wondering "why would you want this to happen?" My take on the dark forest comes from game theory, where nobody is working with complete information (in extreme summary) which sounds like a bad idea if we use it as a social goal. I've always felt like we are currently in the dark forest stage, but the goal should be to get out of it.
Perhaps my understanding is flawed? What is your take or how did you intend to use the phrase?
crq-yml
The dark forest is usually applied as the converse of a panopticon: a society where things are illegible and private as a normal way of conducting one's business, versus one which is maximally surveilled and made legible to a state.
There's a very palpable tension and oscillation between these two extremes in everyday life: school is designed in the mode of a panopticon - a place where you are watched and examined for your benefit - while a dimly lot nightclub is more of a forest, a place where you can stay lost in the crowd and it's not clear how attractive you are. Applying the wrong degree of legibility to the situation is not beneficial - for example, schools in many countries have moved away from publicly posting everyone's exam scores to avoid the negative effects of humiliation, while drinking establishments know that they have to kick out creeps that make other customers uncomfortable, so they do monitor things discreetly.
Socially speaking, we just did the panopticon online, that was 2010's social media - a moment where you were encouraged to post with your legal name, photograph, job title, age, etc. The dark forest was the thing we had in little niches of the Internet before that, and the thing we might be looking towards again.
0xEF
This is a great comparison to make. I hadn't really considered this before from the privacy standpoint, so this gives me something to chew on. Appreciate it!
derbOac
Not the OP, but their comment and your question got me thinking.
Sometimes I get the sense that true decentralization could get people to 90% of how they actually use things like Twitter/X, and federation (including major hubs) gets you to the remaining 10%.
What I often see is people following a certain number of people, often those they "know", either in real life or online, supplemented by a smaller number of bigger, more distant sources. Along these lines, what I could see working is something that's like Matrix, but where explicit groups/rooms aren't there, and defined implicitly by social networks. A bridge between something like bluesky and matrix.
I think the "dark forest" part comes in with the idea that maybe a certain lack of knowledge is ok, or inevitable, just like the real world, and therefore is an acceptable cost to allow even more truly decentralized systems?
I'm just thinking out loud, so maybe I am really off. But I often feel real world social dynamics are some kind of decentralized peer to peer and federated hybrid, and a platform with those characteristics could be successful if it got key elements right.
jghn
Would this model support true global search? As in searching across all posts?
On twitter that was straightforward as there is a single server.
For federated models it requires the search engine to be able to discover everything, not just to what it is connected
derbOac
That's a good question. I'm not sure it could support true global search but I don't know... my guess is there'd probably be some probabilistic guarantee but not much beyond that?
ranger207
I'm afraid that Bluesky's approach to moderation is one of the worst possible ways to do it. When the internet was first starting to be mass adopted in the 90s, there was optimism that having access to such a huge variety of viewpoints would expand people's horizons. Instead, what seems to have happened is that people could find the group of people that shared their exact viewpoint, and ignore every other viewpoint. Bluesky's "choose your own moderators" approach gives a lot of power to the mods to set those viewpoints and block out anything else. I'm not sure what the solution is to getting people's viewpoints widened again (it's certainly not Twitter or YouTube's approach of throwing controversial content at you and letting you find the people in the comments that explains why your side of the controversy is right and everyone else's is wrong), but this isn't it. Ultimately I see Bluesky's technical aspects as mostly social signalling to the appropriate groups of Twitter power users rather than a fundamental shift in social media.
comte7092
What you’re outlining is an issue with moderation in general, not something particular to blue sky.
The issue is, given the power inherent to moderation, how is that power best managed? Do you want it applied by whoever happens to own the platform (previously “liberal” publicly owned Twitter, Elon owned Twitter, etc?), or do you want to have decentralized control over that power?
You talk about getting “viewpoints widened”, as though all speech has inherent value to all people. I’m not sure the evidence bears that out. Simply being exposed to other people’s viewpoints doesn’t necessarily lead to a mind opening experience, especially when that exposure is little more than shouting over text, piling on, and mudslinging. Discourse requires a base level of accepted rules of engagement and norms of behavior that lead to some level of mutual respect.
I’m personally optimistic that blue sky’s approach is closer to the ideal.
fsiefken
I really liked the Slashdot system with meta-moderation and option to filter based on comment length.
JohnFen
I agree. Although it was certainly imperfect, I think that nobody has ever done moderation as well as /. did (during their heyday, anyway. I haven't been there for years so don't know if it's still the same).
