Update: After this article was published, Bluesky restored Kabas’ post and told 404 Media the following: “This was a case of our moderators applying the policy for non-consensual AI content strictly. After re-evaluating the newsworthy context, the moderation team is reinstating those posts.”
Bluesky deleted a viral, AI-generated protest video in which Donald Trump is sucking on Elon Musk’s toes because its moderators said it was “non-consensual explicit material.” The video was broadcast on televisions inside the office Housing and Urban Development earlier this week, and quickly went viral on Bluesky and Twitter.
Independent journalist Marisa Kabas obtained a video from a government employee and posted it on Bluesky, where it went viral. Tuesday night, Bluesky moderators deleted the video because they said it was “non-consensual explicit material.”
Other Bluesky users said that versions of the video they uploaded were also deleted, though it is still possible to find the video on the platform.
Technically speaking, the AI video of Trump sucking Musk’s toes, which had the words “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING” shown on top of it, is a nonconsensual AI-generated video, because Trump and Musk did not agree to it. But social media platform content moderation policies have always had carve outs that allow for the criticism of powerful people, especially the world’s richest man and the literal president of the United States.
For example, we once obtained Facebook’s internal rules about sexual content for content moderators, which included broad carveouts to allow for sexual content that criticized public figures and politicians. The First Amendment, which does not apply to social media companies but is relevant considering that Bluesky told Kabas she could not use the platform to “break the law,” has essentially unlimited protection for criticizing public figures in the way this video is doing.
Content moderation has been one of Bluesky’s growing pains over the last few months. The platform has millions of users but only a few dozen employees, meaning that perfect content moderation is impossible, and a lot of it necessarily needs to be automated. This is going to lead to mistakes. But the video Kabas posted was one of the most popular posts on the platform earlier this week and resulted in a national conversation about the protest. Deleting it—whether accidentally or because its moderation rules are so strict as to not allow for this type of reporting on a protest against the President of the United States—is a problem.
It was far faster and easier to build up a feed of enjoyable content on BlueSky. My Mastodon feed has sat almost completely empty, and I’ve only been able to find a few news-reposters there.
And I’m tech-savvy. Imagine how it is for other social media users.
Yes, exactly this. Like something might be technically better but unless it’s doing its main job of actually connecting people it’s not going to work.
I wish more FOSS nerds understood this.
Many FOSS nerds don’t even understand the necessity of a user-friendly GUI…
Some of them will actively advocate for user-unfriendliness to keep out the noobs which… I mean the number of psy-ops in the community has to be non-zero.
I don’t agree that Mastodon is technically better, but it was first so it should have first mover advantage.
I think it largely comes down to marketing. Mastodon is marketed by word of mouth, and BlueSky has an actual marketing team.
By “technically better” I mean it actually delivers on its technical promises of decentralisation, as opposed to bluesky that simply uses decentralisation as a buzzword without being actually open source and without allowing real competition for the main - centralised - instance.
I think mastodon has actual legs in that if bluesky fails to actually open up, it will enshittify and there will be another exodus. Mastodon has technical barriers to that kind problem, so it will still be there to pick up the pieces. The decentralised nature protects the network from enshittifying and means it will tend not to get exoduses like central platforms do. It’s a matter of making that growth count.
If in that time mastodon has worked on its discovery features, it might be finally ready to capture that growth.
If bluesky manages to properly decentralise then I imagine mastodon will not need to pick up the slack and will either join the network or fade into irrelevancy.
Hard to say which way it will go. I don’t hold out a lot of hope for bluesky changing its ways, and who knows when mastodon will improve in this way.
Bluesky will never be able to properly decentralize, since the costs are prohibitive and cannot be afforded by normal users. The shared heap concept used is currently somewhere around 10-15 TB storage, which is already pretty expensive to host for a single person, and that’s only the STORAGE for a single host NOW - no redundancy, no backups, no traffic and no worldwide infrastructure to keep the response time down. That’s a huge difference to a Mastodon instance, which can be run from a pretty cheap setup and is afforable for most people.
Also, the way Bluesky implements how user identities are handled makes account migration more a theoretical possibility than a believable “decentralization”. Theoretically Bluesky gives a credible exit strategy, where the shared heap can be copied by another organisation in case of loss of user trust or bankruptcy of the company and everyone can just switch over and carry on without losing a single post, but there are a lot of big if’s in that theory.
Here’s the source, from Christine Lemmer-Webber who worked on ActivityPub: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Oh, I didn’t realise the technical barriers were that steep. In that case I think I’m right to say that Mastodon is technically better for achieving the decentralisation it promises.
