I would like to give an update on "federation" on Bluesky.
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@fabrice This is a VERY interesting question, as the answer appears to be "all of them". And when Link got banned, *that answer appeared to be surprising even to Bluesky employees*. The original messaging from Bluesky suggested you'd get banned only by the "labeler"— a third thing altogether. But there's obvious problems with that answer, and it's never what Bluesky implemented. After Link got banned Bluesky said they were reviewing this, but I don't think *changed* anything.
@mcc Because if you're banned only by the appview, this seems easy to bypass (just talk to the PDS!), but if you are banned at the PDS level that blocks you from also non-bsky ATProto apps, right? That all look bad to me; my conclusion is that we should own our PDSes (or use a Fediverse style community run one), and that appviews should not exist as centralized services.
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Oh and I can't get staging.blacksky on my phone app. So imagine if you were using Mastodon, but you saw a slightly different list of posters, *and potentially a different set of your own posts*, depending on whether you were using your PC or your phone. This is great if there's a banned user you want to follow— you get an *option* to follow them. Mastodon.social can deny me the *option* to follow someone, on Fediverse. But except in that edge case this *might* not be a fantastic user experience!
Oh, and let's consider, for a moment, the downsides of an individual user being able to "opt out" of moderation decisions. The problem with misbehavior on social media is force multipliers. One person harassing you is no problem; one person and their 3000 friends is a big problem. Imagine Bluesky and Blacksky ban user X but Trumpsky lets X keep posting. Now their 3000 friends— still in Bluesky's good graces— can see their posts calling to harass you, AND can zero-friction zip over to yell at you
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Oh, and let's consider, for a moment, the downsides of an individual user being able to "opt out" of moderation decisions. The problem with misbehavior on social media is force multipliers. One person harassing you is no problem; one person and their 3000 friends is a big problem. Imagine Bluesky and Blacksky ban user X but Trumpsky lets X keep posting. Now their 3000 friends— still in Bluesky's good graces— can see their posts calling to harass you, AND can zero-friction zip over to yell at you
@mcc is
is Trumpsky a real thing
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@mcc is
is Trumpsky a real thing
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@mcc phew, you had me worried for a second there was another one of Those Bloody Things
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Oh, and let's consider, for a moment, the downsides of an individual user being able to "opt out" of moderation decisions. The problem with misbehavior on social media is force multipliers. One person harassing you is no problem; one person and their 3000 friends is a big problem. Imagine Bluesky and Blacksky ban user X but Trumpsky lets X keep posting. Now their 3000 friends— still in Bluesky's good graces— can see their posts calling to harass you, AND can zero-friction zip over to yell at you
This is why—although, now Blacksky is letting me "see through" Bluesky's worst moderation decisions, I'm glad, because Bluesky's moderation is weird and arbitrary—I think it's a downside of the network, and Mastodon made the right decision not offering this feature. Fediverse defederation forces a degree of soft group consensus on moderation: it's possible to say "if you're talking to X, I don't want to talk to *you*". On Bluesky we are all ghosts walking through walls and this can't be enforced
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This is why—although, now Blacksky is letting me "see through" Bluesky's worst moderation decisions, I'm glad, because Bluesky's moderation is weird and arbitrary—I think it's a downside of the network, and Mastodon made the right decision not offering this feature. Fediverse defederation forces a degree of soft group consensus on moderation: it's possible to say "if you're talking to X, I don't want to talk to *you*". On Bluesky we are all ghosts walking through walls and this can't be enforced
@mcc I guess you could simultaneously see this as a success and a failure for ATproto: decentralization is possible... but you immediately get a lot of the same problems ActivityPub has that ATProto ostensibly solved.
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@mcc phew, you had me worried for a second there was another one of Those Bloody Things
@ratsnakegames @mcc it's probably only a matter of time though. And as with fedi/AP, where this already did happen, how the network reacts and deals with it will be a real test of its philosophy.
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@mcc I guess you could simultaneously see this as a success and a failure for ATproto: decentralization is possible... but you immediately get a lot of the same problems ActivityPub has that ATProto ostensibly solved.
@operand However, they experience those problems in a *completely different way*, which not only is their userbase unprepared for, but the pre-existing experience of fediverse users does not exactly prepare for!
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@ratsnakegames @mcc it's probably only a matter of time though. And as with fedi/AP, where this already did happen, how the network reacts and deals with it will be a real test of its philosophy.
@megmac I refuse to believe Bluesky has a philosophy
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This is why—although, now Blacksky is letting me "see through" Bluesky's worst moderation decisions, I'm glad, because Bluesky's moderation is weird and arbitrary—I think it's a downside of the network, and Mastodon made the right decision not offering this feature. Fediverse defederation forces a degree of soft group consensus on moderation: it's possible to say "if you're talking to X, I don't want to talk to *you*". On Bluesky we are all ghosts walking through walls and this can't be enforced
@mcc Interestingly, this also breaks one of the main selling points of having a network architecture like ATProtos: that 'everyone gets all the replies' because suddenly you don't, maybe!
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:frogsiren: BLUESKY HAS OFFICIALLY NETSPLIT :frogsiren:
There has always been more than one Fediverse. Different instances make different moderation decisions so some instances can't see posts by some users.
There has only ever been one Bluesky because every ATProto frontend uses the same Appview.
It is January 2026 and that's no longer true; Blacksky's Appview is available for beta use and there is at least 1 user banned on Bluesky but not Blacksky. And vice versa.
