Update: After this article was published, Bluesky restored Kabas’ post and told 404 Media the following: “This was a case of our moderators applying the policy for non-consensual AI content strictly. After re-evaluating the newsworthy context, the moderation team is reinstating those posts.”
Bluesky deleted a viral, AI-generated protest video in which Donald Trump is sucking on Elon Musk’s toes because its moderators said it was “non-consensual explicit material.” The video was broadcast on televisions inside the office Housing and Urban Development earlier this week, and quickly went viral on Bluesky and Twitter.
Independent journalist Marisa Kabas obtained a video from a government employee and posted it on Bluesky, where it went viral. Tuesday night, Bluesky moderators deleted the video because they said it was “non-consensual explicit material.”
Other Bluesky users said that versions of the video they uploaded were also deleted, though it is still possible to find the video on the platform.
Technically speaking, the AI video of Trump sucking Musk’s toes, which had the words “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING” shown on top of it, is a nonconsensual AI-generated video, because Trump and Musk did not agree to it. But social media platform content moderation policies have always had carve outs that allow for the criticism of powerful people, especially the world’s richest man and the literal president of the United States.
For example, we once obtained Facebook’s internal rules about sexual content for content moderators, which included broad carveouts to allow for sexual content that criticized public figures and politicians. The First Amendment, which does not apply to social media companies but is relevant considering that Bluesky told Kabas she could not use the platform to “break the law,” has essentially unlimited protection for criticizing public figures in the way this video is doing.
Content moderation has been one of Bluesky’s growing pains over the last few months. The platform has millions of users but only a few dozen employees, meaning that perfect content moderation is impossible, and a lot of it necessarily needs to be automated. This is going to lead to mistakes. But the video Kabas posted was one of the most popular posts on the platform earlier this week and resulted in a national conversation about the protest. Deleting it—whether accidentally or because its moderation rules are so strict as to not allow for this type of reporting on a protest against the President of the United States—is a problem.
I’m not here to discuss how we need to be ethical in response to a fascist takeover. So we gotta play by the rules but they don’t?
Amazed people saying it is correct decision! This is two public figures and doing art or any form of expression material with their image should be protected under freedom of speech.
Correct. this is indeed the correct decision to remove the thing. BUT i have a feeling that this quick reaction does not compare to the speed of decision for normal people, especially women who get this kind of stuff made about them.
Also, note that I’m not saying it was bad to make the video, or have it run in public on hacked screens.
That is perfectly fine political commentary, by means of civil disobedience.Just that Bluesky is correct in it’s action to remove it from their service.
I seem to be in the minority here, but I am extremely uncomfortable the idea of non-consensual AI porn of anyone. Even people I despise. It’s so unethical that it just disgusts me. I understand why there are exceptions for those in positions of power, but I’d be more than happy to live in a world where there weren’t.
I agree with you.
However…there’s an argument to be made that the post itself is a form of criticism and falls under the free speech rules where it regards political figures. In many ways, it’s not any different than the drawings of Musk holding Trump’s puppet strings, or Putin and Trump riding a horse together. One is drawn and the other is animated, but they’re the same basic concept.
I understand however that that sets a disturbing precedent for what can and cannot be acceptable. But I don’t know where to draw that line. I just know that it has to be drawn somewhere.
I think…and this is my opinion…political figures are fair game for this, while there should be protections in place for private citizens, since political figures by their very ambition put themselves in the public sphere whereas private individuals do not.
In my opinion, public figures, including celebrities, give a degree of consent implicitly by seeking to be public figures. I dont think that for celebrities that should extend to lewd or objectionable material, but if your behavior has been to seek being a public figure you can’t be upset when people use your likeness in various ways.
For politicians, I would default to “literally everything is protected free speech”, with exceptions relating to things that are definitively false, damaging and unrelated to their public work.
“I have a picture of Elon musk engaging in pedophillia” is all those, and would be justifiably removed. Anything short of that though should be permitted.
Where do you draw the line for the rich fucks of the world? Realistic CGI? Realistic drawings? Edited photos?
This is what I was thinking about myself. Because we’re cool with political caricatures, right?
I guess the problem is that nobody wants to feature in non-consensual AI porn. I mean if you’d want to draw me getting shafted by Musk, that’d be weird, but a highly realistic video of the same event, that would be hard to explain to the missus.
