Pawlicker's Pleroma Experiment Blog on Nostr: A few months ago, I was passed an invite code to Bluesky by The Original X (thanks a ...
A few months ago, I was passed an invite code to Bluesky by The Original X (npub13d5…jhcn) (thanks a lot!). I’ve been lurking the site once every few days but as I’ve lost interest in doing even that, I think it’s a good time to write what my feelings on it are.
Essentially Bluesky is a very unique kind of containment site; a site made for those who were angry at a different website instead of banned from a different website. Historically these websites have done poorly, and many friends I still have in the furry fandom have abandoned their account after they realized others are not using it often and interaction ratios are mediocre. The community is truly something else however. Essentially; it’s extremely sterile but it’s also interesting to see why people are using it. But I’ll just sum it up in the beginning so you don’t need to read my ramblings; Bluesky is like large Mastodon instances without instance blocking (yet) and enough people to dilute some of the worst people who only post to ask you to “CW and alt text everything.”A different kind of containment
Bluesky is a different kind of containment site from containment sites in the past. Previously containment sites were founded for a number of reasons. One well known site that falls into this mold is FurAffinity, which was founded after a popular furry art gallery banned adult art in 2005, and another banned furries in 2006. When FurAffinity would ban “cub” characters (in theory furry lolisho which is already one of the most loaded topics online but in reality, whatever the admins declared as such), the users who drew said art would move on over to Inkbunny. In the past decade, containment sites (or “bunker sites” as imageboard users called them in case of an imageboard shutdown or outage) have popped up more and more in result to unapproved political content being heavily banned or censored from the mainstream social media sites.
Over the past decade this would happen more and more, with sites like Gab, Voat, Bitchute, and many more popping up and suffering hosting issues for incidents that Facebook or Google would pay PR firms to make go away. While 8chan took much of the brunt when some guy shot a mosque up in New Zealand, the livestream of the event was posted to Facebook, which had carefully crafted PR agents ready to make the problem go away as they called for more internet censorship.
Of course, even a large social media site can act as a containment site, as Tumblr essentially did before the porn ban destroyed the userbase and value of the site so severely that Automattic now owns it (and sees it as a side project to the flagship product of WordPress). It’s well known that the Tumblr porn ban sent users who were still on Tumblr flocking over to Twitter, and making the mob rule of Twitter that was seeping in so much worse that seemingly overnight it changed the culture of Twitter into something even worse.
But Bluesky and its ilk are a new breed of containment site. In the past, containment sites were designed for people who wanted to post controversial pornography or non-approved political opinions, and quite frankly they didn’t have much appeal for anyone else. There was no reason to use them if you were not banned from social media websites, and even if you were these sites would nearly always devolve into an echo chamber. Only now with so many people being banned on social media or censored for anything and everything, is this finally changing.
Bluesky and similar containment sites like Mastodon.social are not like these other containment sites. Bluesky is something else entirely; it’s not a containment site for someone banned for posting too many FBI crime statistics, but rather a site for someone traumatized by seeing too many uncomfortable statistics and memes. Fueling this is Elon Musk buying Twitter and the object of hate for Twitter users switching from Donald Trump to Elon Musk. Bluesky wants to be the idealized version of early 2010s Twitter, which can no longer happen as the people no longer exist.
BlueSky and it’s weird federation
If Mastodon was piggybacking off the StatusNet network in 2016 to gain access to an established network while flooding it with new users with a different mindset, the devs behind Bluesky are a lot more clever. They knew what Eugen and the Mastodon team have wanted to do with a focus on more censorship than Twitter had to bubblewrap users more, and as a result they are baking moderation into the currently in development protocol. Let’s take a look at this.
As of 2023, Bluesky claims it’s a federated social network as of now but the truth is, right now Bluesky is nowhere near federated. It’s a monolithic social network that currently does not federate with anything. The federation is still in testing and it’s planned for a 2024 release (years after ActivityPub has done the same thing and over a decade since StatusNet). But the planned method of federation for Bluesky is nothing like ActivityPub. If AP is designed to function just like e-mail, ATProto is designed to function just like Napster did in a way. According to a diagram posted on the Bluesky website, personal servers are not intended to talk directly to each other but rather to a “big graph service” server first. Anyone who knows social media services and censorship knows why this could be a problem. In fact, one fedi developer said “nobody would find this to be an issue if they drew an arrow between the PDS servers”. There’s no Github documentation to host your own server as of now either, you’re on your own.
