Bluesky is leaning into minimal, keeping the door open for most things as long as they’re legal.

This simply will not work, some other option, probably rushed, poorly thought through and ultimately more authoritarian than an honestly constructed moderation structure would have been will be implemented when this approach ultimately fails catastrophically.

I pre-emptively post a surprised pikachu here to signify this

Why are we acting like this is a detail.

Why did I have to burrow all the way down to this spot to see this?

The conversation should begin, or very nearly begin with this as it puts EVERYTHING ELSE around bluesky hype into question, it transmutes the castles you are describing into constructions of sand that might topple any moment to forces of money, greed and effective (even if not explicit) centralized control.

sigh I don’t mean to attack you personally, but this conversation feels so warped sometimes.

Right… isn’t the obvious response to this “holy shit, they really don’t have a business model even remotely figured out here???” which immediately leads you to the realization that everything they promise (no matter how genuine the employee making the promises is) is subject to being sacrificed at the alter of “sorry we had to monetize and make difficult decisions”.

This isn’t difficult, it is just exhausting.

What this says is that Bluesky has no idea how to make a profit off of social media ethically and they would be better off spending their time selling smart political and funny t-shirts than distracting people with a false vision of the future that is going to end up just making everybody even more cynical in the end when it inveitably enshittifies the same exact way every other for-profit social media venture has…

Nah I am good, I will put my energy into helping the fediverse grow because I know how this story goes and I can’t stand the rising headache I get from seeing it repeat endlessly. I want a different future and so I am here.

Well let me state this explicitly then, I don’t consider AI to be some kind of existential threat in terms of becoming sentient, or stealing all of our information and hoarding it away.

LLMs are powerful and have lots of use cases, but right now we are going through a really tiresome scifi novel delusion where tons of smart people are mistaking the current wave of LLM innovations as being somehow able to transport us to the singularity or whatever boring tech bros are calling it these days… instead of being a boring, lame regression into fuedalism.

yawn

Anyway, the more general tendency of moving away from public spaces is a right and natural thing.

Let me emphatically say that NO it isn’t.

If you need to anonymize or disguise your identity because you feel threatened, I never want to make you feel like you shouldn’t take whatever steps of protecting your privacy that you feel you need to.

That being said, no, I fundamentally consider societal progress to be roughly equatable to how open the systems are in a society both in the material and ideological realm. Public forums/the fediverse are progress because they allow anybody with an internet connection to read through conversations, learn and eventually participate and add to a general collective benefit and community. This is the power of the internet.

Yeah sorry I am tired and I realized after re-reading your response and my response that I misread you and should have taken more time to think my response over I apologize.

Thank you for the thoughtful response, I am sorry I didn’t give it the space in my mind it deserved!

edit would it honor you if I flicked some snot at you in solidarity?

Of course, this is also something artists who create and performs art for an audience understands, as much as expression can be about vulnerability it can also be about lying, twisting the truth and getting people to agree to terrible things because the way you deliver it is charismatic or distracts sufficiently from the material reality.

All of this to say, yes, manipulation is still rampant, but we are talking in an a semi-abstracted space, manipulation will always be possible it is simply a question of how obvious it is to authentic users and/or how costly it is to create sufficiently convincing astroturfing bots and consensus.

Your response doesn’t invalidate my point (I don’t mean to assume it does or take a negative tone), my point is that public conversation where people explain their arguments and give sources and people can respond and critique each other with no centralized authority necessarily determining the existential ability of users to participate in the conversation (i.e. you get banned from reddit for mentioning luigi) is the best solution we have. This is the fundamentally difficult problem of social media, all the programming, scaling up of server architecture, design of protocols, UIs and coding of clients, apps etc… that is the easy stuff honestly.

quit whining tho?

I really have very little tolerance for people on the continuum of techbro to naive-libertarian that try to invent lots of technical hypothetical solutions to this that all either boil down to systems of centralized control, or wildly unrealistic systems that will never take off the ground like fantastic depictions of flying machines…

Lets get straight to the point, the hard problem here is that philosophically there really is no shortcut to tell AI slop from genuine real information, there also can fundamentally be no logical operation you can perform that can seperate the “real” from “bot spam” because you fail at the first step of defining “real” especially if you are a techbro or libertarian fool who has never thought through the implications of any of this (see the shitshow that is the social media hellhole gab).