Assuming you’re asking out of genuine curiosity, for me personally, I’d draw the line somewhere along “could this, or any frame of this, be mistaken for a real depiction of these people?” and “if this were a depiction of real children, how hard would the FBI come down on you?”
I understand that that’s not a practical way of creating law or moderating content, but I don’t care because I’m talking about my personal preference/comfort level. Not what I think should be policy. And frankly, I don’t know what should be policy or how to word it all in anti-loopholes lawyer-speak. I just know that this sucking toes thing crosses an ethical line for me and personally I hate it.
Putting it more idealistically: when I imagine living in utopia, non-consensual AI porn of people doesn’t exist in it. So in an effort to get closer to utopia, I disapprove of things that would not exist in an utopia.
I agree. I’ve thought about it a lot and I still don’t have any sympathy for them after the harm they’ve caused. I see why it’s news worthy enough they might reverse it, and why it would be political speech.
But also I think they made the right choice to take it down. If blsky wants to be the better platform, it needs to be better. And not having an exception for this is the right thing.
Anything bad that happens to a conservative is good. The world will only get better if they are made to repeatedly suffer.
No, we cannot think like that. It is true that fascism cannot be beat peacefully, but we should never want them to suffer. We should always strive to crush their fascist oligarchy with as little suffering ss possible.
“Whoever would be a slayer of monsters must take heed, or they may become the very monsters they slay… For when one peers into the abyss, the abyss peers back into thee” -FN
but we should never want them to suffer
No, we should, actually. It’s what they want for others and is the only way they might come to an understanding with what’s wrong with them.
Sympathy for the fascists is almost equal to support of them afaic
They don’t believe anything they aren’t experiencing first hand is actually a problem.
As much as I don’t like it, they have clearly made their own personal suffering a prerequisite for any solutions being allowed to move forward
It is true that fascism cannot be beat peacefully, but we should never want them to suffer
This is true. We should rapidly give them a lead injection, rather than have them suffer.
In this case, it’s clearly a form of speech and therefore protected under the 1st amendment.
I also don’t understand such a strong reaction to non-consensual AI porn. I mean, I don’t think it’s in good taste but I also don’t see why it warrants such a strong reaction. It’s not real. If I draw a stick figure with boobs and I put your name on it, do you believe I am committing a crime?
Nobody’s going to mistake that stick figure for the real me, though.
Protected from government censorship. Companies have strong protections allowing for controlling the speech on their platforms.
And if you asked Roberts he’d probably say since companies are people, as long as it’s used to protect conservatives they have protection for controlling their platforms speech as a 1st amendment right.
not claiming private organizations don’t have to the right to regulate speech on their platforms. was responding to statement
I understand why there are exceptions for those in positions of power, but I’d be more than happy to live in a world where there weren’t.
which to me implies some sort of state censorship on this type of material
Really, I just wanted to understand the rationale behind the desire to ban this type of material.
On the topic of Judge Roberts, on a similar although different legal issue
He wrote the Court’s opinion in United States v. Stevens (2010), invalidating a federal law that criminalized the creation or dissemination of images of animal cruelty. The government had argued that such images should be a new unprotected category of speech akin to child pornography. Roberts emphatically rejected that proposition, writing that the Court does not have “freewheeling authority to declare new categories of speech outside the scope of the First Amendment.” Roberts also wrote the Court’s opinion in Snyder v. Phelps (2011), ruling that the First Amendment prohibited the imposition of civil liability against the Westboro Baptist Church for their highly offensive picketing near the funeral of a slain serviceman.
In oft-cited language, Roberts wrote:
“Speech is powerful. It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate. That choice requires that we shield Westboro from tort liability for its picketing in this case.”
If Judge Roberts were to be consistent, and I make no such claims that he will ever be consistent, I believe he would likewise not support banning fake AI porn.
In my country the laws about publishing photos etc are different for anyone an “people of public interest”. So yeah imo it should be okay to create cartoons or whatever of politicians without their permission - not porn ofc. Including ai generated stuff, but that one should be marked as such , given how realistic it is now
Bluesky will become just the same az elonx…
It already is
Ah, the rewards of moderation: the best move is not to play. Fuck it is & has always been a better answer. Anarchy of the early internet was better than letting some paternalistic authority decide the right images & words to allow us to see, and decentralization isn’t a bad idea.
