There was already a *lot* going on with Bluesky, and now it's under even more pressure. I wrote about how I think about moderation, affordances, expectations, human needs, and powerful trolls for @techpolicypress.bsky.social www.techpolicy.press/trump-admini...

Been arguing with myself all morning about whether this fits BlueSky's stated user control ethos or not. I've figured out why as a technical matter it does, but as a social matter eeehhhh.

🌐 From the first web page created in 1991… to 1 trillion web pages archived today. Every meme, blog, tweet & vanished site is part of our shared story. This is our collective memory. And it’s being saved. Join in our celebration this October: blog.archive.org/trillion/ #Wayback1T #WaybackMachine

Neat! www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Posts about scientific research on Bluesky receive substantially more attention than similar posts on Twitter. More importantly, you're far less likely to get sexist or racist replies.

not at all surprising: arstechnica.com/science/2025...

"After two decades of sharing more online, it looks like we've decided to share less. New polling shows that nearly a third of all social media users post less than they did a year ago. That trend is especially true for adults in Gen Z." www.bbc.com/worklife/art...

Dead or 'unalive'? How social platforms — and algorithms — are shaping the way we talk. www.cbc.ca/radio/sunday...

I think it's now possible to make a poli-sci course that equips one for modern political analysis better than most classic theory and has a syllabus sourced entirely from random internet posts. Text 1. Wilhoit's Law, born as part of a 2018 blog comment crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l...

I tried to put into (many) words something I've tried to put a finger on for years: everything is weirdly sexual now because nothing is allowed to be overtly, actually sexual anymore www.404media.co/egg-yolk-pop...

This is a fantastic article that I think helped me understand why puriteens constantly insist that everything is so sexual when overt sexuality is at what feels like an all-time low in my lifetime: With the biggest social media platforms banning porn, creators seek to eroticize everything else.

I think there’s something to be said about Bluesky’s lack of mainstream appeal. But the problem is “Bluesky with mainstream appeal” already exists: it’s called Threads. So the question is “How does Bluesky grow without becoming Threads 2.0?”

For the FT, I wrote an essay about why the daily experience of the Internet keeps getting worse, tipping us into madness and conflict. I gather ideas about slop, enshittification, and dead internet theory under what I call "the hostile Internet." www.ft.com/content/5d06...

my goodness these people truly have zero ideas left www.theverge.com/news/649246/...

Hate speech and the proliferation of extremism online have a chilling effect on online speech through intimidation and fear. A philosophy professor explains how restrictions on hate speech can support #freespeech rather than undermining it. buff.ly/0MKbF7u Michael Gregory, Clemson University

For anyone who hasn’t gotten into the habit yet: One thing about alt text is that it makes it MUCH easier to find an old post a few months from now. You’re not just making your posts more accessible for others today, you’re also doing future you a favor.

As Bluesky has grown, I've seen a lot of backsliding on alt text. Please try to be considerate to others and include alt text with all of your images. It helps everyone. Indeed, in the "accessibility" setting in Bluesky you can set it to make sure you add alt text, which is a useful thing to do.

Twitch is seen as a safe haven by some creators in marginalized groups, as platforms like X and Facebook/Instagram roll back content moderation. digiday.com/media/as-pla...

The Effects and Non-Effects of Social Sanctions from User Jury-Based Content Moderation Decisions on Weibo: https://osf.io/vbx65

YouTube CEO on content moderation: ‘Where the world was five years ago is very different’ than today” www.semafor.com/article/03/2...

"Bluesky’s Radical Idea: Let Users Set the Rules of Social Media" www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

So out of curiosity, what's the best accessibly written non-tome-length "this is the reality and these are the stakes of trust & safety/moderation/governance work at scale" primer that surely must exist to get understandably twitchy civilians across networks up to speed?

Once, Meta gave researchers like @davidlazer.bsky.social & @sgonzalezbailon.bsky.social an unprecedented level of access to data on content moderation and the spread of viral posts. Now, Meta is rolling back the protections they studied––and unlikely to greenlight more research.

maybe this will solve us china relations or maybe this is an actual natsec concern that we have yet to understand restofworld.org/2025/tiktok-...

