I’m not Brennan, but I’m very interested in decentralization and a fan of AtProto specifically, so I’d like to weigh in.
First I should mention I’ve personally never been able to get into microblogging, so I haven’t touched bluesky myself, despite having an account for ATProto reasons. But I agree it’s concerning that the company chooses to continue to host the content of harmful individuals and calling that act “neutral”. I’m certainly against the idea of the “marketplace of ideas” as it’s clearly just another way for the status quo to reproduce and reinforce itself. And I have a friend whose been personally put on a very negative list and had to reach out to the owner to get that corrected.
But, decentralized moderation is a tricky problem to solve, and I think it’s worth considering blueskys approach in the context of the alternatives. Before I get to that though, I want to discuss why I think decentralization is important for resisting enshittification and for moderation in particular it’s important to avoid imposing a universal objective set of ethics, which is a myth. I and all the people in my life are against transphobia and other forms of bigotry, for example, but if we had to explicitly lay out “what should the consequences for known transphobes X be? What would a path to restoring their connection, if possible, look like?” you’d get as many answers as respondents. So even if we could agree on pillars like “don’t allow bigots on the platform” the actual details of stuff like “should their old posts be deleted? Only the objectionable ones? If they grow as a person should they be let back on?” are not ones with universally agreed upon answers, and I don’t think it makes sense to allow a single corporation to decide for everyone.
The activitypub solution is placing moderation at the hands of instance owners. Ironically enough I think this tends to be less meaningfully centralized than bluesky, because you’re ceding ultimate moderation authority to an even smaller group of people, and by virtue of having your identity associated with the instance you can’t truly “migrate” your identity. And the knowledge and resources needed to create an instance (and one big enough for you, a random new user, to even be aware of it) means the ones setting these rules are all still amongst the more privileged of us. And of course, instance owners are also known to use block lists and quickly defededate from entire instances, because making decisions per-user is too much work for some person running an instance as a hobby, so I believe it ends up banning a lot more innocent people than bluesky labelers do.
I dont think there’s that many different ideas floating around at combatting decentralized moderation, and the labelers approach seems better than activitypub to me. You as a user can change your moderation without losing your digital identity, and it’s easier to create a moderation setup that more closely aligns with what you want.
I’ve mentioned growing as a person here quite a bit, and I think that’s actually getting at a bigger issue with all this. I think the current internet is so large and social media exposes us to so many people that it’s difficult to envision proper restorative justice and preventing harm without vindictively permanently punishing people. We get forced into boxes based on a handful of posts and are not allowed to be nuanced or grow because how can anyone be expected to do that for each of the hundred strangers they might interact with every single day. I discussed this in the comments on on Moxie’s latest post, but I think the solution (and something that would get us closer to the Good Web too) is for designing social media so viral users and posts just don’t happen, and so that you’re more likely to see people on your friends list or a hop away from your friends list, so people can be nuanced growing individuals instead of one of hundreds of strangers. I think that actually might help the social media and society at large become a better place than any flavor of moderation.
And as a quick aside, it’s not as relevant to a discussion on the good web but I do think the flavors of decentralization ATProto is enough to allow people to stay on protocol but leave the influence of bluesky the company behind, and that’s sufficient for me. The fact the whole lexicon system allows people to use their identity across various different apps and even have data sovereignty through a self hosted PDS will be extremely advantageous in allowing people to move away from the large corporate web in the future imo. Discord, for example, kept getting adopted by communities because people already had discord accounts, and that’s a really nice convenience. But the alternative to discord is likely not an all in one community hub plus support forums plus wiki, as discord is used for today. It’s likely three or more separate apps that communities can use together, and ATProto would allow those apps to share identities and not require new users to create three new accounts.