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.
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.
