If BlueSky banned you tomorrow what is the plan? If BlueSky went bankrupt tomorrow?
I figure there are other AT compliant products that you can switch to but a lot of data would go missing?
Is it perhaps that the "right-leaning" social media users being banned are also violating the rules? Attacks and abuse seem to be standard practice, especially for the American right.
(blog author works at bluesky, no affiliation personally)
Please don't break the site guidelines like this, no matter how incorrect another comment is or you feel it is.
Doing this has the obvious downside of making the threads more toxic, plus the less obvious one of discrediting the truth (assuming your comment is indeed correct) by giving it toxic associations. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
And of course there are several implementations and hosts for relays (the gossip nodes), PDS implementations, clients, and appviews (the server backend for bluesky the web app).
So strictly speaking if bluesky imploded tomorrow you could just use a self hosted version of the same app or use someone else's (such as https://zeppelin.social).
The PLC directory is still technically in bluesky's hands but is being transferred an independent foundation atm and could be trivially forked if needed. And of course if you use did:web that doesn't apply to you and you just depend on DNS.
And PDS level/"account" bans are just at the PDS. If you've been "banned", that's just bluesky the PDS host telling you they don't want to host you and that you need to go host your data yourself or find someone else to host it for you. i.e. find another PDS.
Basically every form of ban or moderation in atproto/bluesky is "soft" moderation and you can fairly trivially bypass it and continue doing your own thing.
The overwhelming majority of right wing accounts that get banned do so soon after joining (and generally after going to pick fights). And they never even bother to try to keep their accounts, instead choosing to create new accounts to get banned again or abandon the platform. It's disingenuous behavior and for right wing personalities it feels almost more like a sticker of pride that they were "banned from bluesky".
Plenty of right leaning and libertarian accounts exist on bluesky. Project Liberal [1] and Liberal Party USA [2] (run by Josh Eakle[3] and Kevin Gaughen[4] respectively) exist just fine on bluesky and they are large splinter groups from the Libertarian Party following the whole Mises Caucus coup attempt thing. Likewise a number of libertarian groups such as the Libertarian Party of Lousiana [5] do just fine on bluesky. And of course AI and Cryptocurrency people also do just fine on bluesky as well despite the stereotypes against them and the common belief that "they aren't welcome on bluesky". The worst thing that happens is people block or mute you and you don't have to deal with them anymore rather than toxicly fighting each other each time you see each other.
TLDR: Everyone is welcome on bluesky but there's no requirement for people to tolerate you. Even if you violate every transgression, as long as you aren't posting literal child porn to the network you'll still be able to exist just fine however people might just ignore you.
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1. Project Liberal: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:d5nigw7kzpsglf3gtl2dvbev
2. Liberal Party USA: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:v3jmda7lwwdoofcvgmjwsbcg
3. Josh Eakle: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2adtngm3y6e6ol6jastnkxzm
4. Kevin Gaughen: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4oyecf2hz4ajhm4zqp52hxqo
5. LP of Lousiana: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mongiv55fh5l5e7vi7cbjajw
So if there's a large scale exodus from bluesky, as long as full backfills of the network exist, you'll be able to reconstruct your CAR files, etc even if your PDS dies.
So yes if they die all the comments disappear but people can reconstruct their history and move it to other PDS like blacksky, northsky, or others who are getting ready to start onboarding/open enrollment.
TLDR it'd be a bit rough if they died overnight but if it was a slow death and people had a bit of warning you'd see people move on to other PDS without issue.
However, atproto data is append-only and cache-friendly. It wouldn't be hard to record historical comments and join them to the ones returned by the live query. (I'm probably just going to script periodic backups for mine and worry about displaying them when/if BlueSky does dissappear.)
It’s a completely valid reason, but All the talk about platform lock in, independent nodes and relay and whatnot is just to make you feel better (I listened to some talks and podcasts but realized that it’s all just window dressing, you can be practically deplatformed at any time, so I’m hazy on the details).
One can't conclude that for sure, it's unnecessarily personal, and it doesn't add anything (other than a swipe) to the correct information in your post.
LPLouisiana is definitely left leaning libertarian but the first 4 are all very much your old school small government libertarians.
Both Josh Eakle and Kevin Gaughen used to be senior members of the Libertarian Party prior to the Mises Caucus burning it to the ground and they are absolutely center right libertarians through and through.
Rather, there is an association between modern conservative/libertarian voices and populist messaging - and all the pitfalls that come with it. Meaning, vulgarity, emotional bait, deception, and purposefully offensive language.
Like, the modern American conservative leadership cannot advertise their own ideology without resorting to lies and attacks of character. The left, by comparison, does not operate that way.
So, if you're censoring shitheads who are generally unliked, that might appear as though youre targeting conservatives or right leaning people. But you're not.
Basically, the right has purposefully positioned themselves to be associated with unpalatable ideas in order to leverage populist messaging. And this worked - they won an election. The downside is that now if you filter out unpalatable ideas such as blatant slurs you're going to necessarily mostly target right wing people. By accident.
No matter how many times this pedantry gets repeated in this thread, this is literally not opt-in.
A light switch that is glued in place so you cannot turn it off is not opt-in.
Sure, some people with the know-how can get a pair of dikes and cut it out of the wall, the light will turn off and they will say "see, I opted out!"
But most people won't do this. At best it is misleading to say so.
"do just fine" is really pushing it I think. I don't think the core mod team or the default-client's moderation service is biased toward the right or the left (at least in how they apply moderation, not necessarily their personal beliefs.) I think the core team is doing the best job they can given their resourcing. The community on the site is a different story.
There was an attempt by AI researchers to join the site and they all got bullied until they left, largely by the community. Pretty much every reply to an NYT article that doesn't denigrate Trump is either "wow how does the NYT have the time to write about fashion/lifestyle/<anything but how Trump is awful>, it's because they've an evil right wing publication" or "how dare the NYT platform this opinion it's an evil right wing opinion". If you look at feature rollouts or social posts by the team you get lots of well-liked comments about how the mod team enables right wing behavior.
I use the platform a lot and am really rooting for them to succeed, but I feel that there's just a lot of lefty toxicity on the platform and that the community on there loves politics and often brings politics into unrelated threads. They seem interested in a sort of pop politics too, not the kind of harder political analysis that a good think tank or non-fiction book can provide either. I feel that if you're into lots of pop left politics and the culture that emerges from a community with this love then you'll like Bluesky. For now I think the community is too political to really foster wider conversations the way pre-Elon Twitter did.
The goal is that third party apps take over as the majority share of clients over time and the main impl should be seen as a "reference implementation".
And that of course ignores all the other non-bluesky projects currently incubating on atproto.
The vast majority of people using Bluesky don't use a 3rd party or self-hosted PDS because they aren't and probably shouldn't have to be aware of it. It isn't even a prominent feature. At least with Mastodon, it's a big part of the culture at its' core... you don't see this with the official app even.
I didn't even know that was even an option until you mentioned it. I only know that there have been banned accounts on the official/default one that didn't even post anything yet.
Credible exit matters too. The idea that all of this data is signed, public, and verifiable by anyone helps ensure that the provider is accountable to the community. A provider might decide against enshittifying a product if they're worried about a competitor doing better and taking their place.
Yes, an atproto lexicon will tend to be dominated by a small number of nodes. It's not the perfect distributed system some would prefer, but it is a real improvement on the completely centralized models seen everywhere today.