The big idea for reinventing the wheel is to obviously avoid the “losing your posting career when your instance goes down” problem. This can be controversial for someone who cares about privacy due to using universal identities, but the younger generation loves to share usernames and feel like a celebrity posting online. Everything is a show (until it isn’t anymore).
But let’s not kid ourselves, the main reason that they’re reinventing the wheel at BlueSky is to allow for stricter moderation functionality and all one has to do is Google to find this out. In fact, one of the motives for Bluesky being invite-only is to enhance the moderation tools:
Moderation is a necessary feature of social spaces. It’s how bad behavior gets constrained, norms get set, and disputes get resolved. We’ve kept the Bluesky app invite-only and are finishing moderation before the last pieces of open federation because we wanted to prioritize user safety from the start.
There’s a good reason Bluesky is doing this: Bluesky wants to experiment with some of the most oppressive moderation systems online, to give the same people who destroyed the rest of the internet a chance to cry out as they shit on your floormat. Take a look at some of the proposals they had for moderation. One such proposal is reply-gating, which is designed to only let certain people reply to you. On Twitter this is one of the most abused features and along with “hiding replies” is a sign that the poster is trying to hide something from you.
Or how about the ability to delete replies?
You know, some things never change. Back in the mid-2010s days of Twitter culture war flamewars, “muh mentions” was a very common way to escape arguments to the point one e-celeb even even made a joke about it.
Another proposal advocates for “content labeling”, which as Twitter community notes has shown, won’t exactly go in the direction the owners of the site want it to. There’s not a lot I can say otherwise about this though.
Not all of these proposals and ideas go over well with users, and one thing BlueSky users have absolutely hated is how blocks are all public. Furthermore, the post even mentions that “rogue apps” can not enforce this blocking behavior, which knowing Pleroma and it’s userbase means that it will happen and that it’s just privacy through obscurity.
In theory, a bad actor could create their own rogue client or interface which ignores some of the blocking behaviors, since the content is posted to a public network. But showing content or notifications to the person who created the block won’t be possible, as that behavior is controlled by their own PDS and client. It’s technically possible for a rogue client to create replies and mentions, but they would be invisible or at least low-impact to the recipient account for the same reasons. Protocol-compliant software in the ecosystem will keep such content invisible to other accounts on the network. If a significant fraction of accounts elected to use noncompliant rogue infrastructure, we would consider that a failure of the entire ecosystem.
Given that one of the main fediverse instance software stacks even includes a feature to reject deletes from servers, this is already a failure. If the people that the AtProto types want to keep away end up using it and not sticking to AP, you just know that this is going to be common. The same goes with ActivityPub scopes being easily MRF’d as well, and some servers will MRF scopes from unlisted to public. In fact with ActivityPub, there’s no longer just one instance software running the show. There are at least 4 main ones (Mastodon, Lemmy, Misskey, Pleroma), and many forks of these (Glitch-soc, hometown, fedibird, Akkoma, Soapbox/Rebased, Firefish (formerly Calckey), and many many more) on top of some smaller players as well (GoToSocial, Pixelfed, WriteFreely, Friendica, the 4 people still using GNU Social, etc.) But I’m getting ahead of myself here, all this is pointless because…Federation doesn’t even need to work
Bluesky isn’t getting new signups because it’s federated, and the userbase doesn’t care if it is federated either. Rather; Bluesky is popular because of the containment site aspect and the elitism aspect. While Bluesky might have used invites to finetune moderation and curate a community, it’s also given Bluesky an elitist aspect to it. Having a Bluesky account earlier on was a status symbol in the same way having a SomethingAwful or ResetEra account was, people were paying money to get in. A few months later, the hype has fizzled, seemingly every furry has an account, and I’ve struggled to give away invite codes. Even some users I gave them out to haven’t even set profile pictures, that’s how little they could care about it.
The people in on it are similar to those on Mastodon.social, the biggest users are no different than an NPR listener regurgitating left wing talking points. Just by browsing Mastodon.social’s trending page you can see posts about Trump, “election deniers”, complaining about Elon Musk, climate change, George Takei taking a shit, even posts about how masks still work. Bluesky still has some of them mixed with dumb Reddit/Tumblr “safe humor”, George Takei still taking a shit, and signs there’s cracks in paradise. The main difference however is that Bluesky has lots of furries on it, posting overtly sexual content since that’s what furries are notorious for doing.
