@kissane @joshwayne @mergesort BlueSky - as a commercial company that is going to earn money from what they build - makes it obvious that they consider a central moderation instance as bad because it is like a "Supreme Court". Which is by itself already a strange way of criticm. What they don't say here is: moderation costs money. Yes, it does. And social network platform hate paying people for this hard job - which is necessary and it is just fair that they do their job on a platform where they also earn money from users generating content. The result is an ecosystem where it is ok to be harassed as you are free to move to another instance. This is just making a bad system worse and selling it as a new technical feature. If BlueSky would finally agree on it's repsonsibility, building a well paid moderation team and then introduce "composable" moderation, yes, that would be fine. As it would be an addon. But this is cost reduction by technical implementation.
When Jack initially announced BlueSky the first (!) point he made was the following:
»First, we’re facing entirely new challenges centralized solutions are struggling to meet. For instance, centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people.«
So he argues that being a responsible company that is obliged to international laws - and it's users - is a "burden on people". Well: the people here is the stakeholders of billion dollar platforms. And that is what BlueSky is the solution, too.
I would have loved to see a blue sky in BlueSky but besides looking nice I mainly see a platform that aims towards deregulation.
https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766082206011393