Yet the forward-thinking people of today know better and insist that with their brave, new moderation they’ll paternalize better without stopping to acknowledge how horribly broken, arbitrary, & fallible that entire approach is. Instead of learning what we already knew, social media keeps repeating the same dumb mistakes, and people clamor to the newest iteration of it.
You clearly never were the victim back in those days. Neither do you realize this approach doesn’t work on the modern web even in the slightest, unless you want the basics of both enlightenment and therefore science and democracy crumbling down even faster.
Anarchism is never an answer, it’s usually willful ignorance about there being any problems.
Anarchism is never an answer, it’s usually willful ignorance about there being any problems.
AnCaps drive me nuts. They want to dismantle democratic institutions while simultaneously licking the boots of unelected institutions.
I guess I don’t really consider AnCaps to be Anarchists because Anarchy is generally leftist philosophy. Traditional anarchy is like small government socialism: empowered local unions and city governments.
You know what’s funny about Stalinism that everyone forgets about?
Its structures were similar to what you describe on the lower level. Districts and factories and such all had their councils (soviet means council), from which representatives were elected to councils of the upper level. They still were pretty despotic most of that period, because crowd rule leads to despotism.
Democracy shouldn’t be made too small and too unavoidable. In some sense an imagined hillbilly village is democratic with that problem.
Point being that this didn’t look much like some people imagine anarchy.
Anyway, ancaps are not particularly attached to the name, and themselves prefer the words “voluntarism” and “agorism” and a few others. But it’s one of the most common names for the ideology.
People against ancaps usually only disagree with them in the way institutions are being dismantled.
In any case looking through the eyes of an ancap you might get valuable insights, and this thought should be obvious for an intelligent person of any school in regards to any other.
Anarchism is never an answer
This isn’t anarchism, as described. Anarchism, like actual anarchism, is the only likely solution, imo. No gods, no masters, no idols.
Solution involves answers where to get energy to dig in the gods, masters and idols. They are well-armed and those seeking solutions are not.
I think there’s a huge difference between fighting bullying or hate speech against minorities. Another thing is making fun of very specific and very public people.
Elon acts like a new Reddit mod drunk on power. He is the guy screaming in the comments that he knows how to run a forum better and seized the chance, and now he cannot fathom why people hate him.
You need some kind of moderation for user generated content, even if it’s only to comply with takedowns related to law (and I’m not talking about DMCA).
You do remember snuff and goatse and csam of the early internet, I hope.
Even with that of course it was better, because that stuff still floats around, and small groups of enjoyers easily find ways to share it over mainstream platforms.
I’m not even talking about big groups of enjoyers, ISIS (rebranded sometimes), Turkey, Azerbaijan, Israel, Myanma’s regime, cartels and everyone share what they want of snuff genre, and it holds long enough.
In text communication their points of view are also less likely to be banned or suppressed than mine.
So yes.
Yet the forward-thinking people of today know better and insist that with their brave, new moderation they’ll paternalize better
They don’t think so, just use the opportunity to do this stuff in area where immunity against it is not yet established.
There are very few stupid people in positions of power, competition is a bitch.
I’m weirded out when people say they want zero moderation. I really don’t want to see any more beheading or CSAM and moderation can prevent that.
Moderation should be optional .
Say, a message may have any amount of “moderating authority” verdicts, where a user might set up whether they see only messages vetted by authority A, only by authority B, only by A logical-or B, or all messages not blacklisted by authority A, and plenty of other variants, say, we trust authority C unless authority F thinks otherwise, because we trust authority F to know things C is trying to reduce in visibility.
Filtering and censorship are two different tasks. We don’t need censorship to avoid seeing CSAM. Filtering is enough.
This fallacy is very easy to encounter, people justify by their unwillingness to encounter something the need to censor it for everyone as if that were not solvable. They also refuse to see that’s technically solvable. Such a “verdict” from moderation authority, by the way, is as hard to do as an upvote or a downvote.
For a human or even a group of humans it’s hard to pre-moderate every post in a period of time, but that’s solvable too - by putting, yes, an AI classifier before humans and making humans check only uncertain cases (or certain ones someone complained about, or certain ones another good moderation authority flagged the opposite, you get the idea).