In a way, BlueSky or some of the big Mastodon instances could be compared to the country of Singapore as described in William Gibson’s famous article, a country where any sort of unique counterculture has been squashed in favor of a country as artificial as a shopping mall or Disneyland was, while the fediverse could be described as how Kowloon was. The artificial feeling of the site isn’t lost on others, with one person on fedi who got an invite as well comparing it to the artificial nature of retirement communities that allow. Of course, just like how the golden days of the 60s won’t come back no matter how many times you listen to the Beach Boys Greatest Hits album on repeat, the 2010s won’t come back when you’re browsing Bluesky with Lapfox on in the background cranked up on your Wal-Mart Skullcandy headphones.
Yet, the community of the fediverse is a turnoff for the typical left wing Twitter account poster, let alone someone who just likes to make jokes online. Many Mastodon instances are notorious for their extremely strict culture that is sterilized just like 90s Singapore was, complete with new instance blocklists that look very polished popping up all the damn time. But perhaps most tellingly, this Reddit thread asking for all the fun people online sums it up. A user asks if there is an instance which doesn’t require you to CW literally everything, and he is berated by screeching harpies who tell him that you’ll totally be defederated for doing so. But the user telling him that not tagging CWs literally leads to Nazis is also the mindset of many bad Mastodon admins and the Bluesky community.
The other side of the fediverse is more like the Kowloon walled city in a way. With light censorship and light rules on things, anyone can spin up an instance and post whatever, not caring if Mastodon.social and some schizophrenic instances block them because unlike Twitter they can say whatever. Naturally, this is also a hard sell for many who want that gated community feel online, as seeing slurs and humor again can cause some people to blow a fuse.
Which leads to why Bluesky is popular with some, even if that furry artist you follow posts 5 times as much on Twitter. Bluesky right now does not have that issue of instance blocking wars, or crazy strict moderators, because it has that image of being run by a professional company. As long as you don’t start telling egirls to get a real job or similar, you won’t get banned, because if you do just like in Singapore you’ll be banned real fast. But just like how there’s lots of people who like using big sterile Discord servers either out of necessity or because they actually like them, there’s plenty of people who want to sit on a sanitized social network.
Even worse, there’s a login wall to view Bluesky posts. This is creating an illusion of privacy through obscurity, until someone either creates a post browser or gets an account and starts browsing posts of people they want to screencap. The funny part is, this has led to some of the fattest nude selfies I have unfortunately had to see with my own two eyes. There’s also many features missing with Bluesky from DMs to gifs/video support to pinned posts to even hashtags, but the diehards using it don’t care about all that.
They care about the fact that right now there is no “instance question”, no block wars, and they can feel at home in their sanitized posting website. In a year, it’ll be interesting if anyone talks about it still knowing where it’s going and how long it took the fedi to get to where it is now. Others on the fedi might appreciate how it’s acting as containment to keep the same people who killed the mainstream internet off their turf, so who knows.
There’s more I could probably think of saying, but quite frankly I could care less about Bluesky. It seems like a mess federation wise, and the community on it isn’t giving me confidence.A quick edit
There’s a few more things I was suggested to touch upon and mention as well. First of all, someone else on the fedi brought up Nostr which is even more decentralized. The issue is, I simply haven’t seen Nostr take off as much as the fediverse has (though a few people I know on fedi have accounts on both). I have not looked too deeply into it and I haven’t had terribly much interest in looking into it as well mostly as I simply haven’t had people I know on it who don’t use something else. Still, I think it’ll be interesting to see where that goes in a year too.
The second thing I just remembered is that Mastodon.social has two things in it’s favor; users who solely post a single topic and “stability”. This attracts normies to it, but unfortunately while Mastodon.social doesn’t have the largest blocklist it has a hefty blocklist. As a result, instance blocking ends up becoming used as a weapon to get people to fall in line by both Mastodon.social and by many other instances blindly pasting in blocklists.
The thing with Bluesky is that while there are blocklists, they’re not server blocklists but rather user blocklists that lots of people willingly import (and they’re designed to be easy to import, as a baked in feature). Hence, if you’re on blocklists due to guilt by association you’ll end up with the awkward scenario of not getting many interactions while users who have blocked you are currently spreading rumors about you. Fun, isn’t it?
