@oblomov yeah that’s basically all bluesky’s lists are, from what i can tell. i think for public shareable lists, it needs to be opt-in not opt-out. Too easy to be used for harassment otherwise.

block lists work similarly. as do labels. i believe people can request to be taken off, but that’s up to whoever manages the list.

moderation services would be quite a bit more complicated, idk about that. one instinctual thought i had was to be able to follow another server’s moderation decisions on an account level, but thinking about it for an extra few seconds, that’d get real hairy real quick. but maybe we could take some ideas there? i don’t know.

@oblomov @mekkaokereke Starter lists can be user generated just like they are there. You follow them from your server, same way we follow users currently, and that causes you to automatically follow everyone on the list at that moment.

Changes could federate via activitypub. Some protections should be in place to not allow users to add folks with protected accounts or discovery off, and adding someone to a list could send an approval request to them on the server they live on. Bluesky doesn’t have this, but probably should.

Going the extra mile for usability, once someone on your server follows a list, maybe a list of popular lists that federate with your server could be shown somewhere during onboarding. Maybe automatically, or approved by server admins/moderators, depending on the server’s vibe. Otherwise they can be manually shared like they are on bsky.

Just an idea on how it could work, but i totally think it could work. It’d be a lot of effort, and idk if the mastodon project has the resources to think about this right now, but yeah.

@oblomov I’m on my phone now so i’m sorry for my typing.

the lists are a big one. starter pack lists make it very easy to find people you might want to follow, and are more intuitive than our hashtag introduction system, though bluesky’s implementation means anyone can add anyone to a list so they’re also used for harassment - requiring approval is probably the move here.

the moderation lists to auto-mute/block folks are pretty cool too, and i think it could work alongside our per-instance moderation with some thought.

labels are neat, although i definitely expect they’ll be misused by bad actors there. probably need some moderation around them. kinda gotta see how that one shakes out.

Those are the things that scream out to me right now. All this shit takes development time and a lot of thought, though. They have waaay more funding than any fedi project i know of.

@mekkaokereke Just to be clear: i'm very critical of a lot of aspects of bluesky, and it frustrates me to no end that so many people don't see or don't care about the red flags I see with it, but there are still a lot of things we can learn from them from a UX and moderation standpoint.

I also don't think fedi needs to "win" in a competition here. It's not a company that needs to show constant growth. Bluesky is a VC-funded for-profit corporation, of course they're going to grow faster and have more resources to develop nice UX. We should steal some of that nice UX though.

I much prefer the sense of community here. Bluesky feels a lot more influencer-heavy imo.

@mekkaokereke Yeah I'm on there as well as here, and I like a lot of aspects of bluesky, like the easier onboarding, moderation lists, labelers, quotes, etc, but I *much* prefer fedi/activitypub's model compared to bluesky's big central service.

Of course i dislike that bluesky isn't a nonprofit, is funded by a crypto group, and hasn't yet handed off atproto to a nonprofit or standards org, but that's nerd stuff.

Most people care about ease-of-use, feeling safe, finding their friends, and literally nothing about the protocol or the decentralization or anything like that. Bluesky is more twitter-y than fedi ever was, and i think that's what most folks are looking for right now.

@MediaActivist This. I keep fucking explaining this shit to people, that bluesky isn't billionaire-proof like folks are saying it is.

It's already got crypto funding, being a "public benefit corporation" doesnt make it not a corporation (shit look at anthropic). It's not immune to investor demands to enshittify in the name of profits.

It's not even really decentralized at this point, as much as they try to convince folks it is.