Even if somebody wanted to make an unmoderated ATProto app, I guess they could? Good luck with the app stores and regulators and users
ActivityPub provides the option to do just that. Anybody can spin up a server running Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma, etc… and moderate it however they like. There are a multitude of clients in app stores and an unmoderated server won’t affect that because they’re generic clients like web browsers. There are countries such a server could be hosted in with minimal regulations.
As for users… you’ll probably get some and they’ll probably be horrible. Most people will probably block your server.
You can also spin up your own Bluesky PDS (the account server) since federation is live now, or your own appview (basically the feed display server that has most of the smarts) and point your app to it, or set up your own relay (CDN like server) and point your appview and even point feed generators to it (3rd party custom feeds are supported in Bluesky)
So if you don’t like the decision made by anybody else you can just replace them. And yeah, just like on Mastodon nobody’s going to use unmoderated appviews, subscribe to scrappy feeds, or federate with a PDS hosting only shitty people.
It seems like there are some good ideas in there. Are there third parties out there running servers for each component that are open to the public yet?
Yes, there’s already some 3rd party reimplementations of both clients and PDS servers and feed generators (but haven’t heard of custom appviews yet). I don’t know anybody running an open PDS yet though, it’s mostly individuals running them
Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. … But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it. That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company.”
This is the same problem that all these “free speech platforms” keep running into. Some people will abuse free speech - if nothing else, I think everyone can agree spam is a type of abusive speech. But the difference between abusive speech and ordinary speech isn’t a sharp line, and the definitions of “abuse” will vary. So there needs to be some mechanism or rules for deciding what that line is. But all the people that create these platforms instead wanna pretend that line doesn’t exist, so they don’t create a means of determining it. So then “abuse” becomes whatever the users demand and/or the decisionmakers decide it is. Which is exactly the same as having no free speech to begin with.
They’ve designed their platform so that you can outsource different aspects to different servers. So you can choose a moderator who curates your experience and that’s a different person from who hosts your data, which may be different to who sorts and determines the ‘top posts’.
Bluesky has moderation accounts you can follow like regular accounts that basically flag or hide posts according to how you configure them. This differs from the Fedi model where your chosen instance dictates what you see. There is the standard account that every user follows by default, but even that can be configured to your liking. And if you don’t want it on, you can disable it and follow a different account that moderates content to your liking.
I, for once, don’t like seeing insects, something that shouldn’t be moderated because there are valid reasons for posting pictures of insects. On Bluesky, I can follow a moderation account for phobias and have it hide any pictures I wouldn’t wanna see.
Thanks to that, Bluesky is more flexible IMO and requires me to do less for more. Unlike the fediverse where I have to maintain my own filter lists which don’t always work when pictures get posted without alt text or keywords found in the filter list.
I don’t know, don’t ask me. People always find stupid shit to be outraged about, but this one is really not it tbh. I personally love it and hope the Fediverse adopts something similar to it or even just reuses the same open source code for these labeling accounts (as they’re called over there), albeit adapted to the ActivityPub protocol.
Because Jack Dorsey is obsessed with the same “free speech absolutism” that Elon Musk is, and he’s butter that people don’t want to be shown Nazi propaganda, hate speech, and all that other shit on his platforms.
Dorsey is an idiot, just like Musk. Don’t let their money fool you.
Bluesky hasn’t been hyper-commoditized yet. I don’t see ads everywhere. I don’t have bots jamming ׺°”˜”°º× 🎀 𝒫𝓊𝓈𝓈𝓎 𝐼𝓃 𝐵𝒾♡ 🎀 ׺°”˜”°º× into my feed. I’m not being spammed with “We noticed you haven’t joined our premium service yet, but for $8/mo we’ll stop showing you this message!” annoyance marketing.
But I’ve got no doubt its coming. It just hasn’t hit that Twitter-level critical mass of users, such that enshittification turns a profit rather than curbing adoption.