Hence, with Bluesky I tend to get the feeling that something is fake about it and that everything is a facade, given I’ve been there before. I’m sure many people who have lived through the same things I have with online communities rotting to the core can agree.
https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2023/10/23/bluesky-the-new-containment-site/
Essentially Bluesky is a very unique kind of containment site; a site made for those who were angry at a different website instead of banned from a different website. Historically these websites have done poorly, and many friends I still have in the furry fandom have abandoned their account after they realized others are not using it often and interaction ratios are mediocre. The community is truly something else however. Essentially; it’s extremely sterile but it’s also interesting to see why people are using it. But I’ll just sum it up in the beginning so you don’t need to read my ramblings; Bluesky is like large Mastodon instances without instance blocking (yet) and enough people to dilute some of the worst people who only post to ask you to “CW and alt text everything.”A different kind of containment
Bluesky is a different kind of containment site from containment sites in the past. Previously containment sites were founded for a number of reasons. One well known site that falls into this mold is FurAffinity, which was founded after a popular furry art gallery banned adult art in 2005, and another banned furries in 2006. When FurAffinity would ban “cub” characters (in theory furry lolisho which is already one of the most loaded topics online but in reality, whatever the admins declared as such), the users who drew said art would move on over to Inkbunny. In the past decade, containment sites (or “bunker sites” as imageboard users called them in case of an imageboard shutdown or outage) have popped up more and more in result to unapproved political content being heavily banned or censored from the mainstream social media sites.
Over the past decade this would happen more and more, with sites like Gab, Voat, Bitchute, and many more popping up and suffering hosting issues for incidents that Facebook or Google would pay PR firms to make go away. While 8chan took much of the brunt when some guy shot a mosque up in New Zealand, the livestream of the event was posted to Facebook, which had carefully crafted PR agents ready to make the problem go away as they called for more internet censorship.
Of course, even a large social media site can act as a containment site, as Tumblr essentially did before the porn ban destroyed the userbase and value of the site so severely that Automattic now owns it (and sees it as a side project to the flagship product of WordPress). It’s well known that the Tumblr porn ban sent users who were still on Tumblr flocking over to Twitter, and making the mob rule of Twitter that was seeping in so much worse that seemingly overnight it changed the culture of Twitter into something even worse.
But Bluesky and its ilk are a new breed of containment site. In the past, containment sites were designed for people who wanted to post controversial pornography or non-approved political opinions, and quite frankly they didn’t have much appeal for anyone else. There was no reason to use them if you were not banned from social media websites, and even if you were these sites would nearly always devolve into an echo chamber. Only now with so many people being banned on social media or censored for anything and everything, is this finally changing.
Bluesky and similar containment sites like Mastodon.social are not like these other containment sites. Bluesky is something else entirely; it’s not a containment site for someone banned for posting too many FBI crime statistics, but rather a site for someone traumatized by seeing too many uncomfortable statistics and memes. Fueling this is Elon Musk buying Twitter and the object of hate for Twitter users switching from Donald Trump to Elon Musk. Bluesky wants to be the idealized version of early 2010s Twitter, which can no longer happen as the people no longer exist.
BlueSky and it’s weird federation
If Mastodon was piggybacking off the StatusNet network in 2016 to gain access to an established network while flooding it with new users with a different mindset, the devs behind Bluesky are a lot more clever. They knew what Eugen and the Mastodon team have wanted to do with a focus on more censorship than Twitter had to bubblewrap users more, and as a result they are baking moderation into the currently in development protocol. Let’s take a look at this.
As of 2023, Bluesky claims it’s a federated social network as of now but the truth is, right now Bluesky is nowhere near federated. It’s a monolithic social network that currently does not federate with anything. The federation is still in testing and it’s planned for a 2024 release (years after ActivityPub has done the same thing and over a decade since StatusNet). But the planned method of federation for Bluesky is nothing like ActivityPub. If AP is designed to function just like e-mail, ATProto is designed to function just like Napster did in a way. According to a diagram posted on the Bluesky website, personal servers are not intended to talk directly to each other but rather to a “big graph service” server first. Anyone who knows social media services and censorship knows why this could be a problem. In fact, one fedi developer said “nobody would find this to be an issue if they drew an arrow between the PDS servers”. There’s no Github documentation to host your own server as of now either, you’re on your own.
The big idea for reinventing the wheel is to obviously avoid the “losing your posting career when your instance goes down” problem. This can be controversial for someone who cares about privacy due to using universal identities, but the younger generation loves to share usernames and feel like a celebrity posting online. Everything is a show (until it isn’t anymore).
