this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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As much as I hate to be that guy, it's worth keeping in mind that BlueSky is not really practising what they preach here. The AT protocol formally allows for a kind of decentralization, but it is prohibitively expensive to run an instance, meaning that only rich folks or those who are willing to accept money from venture capitalists will be capable of actually doing so.
ActivityPub already existed when they started BlueSky. They chose to not make their protocol compatible. The reason is simple: They are a company, and they have a profit motive. ActivityPub is too democratic, and therefore hard to monetize. By now they have a bunch of crypto bro investors who want their money back. It's better to leave your money elsewhere.
Or non-profits that are willing to accept money from supporters.
Because AT protocol has features that are incompatible with ActivityPub, and those features are important to some users.
Which benefits does AT have in comparison to Activity pub? Except currently single point of entry/failure?
They want decentralized moderation on a centralized platform. That's how on Bluesky, there's an understanding that the removal of hate speech "conflicts with Bluesky’s decentralized goals". On Mastodon, the decentralized nature is how we can show bigots the door without them getting to whine about their freedom of expression. Bluesky manages to create a problem using the very same concept by which Mastodon solves it.
I guess this didn't really end up being a post about the benefits of AT. Oops.
At least in Germany there is a mandatory German filter list that seems to be maintained by Bluesky themselves. They couldn't legally operate here if they allowed holocaust denial and such.
There are minimum standards they'll have to abide by, but that's similar to Meta after their change of policy. It really is not enough that it should make anyone feel comfortable.
Basically big platforms can choose between making moderation expensive, minimal, or arbitrary. Bluesky is leaning into minimal, keeping the door open for most things as long as they're legal. Reddit is leaning into arbitrary, having AI banning folks on account of upvotes. Facebook used to dabble with expensive, but have made a recent shift into minimal.
This simply will not work, some other option, probably rushed, poorly thought through and ultimately more authoritarian than an honestly constructed moderation structure would have been will be implemented when this approach ultimately fails catastrophically.
I pre-emptively post a surprised pikachu here to signify this