Between threads mastadon and bluesky, which one do you think will be the biggest in the next year? Or are they gonna all keep living in the shadow of Twitter
Given the inertia of moving social platforms and the spoiler effect of fragmentation, I assume ex-Twitter will remain the leading platform for a while still unless Musk manages to run it into the ground at record speed.
I don’t have any hard numbers on the rest, unfortunately. I personally favour Mastodon, and I believe some national governments have officially adopted it and are running their own instances, which might tip the scales a little if people see that as endorsement.
Bluesky overall seems to have the advantage in terms of marketing (probably because they have the advantage of money too). I have no idea about Threads, but being from the same company as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp may give them an advantage in terms of existing users for those services. I would expect they try to intermesh these services at one point or another.
It’s hard to predict, given that many people might just follow whatever their favourite personalities choose, and once enough users have gone there, other popular people may choose that platform too for its larger userbase, drawing more people in… It can snowball either way.
There’s also the ongoing debate about interfacing the other options with Mastodon. I’m not going to take a stance on that here, but it might be a solution to the split “some of my favourite people have gone here, the others there, but I want to keep up with both in a single app”. I think there would have to be a user-level option in Mastodon to block entire instances to allow people to choose not to get shown content from those services.
As an aside, I think that would be a good idea anyway, for Lemmy too. If I want to be able to browse All without seeing specific instances, I don’t want to have to look for an instance with that exact list of defeds.
Pretty much every failed social network out there failed because it had poor moderation tools, and this genius thinks the biggest mistake Bluesky has made is having any moderation tools at all.
And I’m only, like, 98% joking about it also being the day I saw a headline on Lemmy about Wayland use overtaking X11.
I mean, honesty, there has to be some legally standing harm having been done or be possible. By a fucking billionaire tech mogul guy to a foundational, open, and free part of the tech ecosystem who also relies on fundraising.
Edit: on the other hand I’m waiting to be pounded by a reply about the logo being open source. Which it is. But you know ethics and tech and stuff.
It might not be worth challenging them, by the time it gets anywhere the current business will be gone. They always had little to no hope of paying off the $13bn loan Musk saddled the business with, now the business is worth less than the loan. Musk knows this, which is why he’s trialling all sorts of dodgy shit on the platform, such as this and also the API charges.
Ah yes, the historically marginalized vulnerable community, the cisgenders. How can a community even hope to live in peace with only 98.5% of the population?
bullshit. cis- is a latin prefix that means “on this side of”. So for example, the Roman region Cisalpine Gaul could reasonably be interpreted as “the part of Gaul that’s on our side of the Alpines”. The prefix trans- is the antonym meaning “on the far side”. Transalpine Gaul was the part of the Roman empire on the other side of the Alpines. When related to gender, the only way cisgender can be read in any context is “their gender aligns with their sex”. There is no way that could ever be reasonably be interpreted as a slur.
Ok but you did describe a specific chunk of rome nerds. You’ve really got three kinds of rome nerds: the “I just think it’s neat” folks, the ones who think of it as glorious western tradition and lean fascist (it’s how they turned the symbol of Roman right to rule into the “kill everyone in the name of tradition” ideology), and then there are those of us who see a society that’s full on clown shoes where a bisexual twink managed to talk his way into destroying a republic among many many many other fucking bonkers things that just kept fucking happening while this empire refused to trade with China because of dipshit toxic masculinity. So yeah us in the last group lean anti fascist because rome was a shit show of a caliber only America and Russia can compare to
People can be insulted (read as feel insulted) by anything and everything. If I refer to someone by a technically correct term all the time, but it was not customary to do so, they could easily (and justifiably) feel insulted by that. Whether something can be more or less generally be said to be a slur depends more on majorities, convention, and social protocol than on technical correctness. Neither you nor I are in a position to tell someone that they cannot feel insulted by something. And it might even be a communal thing: if a majority of users on X felt insulted by being referred to as cisgender, it would be correct to label it as a slur in that context/on X. Like cunt is an integral part of everyday language in Australia but a big no-no in the US. Think about that, you dry-nose primate.