I like that subject, I think it’s very important for the Web to have a good future.
people justify by their unwillingness to encounter something the need to censor it for everyone…
I can’t engage in good faith with someone who says this about CSAM.
Filtering and censorship are two different tasks. We don’t need censorship to avoid seeing CSAM. Filtering is enough.
No it is not. People are not tagging their shit properly when it is illegal.
I can’t engage in good faith
Right, you can’t.
If someone posts CSAM, police should get their butts to that someone’s place.
No it is not. People are not tagging their shit properly when it is illegal.
What I described doesn’t have anything to do with people tagging what they post. It’s about users choosing the logic of interpreting moderation decisions. But I’ve described it very clearly in the previous comment, so please read it or leave the thread.
Fuck it is & has always been a better answer
Sure. Unless you live in a place that have laws and laws enforcement. In that case, it’s “fuck it and get burnt down”.
I miss the early days of the internet when it was still a wild west.
Something like I hate you myg0t 2 or Pico’s School would have gotten the creators cancelled if released in 2025.
Note on the term canceling. Independent creators cannot, by definition, get canceled. Unless you literally are under a production or publishing contract that gets actually canceled due to something you said or did, you were not canceled. Being unpopular is not getting canceled, neither is receiving public outrage due to being bad or unpopular. Even in a figurative sense, just the fact that the videos were published to YouTube and can still be viewed means they were not canceled. They just fell out of the zeitgeist and aren’t popular anymore, that happens to 99% of entertainment content.
I had to hack an ex’s account once to get the revenge porn they posted of me taken down.
There’s a balance at the end of the day.
Illegal content has always been unprotected & subject to removal by the law. Moderation policies wouldn’t necessarily remove porn presumed to be legal, either, so moderation is still a crapshoot.
Still, that sucks.
Bluesky had better take care that they not act like other cowardly tech media
So you don’t remember Jack Dorsey’s shenanigans ?
No. I don’t
This guy censored the POTUS (Granted it was Trump)
If they don’t it is only because they are waiting to obtain a higher share of the social media market.
Jumping ship from one corporate owned social media to another corporate owned social media isn’t a smart move. There is nothing about Bluesky that will prevent it from becoming X in the future. People joining now are only adding to the network effect that will make leaving more difficult in a decade or two.
The problem of social media won’t be solved by choosing which dictator’s rule you want to live under. You don’t have the freedom to speak and express yourself if you give someone veto power over what you write.
I guess I get it. They would not like to set precedent to allow non-consensual AI generated porn on the platform. Seems reasonable. That said, fuck Donny. The video is hilarious. It’s fine if Bluesky doesn’t host it though.
Holy shit. A reasonable take from someone who clearly leaves the house.
Well, looks like they put it back up. I think I agree with you though. It might be better for them to restrict this. Frankly republican incels excel at generating this kind of content and this sets the precedent that Bluesky will welcome such AI garbage. I’m not arguing that this stuff shouldn’t be made in good spirit, but for a serious platform to not moderate it out I think invites chaos.
There’s plenty of legal precedent for newsworthiness to supersede some rules in the name of the freedom of the Press. It makes sense that I’m not allowed (at least where I live) to post a non-consensual pictures of someone off the street. But it would not make sense if I was forbidden from posting a picture of the Prime Minister visiting a school for example. That’s newsworthy and therefore the public interest outweighs his right to privacy.
The AI video of Trump/Musk made a bunch of headlines because it was hacked onto a government building. On top of that it’s satire of public figures and – I can’t believe that needs saying – is clearly not meant to provide sexual gratification.
Corpos and bureaucracies would have you believe nuance doesn’t belong in moderation decisions, but that’s a fallacy and an flimsy shield to hide behind to justify making absolutely terrible braindead decisions at best, and political instrumentation of rules at worst. We should celebrate any time when moderators are given latitude to not stick to dumb rules (as long as this latitude is not being used for evil), and shame any company that censors legitimate satire of the elites based on bullshit rules meant to protect the little people.
That’s a really thin line. I have a hard time imagining anyone sticking to this same argument if the satire were directed towards someone they admired in a similar position of power. The prime minister visiting a school is a world away from AI generated content of something that never actually happened. Leaving nuance out of these policies isn’t some corporation pulling wool over our eyes, it’s just really hard to do nuance at scale without bias and commotion.
