This is a pretty great, long form post about the structure of Bluesky, and how it’s largely kinda pretending to be decentralized at the moment. I’m not trying to make a dig at it. I’ve enjoyed the platform myself for a while, but it’s good to learn more about how it actually works.
This article was shared on Mastodon via its author here.
They apparently have a feature to label other users as anti science or whatever. Actual scientists have gotten that label, oops.
“They” don’t have that. Most labellers are user made and people can subscribe to them or not.
The implementation details matter less than how it affects the culture.
I do think it matters a lot whether it’s a thing the app offers natively to everybody or something certain users have implemented on their own and that other users can choose to use or not. You don’t blame the contents of a mod on the game itself, do you?
If there’s a widely used mod that makes the game worse, that’s a good reason to not play the game. It doesn’t matter who made the mod. Using the mod (e.g. an aim bot in a shooter game) is toxic user behavior and if the game ops tolerate it, they deserve blame too.
Is it “widely used”? An aim bot directly affects everybody else, actively making the game worse. This only affects a small number of people who choose to opt-in and trust the labeller’s opinion. I can’t even find that labeller and I learnt about it from you. And again, it’s not BSky that offers the labeller - that IS an important distinction.
No I don’t think the distinction matters. Twitter sucks because it’s full of Nazis. It’s irrelevant that Twitter doesn’t supply the Nazis itself. The culture that a platform fosters is part of the platform.
As for the visibility of the labelling on bsky, idk, I guess I’ll take your word for it. It had sounded like a built in feature that was visible to everyone, but ok, maybe not.
And yet, everybody stayed until the Muskrat took over. Because until then it wasn’t the platform telling people to be nazis and nazis were a nuisance but a minority - as are people who falsely accuse scientists of being anti-science on BSky. That’s exactly what I’m saying.
If the label appears on your profile for everyone to see without further info then it’s truth value is thrown away. IDK how big a problem it really is on bsky now though. The other guy says it is, you seem to think the opposite, I don’t care enough to look into it further.
If Twitter went Nazi post-Musk while it’s software stayed about the same, that shows that management really does shoulder blame.