The term cisgender was coined in 1994 as an antonym to transgender, and entered into dictionaries starting in 2015 as a result of changes in social discourse about gender.[4][5] The term has been and continues to be controversial and subject to critique.
I think there’s some confirmation bias on your end here. The local community (including me) tends to be young and liberal and knows the term cisgender. I’d bet that the majority (by a huge margin) of English speakers (including as a second or third language) has never even heard the term cisgender or doesn’t know what it means. Lots of them will react negatively if you label them cisgender out of pure ignorance and false assumptions - no transphobia needed.
Only complete asshole transphobes do. Honestly, not even they do. They just lie about it as a gotcha.
Sure, they exist. But what’s their percentage of the population or the X user base? I think you’re making a false generalization by an invalid extrapolation.
And just to be clear: I’m not saying cisgender is a slur. I’m just pointing out that the notion that community A or an individual can decide whether some word is a slur or not in community B is ridiculous, and that the argument, from the first comment I replied to, for technical correctness or intended meaning of a word is irrelevant for who considers what a slur.
I hope that made my point clearer to your dry-nosed primate’s brain.
I’m pretty confident the slur-status of a word is closely rated to whether or not it is used in a hateful way to refer to a people group or member of a group that is in some way disadvantaged. For example the n-word is obviously a slur and “cracker” or “whitey” obviously are not. That’s why cisgender isn’t a slur, even if people can and have use(d) it in a hateful way.
I’m just pointing out that the notion that community A or an individual can decide whether some word is a slur or not in community B is ridiculous,
As a member of group B I consider the word community a slur (purely because it is convenient for my argument to do so). Never use that word again because it is a slur and it would be ridiculous for you to say otherwise.
Right wing assholes get all bent out of shape over the computer world trying to do away with “master” and “slave” terminology, but they’ll rush to “cancel” using “cis” because it hurts their feefees…
The word is a threat because it linguistically separates biological sex from socially constructed categories of “woman” and “man.” That gender is a social construction undermines heteronormativity, critical to defending patriarchal sex roles and procreation.
Ok let me rephrase for pedantic people, adjectives with trans prefix have a correspondent cis adjective.
And an electrical cisformer would be something that would keep energy inside the same circuit at roughly the same voltage, so basically a wire. Feel free to use the term if you want to oversell something.
I will start using “cisformer” in place of “wire” from now on, in a similar manner to how we at work sometimes refer to “power aspect negation cycle” for pulling the plug on something and reconnect it.
Also, I guess a cisistor would be just a regular switch or potentiometer.
As one of the most average dudes in the world, I can’t help but feel threatened and marginalized, which of course means that the gay agenda is to blame for everthing that has gone wrong in my life.
Just to be on the safe side: That was sarcasm.
My gender: You can safely make assumptions based on appearance.
Orientation: Straight and boringly sprinkle-free
Favorite dinosaur: Triceratops
Opinion on this: Fuck Elon. Let people be people, for fucks sake. If he feels threatened by increasing specificity in language, he must have some real identity issues boiling underneath.
I don’t think Elon feels personally threatened. I think he feels hate and a misguided sense of heroism. If you listen to him speak enough, it becomes painfully obvious that he not only thinks he’s the most important person in the world, he also thinks he’s the smartest person in the world. Basically he thinks he can’t possibly be wrong, no matter how many experts who’ve dedicated their lives to the pursuit of knowledge in a field that’s new to him disagree with him.
That, plus the constant stream of right wing propaganda from his Twitter addiction, has convinced him that the acceptance of trans people will lead to the destruction of society. His brain is rotten to the core at this point. So he’s made it his personal mission to make trans people’s lives worse.
My refined interpretation: He’s desperate to be liked, and as long as his Xitter-circle cheers him on, he’ll continue to be a Xithead shithead. He doesn’t have a circle of friends to keep him grounded in reality.
All slurs are not equal. A slur against a privileged group won’t have nearly the power that one against a disenfranchised one does. That’s why I find “honkey” or “cracker” funny rather than threatening.
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