5636588
It's understandable to feel disillusioned by the current state of online discourse. Expecting social media platforms alone to broaden horizons is akin to relying solely on a library's size to educate the illiterate. Perhaps it's time for a more holistic approach to digital literacy and critical thinking, rather than outsourcing the responsibility to tech giants like Bluesky.
13years
Global communities have also resulted in precisely the opposite of expectations. They created collections of uniform behavior. I would argue the private moderated communities allow for far greater diversification of ideas.
The reason being is that you can exist in multiple such communities. The individual experiences the diversity and not the community.
It is the premise of an argument I laid out some time ago for why social media has been destructive to diverse views even without the algorithmic manipulations.
dwb
"Expanding horizons" being a job of the internet is the viewpoint of a particular kind of optimist. I very much doubt it's what most ordinary people want, certainly as something that is thrust upon them. For me, if I want to expand my horizons, the internet is clearly very useful and I do make use of it like that. I want that to be under my control, though, and not part of some semi-coerced product design. Bluesky's approach therefore seems like a good attempt to me. I mean, I certainly don't trust Twitter or Meta to do it for me.
haltIncomplete
If you have a suggestion for avoiding that, go for it.
Tribalism seems endemic to humanity though given physical reality sees us dispersed across the globe.
Every attempt at a singular hivemind of social and economic thought has failed as generational churn costs awareness of the origins of a social norm; generational tribalism is even a thing.
How do we defeat physics? Still waiting for those who stare deeply into the machine to answer that. Mathematical generalization of computer behavior is not really upending the time-space continuum but keep staring and believing, I guess.
P_I_Staker
My views have changed greatly, due to hearing these ideas. I may have ultimately ended up more extreme, but it's not an extreme version of what I had before.
ragebol
If people can choose their own moderators, then they can choose to have one that does allow wiew-broadening content, but eg. presented without conspiracy loonies, hate, violence.
Imagine there's a checkmark: "only stuff I agree with". At least it would be explicit that way. Or have a slider of how often am opposing view comes by, so you can control how often you get worked up. One can dream...
willcipriano
> without conspiracy loonies
The term "conspiracy theory" was invented by the CIA after Kennedy's head exploded shortly after he started to move to withdraw from Vietnam.
It was later used on people who didn't buy the Iraq WMD story.
It was used on people who suspected mass government spying before Snowden proved them right.
Recently it was used for people who thought a US funded biolab experimenting with making bat coronaviruses miles from the epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak was suspicious.
You can try to censor untrue things but censoring "conspiracy loonies" means sticking to the mainstream narratives, for that you can go on Reddit and watch CNN.
Almondsetat
Using the origin of a word to discredit its current use is quite simply a bad faith argument to sidetrack discussion. Conspiracy has a meaning and it doesn't matter who coined it. If you want to make this argument be sure to carefully analize the entire etymology of every single word you're writing
brvsft
> Conspiracy has a meaning…
Yeah, and “conspiracy theory” has a meaning, which, in bad faith, currently encapsulates, “Things I disagree with broadly, which can be linked to and invalidated by the existence of other people online who are either trolls or extremely stupid.” That way I can say that anyone who engages in wrongthink—perhaps, that a healthy 30-year-old might be allowed the choice to take a vaccine or allow natural immunity to take effect, without being threatened with loss of employment for choosing the latter—is lumped in with idiots or trolls who think that they’re making vaccines with microchips in them. Now they’re all “conspiracy theorists.”
I don’t believe even 5% of the people using the term are doing so in good faith.
alephknoll
[flagged]
Almondsetat
[flagged]
beardicus
> The term "conspiracy theory" was invented by the CIA
ooh, a recursive conspiracy theory. neat!
jeezfrk
what about all those that turned out to be deranged imagination / fascism / communism / racism / cultic or just plain moneymaking FUD?
You remember all those? Strange. Thst seems to be blocked from you reading it.
evbogue
Yes, exactly. The original article linked on this HN thread mentions Nostr and how Bluesky compares to it. I don't believe either protocol has landed a fix for social media yet, let me explain.
Social media posts are at the most simple level a blog post without a title field. Messages are written by an author, they are given a timestamp, and they contain some kind of content. To create a distributed social media product, we need authored posts with timestamps.
Now one big problem with distributed blogs is authors go back and modify their content in all kinds of ways after the fact. How many times have you been to a blog where they've taken off the timestamps so that their most popular post doesn't appear to be from 2010, for example.