I have a hard time imagining anyone sticking to this same argument if the satire were directed towards someone they admired in a similar position of power
I have a hard time imagining a reasonable person being mad at satire of a politician. Like maybe it’s a cultural divide and I’m not American so I don’t view politics as team sports and my country has a stronger history of political satire than the often pathetically meek American political cartoons, but you can make a satirical deepfake of the politicians I voted in last election if you want.
If the deepfake was not obviously related to current political events or wasn’t obviously fake, the point could be arguable at least as a matter of good taste. As it stands, the satire is obvious, harmless, and topical. It is therefore terrifying that censoring it is even a question. How far the concept of free speech has fallen that it refers to Seig Heiling but a 2s gif of Trump sucking some toes apparently crosses a line.
Yeah I really don’t like that this is probably going to end up being used to argue that deepfake porn of public figures is ok as long as it is “satire”.
I don’t really care about the Trump x Musk one but I know for a fact that this will lead to MAGAs doing the same shit to AOC and any other prominent woman on the democrat side.
And that would be okay
Exactly.
Content featuring public figures should be given extra lenience, because if we can’t openly criticize our leaders, we aren’t free. So as long as it’s either factually correct or clearly parody/satire/etc, it should be allowed. Defamation and libel rules should have a very high bar for conviction when it comes to public figures.
This was obviously satire, and well done at that. Good on BlueSky for restoring it, I hope they fix whatever process got it pulled.
Only because I find these specific videos to be quite funny, maybe there can be a “satire/criticism of a public figure” exception that could exist
I’ll just explain why that is a horrible idea with three simple letters:
A. O. C.
I am standing on the wire😅 what is the problem with satire and AOC (whatever that is)?
The problem is the combination of AOC and nonconsentual explicit AI content. Overly broad rules might make that fall under satire, which is why caution is advised when devising such rules.
Fuck. Good point. Guess I’ll just have to come to peace with me being a hypocrite when it comes to what I find acceptable.
Satire is already legal and right wingers have already called for her to be shot or worse and gotten away with it. Pandora’s box isn’t closed, it’s long been open.
I don’t like AOC, but any threat of of call for violence is unacceptable regardless of the target. I don’t care if it’s despicable people like Trump, violence against an individual isn’t the answer. Violence against ideas, however, is fine.
There are politicians that I kind of like, and they should also not be above reproach. Bring all their bad takes into the light and let’s talk about them.
There’s already multiple LoRA of her on civitai.
That’s a pretty big loophole. I mean, imagine the same exact video with Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi. It takes a significantly different subtext when the subjects are women. But the subtext doesn’t really matter to the morality of the act.
Either involuntary AI generated pornography is wrong or it isn’t. I think it’s wrong. Do Trump and Musk deserve it? Sure, but it’s still wrong. Do I feel bad for them? No, because they deserve it. But it’s still not something I would do, or suggest anyone else do, and if the creator is prosecuted, I’m not going to defend them.
It’s satire, and yeah, I think satire of Harris skipping the primary process through “backroom deals” could be criticized with a similar video.
As long as there’s a point to the video, it’s speech. Make it clear that it’s AI gen satire and I think it’s fine, just don’t make more explicit than necessary to get the point across.
Except you know that sexual exploitation has a different effect on women than men. Trump revels in his playboy reputation. Harris was accused of using sex to get ahead in politics. And you know that conservatives would believe that the video was real while they jerk off to it. Those dipshits still think Michelle Obama was a man.
Trump rapes women. He’s not entitled to the same level of respect as almost anyone. He is entitled to the same laws, on that we agree.
And you know that conservatives would believe that the video was real while they jerk off to it
It doesn’t matter what they believe, what matters is that it’s explicitly parody or satire. Idiots will be idiots despite your best efforts to prevent it.
Either involuntary AI generated pornography is wrong or it isn’t.
Agree. Laws have to be applied evenly, or else they are not Laws.
Good thing you put a permissive license on that so the whole of humanity can benefit.
These uh… aren’t laws. They’re community guidelines. I think one does not have to get so anal about preserving the rights of vulnerable people while also maintaining an “even application” because they’re two different situations.
