If You've Signed Up for Bluesky, You've Signed Up for Offloadable Moderation

[osteophage]

By now a lot of people have been lured to Bluesky with a mistaken impression of what they're in for. Foundationally, the reason Bluesky was launched in the first place was out of a desire to do less moderation, and so Bluesky's approach to moderation is all about creating excuses for offloading responsibility. This approach has predictable consequences.

Spelling all this out is unfortunately necessary because of how widely Bluesky has been touted as better about moderation. Identifying the red flags should have been the job of journalists who do this sort of thing for a living—and with few exceptions, far too many of them have fallen down on the job, instead hyping up the place as "safe" and "fun" as though there's nothing in particular to worry about. Can't be any worse than usual, right?

So let's set the record straight.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and Neocities. For offsite linking, I recommend using the version on Neocities.

 

Banning Fewer People is Bluesky's Raison D'être

The reason that Bluesky exists at all, its raison d'être, begins with Twitter looking to create a technological excuse for tying its own hands. The people involved don't say it as bluntly as that, of course, but the aims themselves are no secret. This was already spelled out in official communications that are clear enough if you connect the dots: Bluesky was supposed to enable Twitter to decentralize, and Twitter wanted to decentralize in order to dodge the responsibilities of moderation.

For example, in 2019, Twitter's cofounder described the rationale for creating Bluesky by citing an article in which a "marketplace of ideas" guy frets about the complex responsibility of moderation. When different people demand different things from your moderation team, what do you do? His proposed solution is fostering more "competition," i.e. more options to choose from, "without having to resort to outright censorship for certain voices," and you may be able to guess where this is going.

In 2021, when Twitter finally suspended a certain Twitter user for inciting violence, the company's cofounder posted a hand-wringing thread about how much he hates to ban people from his website. Banning anyone, he says, is "a failure of ours ultimately to promote healthy conversation," which is why he says more of the internet should be modeled off of Bitcoin:

The reason I have so much passion for #Bitcoin is largely because of the model it demonstrates: a foundational internet technology that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity. This is what the internet wants to be, and over time, more of it will be. We are trying to do our part by funding an initiative around an open decentralized standard for social media. Our goal is to be a client of that standard for the public conversation layer of the internet. We call it bluesky.

Bluesky was being promoted here as—I cannot stress this enough—a technological workaround to reduce the power to ban people.

This fundamental ethos has guided the selection of the people in charge, including the current CEO, Jay Graeber. Graeber is a supporter of cryptocurrencies and blockchains, which was explicitly something the Chief Technology Officer was looking for at the hiring stage of the project. Bluesky has since been spun off from Twitter as a separate company, but regardless, Jay Graeber remains at the helm. This is why it doesn't matter that Jack Dorsey has since left the board, nor does it matter that Bitcoin is not, in fact, the closest point of comparison—what matters is that the people attracted to an idea like "Twitter but make it more like Bitcoin" are still the ones in charge.

Making Bluesky truly decentralized, however, depends on other parties stepping in to participate on the protocol (which has largely not happened yet), and in the meantime...

Bluesky's "Composable Moderation" = Offloadable Moderation

Bluesky has introduced what it's calling "composable moderation," a term that puts a positive spin on a system for offloading responsibility and creating undue vulnerability. What it sounds like is one thing; what it does is another. This system puts an imposition on ordinary users and enables bad actors to wreck other users' experience of the whole site.

If you take the talk of "composable moderation" at face value, of course, it sounds like it should be a good thing. You could be forgiven for thinking it just means the option to filter out certain topics from your feed, in the same way you can already do on Tumblr, Pillowfort, and Mastodon. Just look at how the company itself pitches the idea:

The piece we're most excited about is the open, composable labeling system we're building that both developers and users can contribute to. Under the hood, centralized social sites use labeling to implement moderation — we think this piece can be unbundled, opened up to third-party innovation, and configured with user agency in mind.

"User agency," they call it. Now here's a couple things to know about what that actually means:

1) The BS "composable" labeling scheme means leaving users to do the cleanup work for the truly execrable garbage. That extends to things that are ordinarily the responsibility of site staff, and which Bluesky, in aim to be as hands-off as possible, uses this system as an excuse to allow. So instead of communicating, for instance, "if you see a flagrantly racist post, report it to staff, and we'll take it down," the BS stance on the matter is "if you see a flagrantly racist post, use this optional feature to label it as racist, and other users can opt-in to your moderation judgment about that post while we as a platform continue to host it."

2) BS "composable" labeling is also ripe for abuse by anyone who wants to ostracize people with false accusations. If someone puts you on a list called Evil People Who Kick Puppies, well, you're out of luck. Now everyone who sees that list and goes "oh man, I hate evil people who kick puppies; let's subscribe to this mass block list" will have you blocked, and there's nothing you can do about it. People you want to follow and people who were already following you can both be ripped away from you. With a mechanism like this, ordinary users are more empowered to wreck your experience of the whole site.

To those who say this risk is manageable if we merely do our due diligence: be realistic. People don't do their due diligence. The whole appeal of a mass block list with 100+ accounts on it is to save us the hassle of having to manually check and block each and every one of them ourselves, a grueling prospect even if you aren't expecting that clicking each username will confront you with something odious, which brings me back to my point: this system exists as a means for Bluesky to farm out the work that should have been their own responsibility.

Bluesky's Approach Has Predictable Consequences

Predicting what would happen should have been easy for anyone with the right information in hand. In fact, here's me predicting it back on April 30th, 2023. Given the openly-professed "marketplace of ideas" ethos behind Bluesky, no one should have been left in the dark enough to be surprised by...

• Bluesky waffling over what to do about multiple high-profile cases of harassment, from anti-trans ideologues to white supremacists


• Recurring complaints on Reddit, Github, and Bluesky itself about the list feature getting misused and abused, including a case where a user got unintentionally separated from their own friends by a third party

These are not just technical hiccups or the fumblings of a scrappy little team with a shoestring budget. These are outcomes of the foundational priorities of Bluesky as a platform, and with problems this baked-in, you don't have to personally make any missteps or be a high-profile user to wind up being negatively impacted. All you have to do is get unlucky.

So What Now?

Just as it's naive to have too much faith in BS, it would also be overly pessimistic to throw up your hands and declare that there's nothing to be done because BS is already popular. There are plenty of nigh insurmountable problems in the world, and that isn't one of them. You may not be able to change what anyone else does, but you can at least choose what you do and what steps you take to protect yourself.

With that said, expect no blanket advice here. Different people are looking for different things, and different priorities call for different suggestions. Consider this piece an attempt to open up a question for discussion rather than seal it off with definitive answers.

My one request for you is this: Tell people. Spread the word. Link this around. Already far too many people have gotten lured to Bluesky with a mistaken impression of what to expect. Play a part in setting the record straight, and who knows—maybe we can have a discussion that goes from there.

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