Thought Shrapnel

Over the last 5-6 years I’ve had to think deeply about moderation in decentralised networks, first for MoodleNet and then for Bonfire. In that time, a new network has come along called Bluesky, seeded with money from Twitter (pre-Musk).

Bluesky (atpro) and Fediverse apps such as Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Bonfire (ActivityPub) use different protocols. There’s no reason why they can’t be bridged, but attempts to do so have met with some hostility. Moderation in ActivityPub-compatible networks rely on the server/instance that you’re on. There’s advantages to this, but I guess the downside is that if you like the people but not the moderation policy, you’ve got to decide to stick or twist.

What Bluesky is doing is something similar to something Bonfire has proposed: allowing people to follow accounts that focus on moderation. This means that you can decide to, for example, dial down the profanity, or mark things as spam based on a definition you share with someone else.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re open-sourcing Ozone, our collaborative moderation tool. With Ozone, individuals and teams can work together to review and label content across the network. Later this week, we’re opening up the ability for you to run your own independent moderation services, seamlessly integrated into the Bluesky app. This means that you’ll be able to create and subscribe to additional moderation services on top of what Bluesky requires, giving you unprecedented control over your social media experience.

At Bluesky, we’re investing in safety from two angles. First, we’ve built our own moderation team dedicated to providing around-the-clock coverage to uphold our community guidelines. Additionally, we recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to moderation — no single company can get online safety right for every country, culture, and community in the world. So we’ve also been building something bigger — an ecosystem of moderation and open-source safety tools that gives communities power to create their own spaces, with their own norms and preferences. Still, using Bluesky feels familiar and intuitive. It’s a straightforward app on the surface, but under the hood, we have enabled real innovation and competition in social media by building a new kind of open network.

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Bluesky’s vision for moderation is a stackable ecosystem of services. Starting this week, you’ll have the power to install filters from independent moderation services, layering them like building blocks on top of the Bluesky app’s foundation. This allows you to create a customized experience tailored to your preferences.

Source: Bluesky blog