Not even the law is black and white, it’s still tweaked and interpreted by judges and lawyers. It’s obvious that AI-generated pornography of women in political office is completely different from a video of a fascist dictator making out with the feet of another fascist. Get your head checked.
It’s not porn tho…not even a little bit.
It is if you are into feet, lmao
So if I’m into words, are libraries considered porn?
Your analogy doesn’t hold. Words aren’t human body parts.
Is this considered porn? I am certainly, along with at least hundreds of millions of people, into shirtless Ryan Gosling. Specifically his pecs and abs.
Look, I am taking the piss, but not everything that might turn someone on for one reason or another is porn. The AI video of Trump is clearly satire and meant to disgust. What’s next, we can’t make satirical drawings of him grovelling at Putin’s feet because some people have a humiliation fetish?
I’ll admit defeat when I’m defeated.
At least you haven’t been defeeted.
Tarantino nods in agreement
Are we about to delve into the legal status of squat cobbler
Bluesky is BS
Put it on Facebook! Ol’ Zuck decided all the guardrails pretty much needed to go so. Post and do whatever. Plus, the people who should see it most are those still hanging around on Facebook 🤣
Ugh but then I’d have to use Facebook
WTF bluesky.
More trash
Their moderation has been garbage lately. They’re wrongly banning people for things they didn’t do. It’s just premusk twitter at this point. The real fediverse is a better vet medium and long term
It’s just premusk twitter at this point.
I mean, given that Jack Dorsey founded it as basically the “not Twitter Twitter” after musk bought the main one, I don’t think it’s surprising to see it face basically the same moderation issues in the name of being “even-handed”
fwiw they restored the post and blamed it on a moderator being too strict in applying a policy regarding non consensual ai porn. It’s objectively good they have policies banning such things but it was completely obvious from context that this was not meant to be pornographic at all
As such, one could easily read it with cynicism as responding to backlash as they only reviewed said moderators actions after this article came out and the associated clamor
Poor moderator probably had a foot fetish
Or more likely a Trump fetish.
I don’t want to watch this video please
Simple solution to all this crap:
MASTODON.
I do not understand why people use BlueSky We already had the alternative!!! It was here first and many had already created accounts… Then just went back to Twitter
because there is zero marketing for mastodon. zero sex-appeal to mastodon.
bluesky was a better car salesman selling the same old car twitter had.
The sad truth is that the vast majority of people WANT an algorithm to tell them what they like.
Mastodon requires you to actually have your own opinions going in, and follow material based on that.
It was far faster and easier to build up a feed of enjoyable content on BlueSky. My Mastodon feed has sat almost completely empty, and I’ve only been able to find a few news-reposters there.
And I’m tech-savvy. Imagine how it is for other social media users.
Yes, exactly this. Like something might be technically better but unless it’s doing its main job of actually connecting people it’s not going to work.
I wish more FOSS nerds understood this.
Many FOSS nerds don’t even understand the necessity of a user-friendly GUI…
Some of them will actively advocate for user-unfriendliness to keep out the noobs which… I mean the number of psy-ops in the community has to be non-zero.
I don’t agree that Mastodon is technically better, but it was first so it should have first mover advantage.
I think it largely comes down to marketing. Mastodon is marketed by word of mouth, and BlueSky has an actual marketing team.
By “technically better” I mean it actually delivers on its technical promises of decentralisation, as opposed to bluesky that simply uses decentralisation as a buzzword without being actually open source and without allowing real competition for the main - centralised - instance.
I think mastodon has actual legs in that if bluesky fails to actually open up, it will enshittify and there will be another exodus. Mastodon has technical barriers to that kind problem, so it will still be there to pick up the pieces. The decentralised nature protects the network from enshittifying and means it will tend not to get exoduses like central platforms do. It’s a matter of making that growth count.
If in that time mastodon has worked on its discovery features, it might be finally ready to capture that growth.
If bluesky manages to properly decentralise then I imagine mastodon will not need to pick up the slack and will either join the network or fade into irrelevancy.
Hard to say which way it will go. I don’t hold out a lot of hope for bluesky changing its ways, and who knows when mastodon will improve in this way.
