Just getting the chance to check this out. Moderation software that puts human moderators' wellbeing and relationships at its center. Moderation work is community-building work, and no one's building community like the Blacksky team. Congratulations y'all, this looks incredible 🌰

I just verified @bellack.com using Bluesky's new verification system. Try verifying someone yourself using @cred.blue's verifier tool: cred.blue/verifier

Social media platforms are using terms of service to subvert the rule of law. New data from the ASML Transparency Hub, compiled by students at Boston University, has the receipts. Mandatory arbitration clauses and class action bans abound. Details in this week's Platformocracy and this thread 1/10

Constant erosion of our rights by companies that have proven they are not trustworthy counterparties.

“Section 14 of the Press Law ordered editors ‘to keep out of the newspapers anything which…tends to weaken the strength of the German Reich, outwardly or inwardly.’” - William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 405

If we made the green energy transition this war would be unthinkable and these authoritarians wouldn’t be in power — not in the US, not in Iran, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Russia. Hydrocarbons are killing our freedom and just plain killing us.

Dammit, Franklin

Holy s**t, this is amazing. An app space that is keyed off of your AT Proto ID (the account you use for Bluesky, but you can control and move anywhere).

Democracy deserves invention, not nihilism. We've spent 17 years dunking on Peter Thiel's infamous assertion that freedom and democracy are incompatible, but that's no reason to stop now. I take my turn in this week's Platformocracy. Free, weekly, snarky - subscribe now!

🚨🇺🇸

If someone wrote this entire episode as a piece of fiction just 5 years ago, you would have been told it was too shitty for even a knock-off call of duty campaign.

Living in a science fiction novel. Not one of the ones with fun robots and exciting spaceships.

This is my kind of humor.

Your regular reminder that normal, mainstream, pro-democracy political parties do not make restricting suffrage the central pillar of their policy platform

i just think it’s neat for people to try offering easy paid pds hosting options with operational concerns covered

The evolution of democracy over time, largely as a function of population growth, points to different models of governance for different sizes of online communities. And suggests the largest platforms might require something entirely new. In this week's Platformocracy, and this thread. 1/6

As I get older I'm coming to increasingly radical views like "you have to do things to get good at them" and "you have to think about problems to solve them"

Stop writing that someone writes “a Substack.” You wouldn’t say that someone writes “a beehiiv” or “a Medium.” I don’t write “a WordPress.”

This morning we’re over 3,000 strong. Invite codes are now arriving within 24 hours of registration. How many will we be by the end of the day?

It's not just that we live under private government of the monopolies, but it's private government by casinos. #Rebuild

Hey New Jersey! Did you know that besides the Roxbury concentration camp, ICE is also trying to lease space for 40 lawyers in Roseland? Tell Aresco Management (the owners), that you don't want ICE functionaries operating in a building with a day care center. Details in attached image. #newjersey

Now more than ever, you don't have to be cutting and pasting batshit posts that you have seen over on That Other Site and also, for fuck's sake, get off That Other Site, again, now more than ever

> @covie93.bsky.social

Magna Carta proves we deserve the rule of law online. No, really. Forcing King John to acknowledge the law of “the law of the land” over "the law of the kingdom" was a radical act. Online platforms should also be subject to the laws of the communities they serve, not the will of their owners. 1/5

Just a reminder that governments can invalidate or destroy the things you rely on to be seen as a valid, legal participant in society pretty much at will. So if you think you’re good bc you’re not trans or not in Kansas or whatever you’re lying to yourself while danger gets closer to your community.

CW: transphobia. See, this is why it can be painful to know too much history.🫤 This post implies that what is happening in Kansas is *similar* to what the nazis did. But it's not just similar. It's *identical*. In 1933, nazis revoked trans people's documents. Before 1938. Paragraph 175 and 183.

RESEARCHERS AND REGULATORS! Harvard’s Applied Social Media Lab is launching a vital new corpus of 22,000 privacy policies, terms & conditions, and community standards for over 300 companies. Woohoo!

In case you wondered why I named my newsletter Platformocracy (as something in opposition to democracy)…

awww

“We were stunned [about the prescience] for a while, but we’ve really gotten to the point where it’s really sad. It’s just sad how predictable and lame and obvious and wrong it all is. Fascism is just a total fail in the end.” www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-featur...

Bluesky should not get into this idea that blocking you is a problem. You can be blocked for any reason. You can be blocked because your pfp is annoying. You can be blocked because your vibe sucks. If you take this personally I think that’s also a reason you can be blocked.

Whoa.

Platforms are marching toward ubiquitous age verification without giving us anything in return. At a minimum, verified accounts deserve due process before being terminated. In this week's Platformocracy, I look at whether safety requires secrecy, and the increasing role of enhanced verification.

My theory is that we're here specifically because of this. That we have not lived through dictatorship and have no living memory of war within our territory, so we take our liberties for granted, and wrongly believe we'll get to keep them even if we vote criminals into office.

Indiana Jones and the Last Muppet

“my children might see the children I voted to put in shackles, how shall they grow up”

This is a good piece.

Apparently people aren't excited about spending $56,000 per ticket to attend a World Cup game. Hmmm, what else could be contributing to a lack of hype?

PLATFORMOCRACY: Platforms say their processes are thorough and fair, but they frequently restore terminated accounts when there's public outcry. Are they getting it wrong all the time, or are they throwing principle overboard to tamp down criticism? Transparency would help them, as well as us. 1/5

We plan to launch the Torment Nexus feature during a volatile period of exceptionally high social torment [see internal Torment Index prediction market]. During limited testing, we expect to discover whether we will require support from Feeds and Algorithms to increase background torment for launch.

An evergreen classic for us evolution nerds.

This blew up fast, and some others seem to have tracked down the original quote attributed to Gareth Klieber, documented by Dan Wentzel (@danwentzel.urbanists.social.ap.brid.gy) , : urbanists.social/@danwentzel/...

By the way, for those of you not in MN: Homan’s strategy was to withdraw some agents, so it felt like we were in the denouement of the crisis, and then escalate hard against observers. They’re being incredibly aggressive with observers now. National media may not want to check out just yet

GM: Charisma check. Mamdani: [rolls natural 20] GM: that’s a d6 how did you Mamdani: [direct to camera] Did you know you can check out board games at your local public library? 😊

Basic problem of *global* social media. You don't need to give access rights to the second group for it to be media that is social. It might even be diluting social interaction by forcing it to double as a global publication

Online account termination is often a Kafkaesque and ineffective process that incinerates user trust. Due process ideals like "innocent until proven guilty" and independent judges are thrown out the window. We could do better with three practical changes. Summary thread here, details at link. 1/7