Rudy wants revolution. (@rude1.blacksky.team)
Bluesky runs an appview. Blacksky runs an appview. A complete appview is a several terabytes sized database of the >18 billion follows, likes and posts of all bsky users, ever and forever. To run a different appview is to make a fork in bsky’s timeline. One has new posts from Łink. One doesn’t.
Bluesky Social (bsky.app)
@mcc blacksky is the social media platform for Black users that the fediverse promises to be and fails at
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@mcc blacksky is the social media platform for Black users that the fediverse promises to be and fails at
@mcc for better or worse
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@mcc blacksky is the social media platform for Black users that the fediverse promises to be and fails at
@burnoutqueen If it were not for Blacksky it is quite possible I would no longer be using Bluesky.
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:frogsiren: BLUESKY HAS OFFICIALLY NETSPLIT :frogsiren:
There has always been more than one Fediverse. Different instances make different moderation decisions so some instances can't see posts by some users.
There has only ever been one Bluesky because every ATProto frontend uses the same Appview.
It is January 2026 and that's no longer true; Blacksky's Appview is available for beta use and there is at least 1 user banned on Bluesky but not Blacksky. And vice versa.
Rudy wants revolution. (@rude1.blacksky.team)
Bluesky runs an appview. Blacksky runs an appview. A complete appview is a several terabytes sized database of the >18 billion follows, likes and posts of all bsky users, ever and forever. To run a different appview is to make a fork in bsky’s timeline. One has new posts from Łink. One doesn’t.
Bluesky Social (bsky.app)
@mcc Someone should update the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacksky
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:frogsiren: BLUESKY HAS OFFICIALLY NETSPLIT :frogsiren:
There has always been more than one Fediverse. Different instances make different moderation decisions so some instances can't see posts by some users.
There has only ever been one Bluesky because every ATProto frontend uses the same Appview.
It is January 2026 and that's no longer true; Blacksky's Appview is available for beta use and there is at least 1 user banned on Bluesky but not Blacksky. And vice versa.
Rudy wants revolution. (@rude1.blacksky.team)
Bluesky runs an appview. Blacksky runs an appview. A complete appview is a several terabytes sized database of the >18 billion follows, likes and posts of all bsky users, ever and forever. To run a different appview is to make a fork in bsky’s timeline. One has new posts from Łink. One doesn’t.
Bluesky Social (bsky.app)
@mcc Do you not find the login UI for https://blacksky.community and https://bsky.app a bit concerning? Because if you fill in a “custom server” you are now sending your password from one app view to a different server? If you host your own PDS do you only ever send that pw to your own servers?
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This is why—although, now Blacksky is letting me "see through" Bluesky's worst moderation decisions, I'm glad, because Bluesky's moderation is weird and arbitrary—I think it's a downside of the network, and Mastodon made the right decision not offering this feature. Fediverse defederation forces a degree of soft group consensus on moderation: it's possible to say "if you're talking to X, I don't want to talk to *you*". On Bluesky we are all ghosts walking through walls and this can't be enforced
Fediverse defederation forces a degree of soft group consensus on moderation: it's possible to say "if you're talking to X, I don't want to talk to you".
How? If server A blocks server B, and neither server blocks server C, server C can still interact with both servers A and B. Server A could of course choose to also block server C for not blocking server B, but this would have to be done manually (you can't necessarily tell if server C blocks server B, since blocklists are often not public and not all interactions are public either) and I don't see how it's forced.
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Fediverse defederation forces a degree of soft group consensus on moderation: it's possible to say "if you're talking to X, I don't want to talk to you".
How? If server A blocks server B, and neither server blocks server C, server C can still interact with both servers A and B. Server A could of course choose to also block server C for not blocking server B, but this would have to be done manually (you can't necessarily tell if server C blocks server B, since blocklists are often not public and not all interactions are public either) and I don't see how it's forced.
@noisytoot It's possible for A to figure out C's blocks and take action. C might choose to make that hard, but A might choose to treat hiding the blocks as suspicious. Or just talk to people and ask them what the blocks are.
By contrast on Bluesky it's not possible to do any of this. Not "it's not automatic", not "it's potentially hard", it's impossible. Any account can be on any PDS can be on any appview, there are no walls or fences, the instance is not present as a moderation abstraction.
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:frogsiren: BLUESKY HAS OFFICIALLY NETSPLIT :frogsiren:
There has always been more than one Fediverse. Different instances make different moderation decisions so some instances can't see posts by some users.
There has only ever been one Bluesky because every ATProto frontend uses the same Appview.
It is January 2026 and that's no longer true; Blacksky's Appview is available for beta use and there is at least 1 user banned on Bluesky but not Blacksky. And vice versa.
Rudy wants revolution. (@rude1.blacksky.team)
Bluesky runs an appview. Blacksky runs an appview. A complete appview is a several terabytes sized database of the >18 billion follows, likes and posts of all bsky users, ever and forever. To run a different appview is to make a fork in bsky’s timeline. One has new posts from Łink. One doesn’t.
Bluesky Social (bsky.app)
@mcc oh that's sick. congrats to blacksky for making it
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This is why—although, now Blacksky is letting me "see through" Bluesky's worst moderation decisions, I'm glad, because Bluesky's moderation is weird and arbitrary—I think it's a downside of the network, and Mastodon made the right decision not offering this feature. Fediverse defederation forces a degree of soft group consensus on moderation: it's possible to say "if you're talking to X, I don't want to talk to *you*". On Bluesky we are all ghosts walking through walls and this can't be enforced
@mcc I read your thread only now, and I wanted to thank you for posting all that. I am no fan of Bluesky and their one-instance federation, but I have a phony account there, to follow how it's going for them. Threads like yours fill in additional context.