One thing abt Meta's changes I haven't seen as much commentary on is the process. Meta spent years being all "heavy is the head that wears the crown" and setting up the oversight board, citizens assemblies, consultation etc to legitimate decisionmaking. Psych! It is and will always be "Mark says".

This is really interesting from a T&S policy perspective. Of course, my personal preference is “if in doubt, leave it up” (because people can then decide for themselves whether to view it or not)

The page and videos should absolutely be made available to journalists and researchers.

inspired by the endless whinge about how the internet is not "real", and how it's starting to feel Very Not Real more than usual. i went on a rant just to pin down a feeling on how we perceive our cyberspace connections.

230 cameo in Squid Game 2

Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster "throttle" access to e-books by selling them to libraries for either a limited time or a limited number of circulations — sometimes both.

I wrote about how Bluesky is starting to make it, which means @aaron.bsky.team and team have to handle the ugly stuff that comes with a popular social media platform, including trolls, scammers, pedophiles, and authoritarian government propaganda.

yeah this definitely feels like double jeopardy

Just five days left to support Techdirt, and (if we meet our goal) get a very fun card game too. www.techdirt.com/2024/12/14/f...

This is a very succinct way of describing the problem. The issue is no longer simply moderating content so users don’t see what they don’t want to see. The issue is moderating adversarial networks who want to prey on a user base. Composable moderation exists only within the first of those concepts.

Social media content moderation isn’t a matter of just crowd-sourcing slapping some labels on offending content—it’s literally a microcosm of the horrible and messy project of the building and governance of civilization, and all the problems that come with that

As the days pass, I'm increasingly leaning into Bluesky management seeing Bluesky as a protocol, not a platform, that Singal is a "platform" issue that they don't want to handle.

Sans strong defensive enforcement, the main difference between here and X is that X *intentionally* makes itself more toxic while Bluesky is just letting it happen. Bottom line: Federation and composable are great for federated users, but for them to work, bsky.social needs to create a stable base.

While I appreciate that these are the core concepts that led to this platform being built, most people have fewer sunk costs here than they did on Twitter, and if this place turns toxic, most will leave just as fast as they came.

Bluesky's recent success is not driven by federation or composable moderation, it's driven by the desire for a less toxic ecosystem. This creates inherent tension between the company's founding principles and the reasons for its growth. Or more succinctly, no policy survives contact with the users.

I'm fascinated by the Singal discourse because it feels like a real inflection point for Bluesky. There's what the platform owners want to use it for (a springboard to establish a decentralized social media protocol), and what its users hope it will be (Twitter but aligned for good).

We have long known that "emotion = distribution" www.niemanlab.org/2011/02/like... In a paper published in 2010/11, our @gruzd.ca, S. Dorion & @philipmai.com showed that content w/strong emotional valence gets more engagement. ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/571...

If you can't post real-world events of import, then this site is fundamentally incapable of replacing twitter. It was the whole fucking point of that site.

@jay.bsky.team There's no arguing with this. I value the moderation and feed curation options on bluesky, O specifically do not want you to take that over for me.

would be somewhat bizarre if twitter basically ended up as worldstar or kick or something, only surviving because it allows stuff that is banned on other platforms

THE PEOPLE DESERVE TO SEE THIS CREEP BITE IT

Still have not gotten an answer as to why the video is in other people’s posts, it’s clearly newsworthy, there’s a warning label that I absolutely used and then I got this email. I don’t really give a shit at the end of the day but if I’m gonna walk a fine line I wanna know where it is at the least.

Really hope this is an error. A big part of Bluesky’s appeal (to me) is composable moderation allowing me to choose what I want to see.

Bluesky's head of trust and safety says a safe space requires a mix of humans, automation and tools. “I still have to throw humans at a huge chunk of the problems because there’s all the gray-area content,” Aaron Rodericks, Bluesky’s head of trust and safety, told platformer.news. More: