The Bluesky "Problem"
Conglomerating disparate thoughts into a musing on power and paradigms
"You will fall, because you never tried to stand for yourselves."
Another day, another error in the realm of trust & safety. The claims are substantive; a known and foreseeable problem came to the forefront due to a bad faith actor. While the mistake was easily avoidable, they do tend to happen regardless. A patch was applied, an account was banned, and a commit was merged to improve the handle validation process and hopefully prevent this from reoccurring. These measures should be sufficient to sate the brewing unrest, or were they?
It appears not. The autoimmune vortex churns anew, grabbing their keyboards and marching to war, waxing poetic on moderation strategies and raining harassment on a development team that is building what could be the future for microblogging. While the communication for the changes made has not been expedient, the team took their time to implement a proper fix. Unfortunately, the praxis of real change requires tangible effort in constructing the world you want to see.
It’s important to remember that Bluesky is not a platform, but a proof-of-concept. It’s an instance to demo the AT Protocol and display that the technology can form the bedrock of future microblogging.
The benefits of federated protocols are well-known; no one entity can control the entire network, and they are more resilient because a failure of one node will not result in the entire network going down. They are also safer and more inclusive, as community moderation allows users to create spaces that reflect their values.
Bluesky received flak for not adopting the ActivityPub protocol underlying the Fediverse, instead going with their own. The divergence was an intentional decision, intended to alleviate the perceived shortcomings in ActivityPub. One of these shortcomings is that the Fediverse is not decentralized in a meaningful way. It is decentralized compared to the contemporary platforms, but the power dynamic is akin to that of a feudal fiefdom.
With ActivityPub, you do not have control of your data, the server does. Moderation is at the behest of the administrators. Dislike your ruler? You can port your followers, but have to leave all your content behind. The server owner can see all of your messages as they are not end-to-end encrypted. The point of authority has been shifted from the corporation to the lord of the node, but the power remains out of reach for the user.
AT Protocol attempts to alleviate these problems by giving users control over their own personal data servers, and through other tooling such as composable moderation and custom feeds. Dislike your ruler here? No problem, you can take all your data with you as you emigrate to a different node, you are not beholden to another. This is a paradigm shift from the past decade plus in how platforms are conducted, where now users truly have agency and authority over their own experience, including moderation decisions.
Mike Masnick's Impossibility Theorem states that good content moderation is impossible to do at scale. There is no way to institute a system that will accurately reflect the collective will of all the users. Even a node in a decentralized network can scale to the point where node-level moderation slides off-target. To that effect, the vociferous calls to hire a trust and safety team, which have become a rallying cry for the disaffected, will not bring about a panacea as expected.
What will be reaction to the inevitable return of the Scunthorpe problem? Social media is global, it cannot be developed effectively while being strangled by the gauntlet of a terminally online, and overwhelmingly American subgraph and its whims. There are a wide range of contexts and cultures that will need a human hand to effectively accommodate.
To compound the above, it is also adding another centralized point of failure. Governments have abused these institutions to enact censorship. They can often be used as abuse vectors or as a silencing hammer for critical journalists. The best way to remove this point of failure is by decentralizing the structure, instead giving the tools to the users and admins of the nodes they inhabit to create an environment that suits their needs.
It's easy to plug the ears and just dismiss this as a bout of techno-libertarianism, as optimism towards technological solutions commonly is. 'Technology can't solve social problems' is an idea that is often presented in a vacuum, removed from the context of historical examples that prove the contrary. Even if you agree with the aforementioned idea, at the very least technology makes our battles winnable.
These discourse loops that Bluesky has been repeating are self-sustaining due to bad faith actors that seem to stand for nothing. They find doomposting preferable to building and condemn users and developers alike who appear enthusiastic about the proposed architecture. They refuse to acknowledge the promise of AT Protocol and how it can address the current pitfalls of interaction online, instead bullying the team and asking why they are not just remaking Twitter, but this time with a benevolent overlord.
Beyond its centralization, Twitter’s concept of the digital town square is flawed considering the social implications of Dunbar's number. The move to a decentralized network comes with a shift to smaller, more intentional communities, more like neighborhoods. Rather than being crammed into one giant space with a legion of strangers engaged in a digital battle royale for social status, you are afforded the choice of picking a node that best suits you.
While a definitive Dunbar's number does not exist, the idea that the threshold for healthy human community size is much lower than what is afforded by the collective conscious' thought stream rings true. The damages contemporary social media can wreak upon the human psyche are well-documented. Through the various online purveyors of quick dopamine fixes or cathartic fury, many users end up in what appears like a frenzied combat state, an unending fight-or-flight response.
The approach of solving our issues through another centralized authority implies a preference to have an external entity to provide deliverance or take the fall, rather than taking the reins and building the desired space ourselves. This practice effectively distances the individual from any resulting outcomes. This conditioned passivity is what helped to entrench the previous power dynamics.
A staple of authoritarians maintaining power is convincing the populace that they are powerless to enact change. Corporations have followed the same playbook to a wildly successful effect, providing a "take it or leave it" experience and gradually degrading user agency over time. Granularity in settings and user choice were eschewed for algorithms and suggested content. It's high time that changes, and where better to do so than in one of the fundamentals of society? The way we connect with each other.