That’s a great resource, I’m going to follow them. Plus the link to Spritely was really interesting. Looks like it’s meant to be a successor to ActivityPub, which is quite exciting. From what I’ve seen activity pub is pretty limited in the ways it can enable interaction, like how mastodon posts look so funky on lemmy.
Plus, holy web 1.0, that’s a motherfucking website.
My understanding is that BlueSky is distributed, meaning there’s no single point of failure and nodes are independent. So scaling up should just mean adding more nodes, not having to scale vertically.
Distributed computing is a form of decentralization where the goal is resilience of the platform, not decentralization of control. The goal is very different from the Fediverse, which is to decentralize control, with resilience being a nice side effect.
It also has technical barriers to widespread adoption, hence why BlueSky is winning. I’lf BlueSky fails, people will just go to whatever alternative has a healthy marketing budget and low barrier to entry.
It doesn’t matter how distributed the servers are. You could say any centralised platform is “distributed” if it has at least one redundant server, which plenty of them do. Youtube has servers all over the world. That has nothing to do with enshittification and it’s not the feature I was talking about.
The thing that supposedly set bluesky apart was that they would be using a decentralised protocol that allowed anyone who wanted to to operate their own server with full control over their data. You can actually see some people posting from different domains.
That’s a nice idea and it trades on the rising popularity of the fediverse, but it’s not doing it in an open manner because the software isn’t open and separate instances are locked to 10 users maximum unless the central authority allows them more. That means it’s not meaningfully decentralised, but it’s still trying to capitalise on the concept. It can still be torpedoed by one company’s bad business decisions.
That’s what I was referring to.
And I said mastodon might be able to take in the exodus if they improve, so I guess I agree with your last point.
Well, they have that, they just haven’t opened it up to others yet. A lot of it is open source today.
I’m not saying BlueSky is ideal, just that it has a decentralized design and is currently quite distributed in practice. It’s not like YouTube where it’s largely just a CDN to keep things fast, but the core service is broken up into logical independent pieces instead of a top down system.
They just currently control most of the pieces. But the design is still decentralized.
Right, my point is that they have the ingredients to meaningfully decentralise control, but until they do they are not meaningfully bettee than twitter, and it’s just a branding exercise.
Maybe they’ll fix that, maybe they won’t but until they do I think the fediverse’s resilience proves that platforms will keep turning over until a viable federated system arises, whether that’s bluesky, mastodon or something else.
I can’t even see where you disagree with this. You’re just throwing out details withoit reference to how this affects my point.
I fundamentally disagree that a federated system is the desired end goal.
One of the problems it seems to try to solve is eliminating the risk of a service going down. Just like a centralized service, a federated service lasts only as long as the maintainers want it to last, and I think the risk of important services disappearing is higher when you remove the profit motive to keep it going. Hobbyists’ pockets are only so deep, and they’ll eventually die or lose interest. Yeah, I guess another service will pop up, which perpetuates some portion of the platform, but it doesn’t really preserve the data.
So I see things like Mastodon (and Lemmy) as more complicated alternatives to services like Twitter or BlueSky, but with many of the same downsides. Will the data still be there in 20 years? 50? 100? Idk, probably not. Maybe if you put together a non-profit or something, but even then, I have my doubts.
So in that sense, I don’t really see a technical advantage that the Fediverse has that BlueSky doesn’t. If anything, I’d expect BlueSky to potentially stick around longer, assuming they can find a decent profit model, because money coming in tends to keep the servers running. Maybe they go bad like Reddit, maybe they get bought like Twitter, or maybe they stick it out longer (or maybe they open up to hobbyists). Whatever the case, I highly doubt Mastodon and friends will actually take over when they do disappear. It’ll likely remain a hobbyist project until the next hot thing comes out (Fedi v2?), and never really reach mainstream success.
Maybe I’m wrong. But given how the Reddit and Twitter exoduses have worked out, I don’t think so.
I want to see more projects looking into P2P, so that’s where my interest lies. That way data and platforms can truly live forever, provided new people constantly come around to provide more storage. Communities and posts wouldn’t live anywhere in particular (no single point of failure), but instead get distributed so there’s a very low chance that any given bit of data will be truly lost, kind of like how torrents tend to keep on keeping on as long as someone is seeding (but people would only need to seed a small subset of the total data). I think that’s a much more interesting idea than the Fediverse.
We do need better onboarding. I wonder if you could make an equivalent of the “discovery” feed that wasn’t abusive to the user