I think a lot of people I am tempted to refer to as “centrist”, though that is a problematic generalization it is of course more complicated, want to believe we just need more authoritarianism and advanced technology to solve this problem, and it is ultimately a dangerous fantasy.

At a philosophical level, which let me remind everyone, is the level you need to talk at before you ever bother thinking about technical implementations and advanced AI fact checkers blah blah blah… the only thing we can really do is design spaces that make it most likely for the human parts of real information to shine through in a way that makes it apparent that it is unlikely that information was generated by a bot or by a nefarious actor.

This is a game of probabilities, like trying to guess someone’s intentions or understand what they are feeling, we might get very very very good at doing so but ultimately there is always a significant likelihood that we are wrong either because of a lack of context or just because that is how things go with unpredictable chaotic things…

So then how do we design spaces so that they let the authenticity of “real” things shine through? I would argue the answer is genuine, spontaneous conversation and interaction in public or semi-public shared spaces. Forums, lemmy/reddit-likes and other forms of public discussion create conversations and as human beings we are INCREDIBLY good at observing interactions between strangers and deducing if those interactions feel genuine or not.

We can often be wrong about it, but anybody that has done theater for any amount of time, or really done any kind of art for an audience, knows that though the audience may not be able to put into words why something feels inauthentic the moment it becomes so they notice. That is why art performed to an audience is so endlessly compelling and why you can spend a lifetime learning from it.

What we can hope to do, and will always at some level fail at because we can never be ideal, is to help build the “real” collectively through public conversation, disagreement, explanation and sharing of sources of information.

The story here is how pathetic it is that as a country we are making university applicants nervous to talk about working for an emergency aid relief organization for vulnerable people when applying to go to their dream university/college.

Fuck my country.

Yeah, I don’t post private shit on forums, I discuss things publically so I can collectively have a conversation with countless other people.

If you want to have a private personal conversation sure use a private chat room, but I need that public space to discuss and learn, active publically accessible forums / lemmy / other equivalent communities are goldmines of information that benefits all.

Exactly, and centrists will shrug their shoulders and say “well if they aren’t going to pay taxes, do they really deserve to be here?” and be completely clueless to how blatantly hateful this is.

No, it isn’t.

Make no mistake a primary monetization vector for Discord is to scrape the shit out of everything said on its chats.

By suggesting Discord for privacy you are effectively only giving corporations the benefit of a commons while denying that to people.

Discord is NOT private, it is a corporation and your data is valuable.

Discord may offer to sell chat histories in certain communities (after “anonymizing” the data, yeah right like they will do that effectively) directly to AI companies.

Discord is only private in the sense that you are advocating for only a private for-profit corporation being able to enjoy the benefit of scraping and collecting our conversations.

This is not healing, this is the vision of the internet as a truly open shared space that benefits all… dying because people like gamers were too foolish to see the coming catastrophe from putting EVERY community under the control of a single company struggling to make a profit.

Ok there’s a point when you get so obsessed about shoving colonialism into EVERY conversation it just gets funny.

aw thank you, that is a very sincere compliment, as cynical as I can be sometimes it feels good to know I haven’t lost a youthful perspective : )

Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?-- in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow’d Expression away in the restless Slumber of these Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever 'tis not yet mapp’d, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,-- serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,-- Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ’s Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe til the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur’d and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,-- winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair.

Discord is a terrible format to manage large, complex communities and projects, I don’t know what you mean by an alternative to Discord because my argument is that Discord is shit for organizing.

Discord is great for chat, both voice and text, it is a great live space to have for a community. I don’t dispute that. Sure there hasn’t been good alternatives to recently for that specific usecase…

What I dispute, and what I am pointing out is that Discord ate forums, it ate all kinds of public, publically accessible formats for online communities that were much more easily searchable and collatable into useful information for everybody.

Discord is a fucking hallway of a thousand fractured silo’d conversations locked behind an account login. I hate Discord for destroying the internet before it which I could freely browse and learn so much more from.

Yeah I remember voicing this concern when all online communities seemed to be going to discord and people seemed to mainly laugh at me in response at the time.

Fuck Discord

East coast got lucky last year with hurricanes given the bonkers forecast, this year the ocean hasn’t cooled down any (very alarming) and east coast might get slammed.

It makes sense birds would have trouble with crossing Bass Strait seeing as most bird are Tweeters.

No, it is far less environmentally friendly than rc bots made of metal, plastic, and electronics full of nasty little things like batteries blasting, sawing, burning and smashing one another to pieces.