But let’s not kid ourselves, the main reason that they’re reinventing the wheel at BlueSky is to allow for stricter moderation functionality and all one has to do is Google to find this out. In fact, one of the motives for Bluesky being invite-only is to enhance the moderation tools:
Moderation is a necessary feature of social spaces. It’s how bad behavior gets constrained, norms get set, and disputes get resolved. We’ve kept the Bluesky app invite-only and are finishing moderation before the last pieces of open federation because we wanted to prioritize user safety from the start.
There’s a good reason Bluesky is doing this: Bluesky wants to experiment with some of the most oppressive moderation systems online, to give the same people who destroyed the rest of the internet a chance to cry out as they shit on your floormat. Take a look at some of the proposals they had for moderation. One such proposal is reply-gating, which is designed to only let certain people reply to you. On Twitter this is one of the most abused features and along with “hiding replies” is a sign that the poster is trying to hide something from you.
Or how about the ability to delete replies?
You know, some things never change. Back in the mid-2010s days of Twitter culture war flamewars, “muh mentions” was a very common way to escape arguments to the point one e-celeb even even made a joke about it.
Another proposal advocates for “content labeling”, which as Twitter community notes has shown, won’t exactly go in the direction the owners of the site want it to. There’s not a lot I can say otherwise about this though.
Not all of these proposals and ideas go over well with users, and one thing BlueSky users have absolutely hated is how blocks are all public. Furthermore, the post even mentions that “rogue apps” can not enforce this blocking behavior, which knowing Pleroma and it’s userbase means that it will happen and that it’s just privacy through obscurity.
In theory, a bad actor could create their own rogue client or interface which ignores some of the blocking behaviors, since the content is posted to a public network. But showing content or notifications to the person who created the block won’t be possible, as that behavior is controlled by their own PDS and client. It’s technically possible for a rogue client to create replies and mentions, but they would be invisible or at least low-impact to the recipient account for the same reasons. Protocol-compliant software in the ecosystem will keep such content invisible to other accounts on the network. If a significant fraction of accounts elected to use noncompliant rogue infrastructure, we would consider that a failure of the entire ecosystem.
Given that one of the main fediverse instance software stacks even includes a feature to reject deletes from servers, this is already a failure. If the people that the AtProto types want to keep away end up using it and not sticking to AP, you just know that this is going to be common. The same goes with ActivityPub scopes being easily MRF’d as well, and some servers will MRF scopes from unlisted to public. In fact with ActivityPub, there’s no longer just one instance software running the show. There are at least 4 main ones (Mastodon, Lemmy, Misskey, Pleroma), and many forks of these (Glitch-soc, hometown, fedibird, Akkoma, Soapbox/Rebased, Firefish (formerly Calckey), and many many more) on top of some smaller players as well (GoToSocial, Pixelfed, WriteFreely, Friendica, the 4 people still using GNU Social, etc.) But I’m getting ahead of myself here, all this is pointless because…Federation doesn’t even need to work
Bluesky isn’t getting new signups because it’s federated, and the userbase doesn’t care if it is federated either. Rather; Bluesky is popular because of the containment site aspect and the elitism aspect. While Bluesky might have used invites to finetune moderation and curate a community, it’s also given Bluesky an elitist aspect to it. Having a Bluesky account earlier on was a status symbol in the same way having a SomethingAwful or ResetEra account was, people were paying money to get in. A few months later, the hype has fizzled, seemingly every furry has an account, and I’ve struggled to give away invite codes. Even some users I gave them out to haven’t even set profile pictures, that’s how little they could care about it.
The people in on it are similar to those on Mastodon.social, the biggest users are no different than an NPR listener regurgitating left wing talking points. Just by browsing Mastodon.social’s trending page you can see posts about Trump, “election deniers”, complaining about Elon Musk, climate change, George Takei taking a shit, even posts about how masks still work. Bluesky still has some of them mixed with dumb Reddit/Tumblr “safe humor”, George Takei still taking a shit, and signs there’s cracks in paradise. The main difference however is that Bluesky has lots of furries on it, posting overtly sexual content since that’s what furries are notorious for doing.