Bluesky will never be able to properly decentralize, since the costs are prohibitive and cannot be afforded by normal users. The shared heap concept used is currently somewhere around 10-15 TB storage, which is already pretty expensive to host for a single person, and that’s only the STORAGE for a single host NOW - no redundancy, no backups, no traffic and no worldwide infrastructure to keep the response time down. That’s a huge difference to a Mastodon instance, which can be run from a pretty cheap setup and is afforable for most people.
Also, the way Bluesky implements how user identities are handled makes account migration more a theoretical possibility than a believable “decentralization”. Theoretically Bluesky gives a credible exit strategy, where the shared heap can be copied by another organisation in case of loss of user trust or bankruptcy of the company and everyone can just switch over and carry on without losing a single post, but there are a lot of big if’s in that theory.
Here’s the source, from Christine Lemmer-Webber who worked on ActivityPub: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Oh, I didn’t realise the technical barriers were that steep. In that case I think I’m right to say that Mastodon is technically better for achieving the decentralisation it promises.
That’s a great resource, I’m going to follow them. Plus the link to Spritely was really interesting. Looks like it’s meant to be a successor to ActivityPub, which is quite exciting. From what I’ve seen activity pub is pretty limited in the ways it can enable interaction, like how mastodon posts look so funky on lemmy.
Plus, holy web 1.0, that’s a motherfucking website.
My understanding is that BlueSky is distributed, meaning there’s no single point of failure and nodes are independent. So scaling up should just mean adding more nodes, not having to scale vertically.
Distributed computing is a form of decentralization where the goal is resilience of the platform, not decentralization of control. The goal is very different from the Fediverse, which is to decentralize control, with resilience being a nice side effect.
Mastodon has technical barriers to that kind problem
It also has technical barriers to widespread adoption, hence why BlueSky is winning. I’lf BlueSky fails, people will just go to whatever alternative has a healthy marketing budget and low barrier to entry.
It doesn’t matter how distributed the servers are. You could say any centralised platform is “distributed” if it has at least one redundant server, which plenty of them do. Youtube has servers all over the world. That has nothing to do with enshittification and it’s not the feature I was talking about.
The thing that supposedly set bluesky apart was that they would be using a decentralised protocol that allowed anyone who wanted to to operate their own server with full control over their data. You can actually see some people posting from different domains.
That’s a nice idea and it trades on the rising popularity of the fediverse, but it’s not doing it in an open manner because the software isn’t open and separate instances are locked to 10 users maximum unless the central authority allows them more. That means it’s not meaningfully decentralised, but it’s still trying to capitalise on the concept. It can still be torpedoed by one company’s bad business decisions.
That’s what I was referring to.
And I said mastodon might be able to take in the exodus if they improve, so I guess I agree with your last point.
We do need better onboarding. I wonder if you could make an equivalent of the “discovery” feed that wasn’t abusive to the user
- Bluesky is more easily usable
- More people they want to follow are on Bluesky
Instead of complaining we need to work on making Masto more welcoming to new users and amplifying the advantages it has over Bluesky
Honestly, that ship has sailed, I think. When Musk first took over Twitter and everyone was bailing, if Mastodon was a viable alternative it could have taken off.
Now that Bluesky has overtaken them, and is seen as the alternative to Twitter, I think the opportunity has been lost.
That’s quite a good point. Here’s a little thought experiment, though: If we woke up tomorrow and Mastodon looked just like Bluesky (but with a different color scheme) and featured 100% two-way integration with Bluesky…
Essentially, if Mastodon became hands down the most user-friendly and engaging option—would that be enough to make a meaningful difference in its adoption curve?
Possibly, although anyone who already has an account on Bluesky would likely stay there, and Bluesky has the upper hand in name recognition, and there is the uphill battle of explaining the concept of federation to people who have little interest in technology.
And that’s if, hypothetically speaking, Mastodon was as easy to use.
It’s not happening. Also, if it’s anything like here, the non stop Linuxposting would probably annoy people.
Love mastodon but Bluesky has a lot of cool features like starter packs and lists and feeds + the ability to do your own moderation. It’s really customizable that way + there a lot of users… In the end people will go where people are. Besides, mastodon is cool because its still underground and is filled with nerds like the early internet. Do we really want all the normies to join?
Same discussion in every single post on either Mastodon or Bluesky.
