Coyote's Dreamwidth Blog

Twitter and its imitators have adopted a structural design that is fundamentally bad for people. This isn't just a matter of who's in charge; it's a problem with the thing itself. Forcing users to adhere to a tight character limit, discouraging link culture, preventing people from editing their own posts, steering people into sharing things they hate, incentivizing rage bait with trending feeds, subjecting people to decontextualized encounters, encouraging conflict by discouraging tags, and leaving users powerless to clean up the resulting mess—all of this is bad shape.

Crossposted to Pillowfort and Neocities. For off-site linking, I recommend using the version on Neocities.

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.