In a way, BlueSky or some of the big Mastodon instances could be compared to the country of Singapore as described in William Gibson’s famous article, a country where any sort of unique counterculture has been squashed in favor of a country as artificial as a shopping mall or Disneyland was, while the fediverse could be described as how Kowloon was. The artificial feeling of the site isn’t lost on others, with one person on fedi who got an invite as well comparing it to the artificial nature of retirement communities that allow. Of course, just like how the golden days of the 60s won’t come back no matter how many times you listen to the Beach Boys Greatest Hits album on repeat, the 2010s won’t come back when you’re browsing Bluesky with Lapfox on in the background cranked up on your Wal-Mart Skullcandy headphones.
Yet, the community of the fediverse is a turnoff for the typical left wing Twitter account poster, let alone someone who just likes to make jokes online. Many Mastodon instances are notorious for their extremely strict culture that is sterilized just like 90s Singapore was, complete with new instance blocklists that look very polished popping up all the damn time. But perhaps most tellingly, this Reddit thread asking for all the fun people online sums it up. A user asks if there is an instance which doesn’t require you to CW literally everything, and he is berated by screeching harpies who tell him that you’ll totally be defederated for doing so. But the user telling him that not tagging CWs literally leads to Nazis is also the mindset of many bad Mastodon admins and the Bluesky community.
The other side of the fediverse is more like the Kowloon walled city in a way. With light censorship and light rules on things, anyone can spin up an instance and post whatever, not caring if Mastodon.social and some schizophrenic instances block them because unlike Twitter they can say whatever. Naturally, this is also a hard sell for many who want that gated community feel online, as seeing slurs and humor again can cause some people to blow a fuse.
Which leads to why Bluesky is popular with some, even if that furry artist you follow posts 5 times as much on Twitter. Bluesky right now does not have that issue of instance blocking wars, or crazy strict moderators, because it has that image of being run by a professional company. As long as you don’t start telling egirls to get a real job or similar, you won’t get banned, because if you do just like in Singapore you’ll be banned real fast. But just like how there’s lots of people who like using big sterile Discord servers either out of necessity or because they actually like them, there’s plenty of people who want to sit on a sanitized social network.
Even worse, there’s a login wall to view Bluesky posts. This is creating an illusion of privacy through obscurity, until someone either creates a post browser or gets an account and starts browsing posts of people they want to screencap. The funny part is, this has led to some of the fattest nude selfies I have unfortunately had to see with my own two eyes. There’s also many features missing with Bluesky from DMs to gifs/video support to pinned posts to even hashtags, but the diehards using it don’t care about all that.
They care about the fact that right now there is no “instance question”, no block wars, and they can feel at home in their sanitized posting website. In a year, it’ll be interesting if anyone talks about it still knowing where it’s going and how long it took the fedi to get to where it is now. Others on the fedi might appreciate how it’s acting as containment to keep the same people who killed the mainstream internet off their turf, so who knows.
There’s more I could probably think of saying, but quite frankly I could care less about Bluesky. It seems like a mess federation wise, and the community on it isn’t giving me confidence.A quick edit
There’s a few more things I was suggested to touch upon and mention as well. First of all, someone else on the fedi brought up Nostr which is even more decentralized. The issue is, I simply haven’t seen Nostr take off as much as the fediverse has (though a few people I know on fedi have accounts on both). I have not looked too deeply into it and I haven’t had terribly much interest in looking into it as well mostly as I simply haven’t had people I know on it who don’t use something else. Still, I think it’ll be interesting to see where that goes in a year too.
The second thing I just remembered is that Mastodon.social has two things in it’s favor; users who solely post a single topic and “stability”. This attracts normies to it, but unfortunately while Mastodon.social doesn’t have the largest blocklist it has a hefty blocklist. As a result, instance blocking ends up becoming used as a weapon to get people to fall in line by both Mastodon.social and by many other instances blindly pasting in blocklists.
The thing with Bluesky is that while there are blocklists, they’re not server blocklists but rather user blocklists that lots of people willingly import (and they’re designed to be easy to import, as a baked in feature). Hence, if you’re on blocklists due to guilt by association you’ll end up with the awkward scenario of not getting many interactions while users who have blocked you are currently spreading rumors about you. Fun, isn’t it?
Hence, with Bluesky I tend to get the feeling that something is fake about it and that everything is a facade, given I’ve been there before. I’m sure many people who have lived through the same things I have with online communities rotting to the core can agree.
https://pleromanonx86.wordpress.com/2023/10/23/bluesky-the-new-containment-site/