Secure-Scuttlebot tried to solve this issue by using ed25519 signing key cryptography to create append-only logs of content. This is great, and as acknowledged in the Nostr original readme, it might ultimately be better than Nostr. But append-only logs syncing from post 0 until 1000 leads to UX-level problems for new users, which can be overcome with the right dev team.
Nostr uses the same cryptography as Bitcoin, and has no association between the posts. This means you send a request for a pubkey to a relay and the relay sends you some stuff authored by that pubkey. It's kind of up to the relay what it sends. I've experienced UX issues with Nostr clients where I am being blasted 10,000 messages by a relay to my client just so I can render a thread. This probably can be fixed, but it would help if there was some kind of protocol level ordering to/relationship with the posts.
But Bluesky managed to make it so identities do not really exist outside of your PDS. The PDSes hold onto your private keys for you, and until there is an option to sign your own messages your posts and your identity do not really exist outside of a PDS. The Bluesky PDS has authority over you, and then if you switch to another PDS the Bluesky PDS still has authority over you because they can still decide not to show your posts to mainline Bluesky people.
For those of us who got into distributed social media because some anonymous server-side admin 'took action' against our account without getting in touch to correct the behavior first, Bluesky begins to raise all kinds of red flags with the way they've made it hard to separate yourself from the moderation team. Really Bluesky has redeveloped a very similar problem to the criticisms the original Nostr readme had about Mastodon.
And don't get me started about Truth Social, which is what happens when you have a Mastodon PDS that does not talk to other Mastodon PDSes!
It's not too late to fix these issues of course. I mean the PDS has your keys, so you can always rewrite the whole network!
If there's anything I'd like to encourage Bluesky commenters to do is to keep speaking about how to solve this social media issue in a way that allows a global conversation, and also lets people not see content that they have reasons to not want to see.
I'm happy to discuss this forever, for you social media dorks out there. Call me/email me/etc.
throwaway290
> mainline Bluesky
> solve this social media issue in a way that allows a global conversation
"Mainline bluesky" is just one of the instances. You can't have a community without moderation and you can't have moderation without upholding some norms so yeah there will always be some norms. If you think there can be some single global conversation that specifically caters to your norms then I hope you understand you're out of luck?
> The Bluesky PDS has authority over you, and then if you switch to another PDS the Bluesky PDS still has authority over you because they can still decide not to show your posts to mainline Bluesky people.
I don't use bluesky but I heard you can run your own PDS. Those who can't will have to trust someone. Like you can build your own phone from scratch but if you can't you have to trust someone to build it. You won't make the trust problem go away by inventing more and more intricate systems...
intended
I'm betting, this is how tech firms offload content moderation work in its entirety. Between this, and GenAI (LLMs), the argument for dumping trust and safety onto T&S firms sounds like an inevitability. So I really hope this works.
One blind spot that I hadn't thought about was when people share non-consensual content about you.
Right now I don't see any recourse for coordination problems that need the whole network to co-operate.
As a result, I think that there will always be a force that centralizes networks. Not just because big-brother, but because citizens don't accept some types of behavior, even if you do it in your own home.
KenArrari
I think the idea of "decentralized moderation" misses the point of why people ultimately want moderation to begin with.
People didn't want to ban Trump from twitter because they didn't want to see him. They didn't want anyone to see him because they didn't want him to galvanize his base. The trick is that he still had the option of going to other websites (that no one uses) but obviously that came at the cost of losing most of his audience. Switching moderators or such won't do that.
alphakilo
I think farcaster has a much more interesting future given client diversity and protocol extensions
Didn’t see it mentioned in the article surprisingly
mplewis
I’ve never heard of Farcaster.
a_random_canuck
Probably because it’s crypto-based (blockchain) and required a $5 sign up fee to join… so it’s mostly attracted crypto folks.
alphakilo
Free with a US phone number
Also most of it is off the blockchain, just accounts are on chain
AtlasBarfed
....
wouldn't a database be more efficient :-)
alphakilo
More efficient at what? A database would not provide the decentralization the farcaster protocol requires
alphakilo
Definitely recommend checking it out
What will be very cool will be making it feasible for non-technical folks to easily stand up servers and make federation much more of a dark forest model. I was hoping this was the direction Mozilla would take when they invested in building with Mastadon. Essentially, it should be possible to have social tooling in a Wordpress-like ecosystem where developers can create different modules and plug-ins, where people can charge for hosting, building out instances, etc but the code itself is FOSS, and where we can use decentralized experiments to learn what we actually want as far as social tech goes, not just emulate existing platforms with feeds and vanity metrics.