User Ban Controversy Reveals Bluesky’s Decentralized Aspiration Isn’t Reality
Key topics
The Bluesky social media platform's handling of user bans has sparked controversy, highlighting the challenges of decentralization and moderation. The discussion reveals concerns about the tension between free speech and safety, as well as the limitations of decentralized systems.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
46m
Peak period
110
0-6h
Avg / period
16
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Oct 7, 2025 at 3:44 PM EDT
3 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Oct 7, 2025 at 4:29 PM EDT
46m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
110 comments in 0-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Oct 10, 2025 at 2:59 AM EDT
3 months ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
This is actually today's controversy on Bluesky because the #1 attribute of its power users is they're terrified of "AI" and the idea that "companies will steal their posts to generate AI slop", which means they think the ML moderation is stealing their posts.
Oh, but the ML can't be decentralized because the training datasets are illegal.
I don't know of any sense in which Mastodon has increased centralization, I think its blocking tools have been distributed essentially since the beginning, not something that has iterated toward centralization over time in response to an unfolding debate. Although it does have a complicated history and as possible that new things have happened I'm not aware of.
BlueSky though, to your point, is a good example of centralization not being reliable in terms of not being accountable to users. Or for a different way of saying the same thing, the lack of accountability has served to reveal how centralized it truly is.
It does seem to be simple enough that people don't get confused about using it, but it doesn't seem to walk the actual walk of decentralization.
So if for example #archlinux disagrees with your opinion and they decide to ban you for it, you are now banned from many other unrelated channels.
I have also seen subreddits that auto-ban users that have ever posted in specific other (unrelated) subreddits.
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/blob/msc2313/propos... is how it works fwiw.
Wheras with Matrix, you can run your own server, with your own rules, and federate with the rest of the network.
It sucks when server operators group together because it effectively becomes a centralized moderation team that makes decisions for users with tenuous implicit consent but user moderation lists aren't that.
Centralization eventually ends up with a single entity in charge of everything, which eventually does (or doesn't do) something that causes it's value to collapse.
The real solution here is federalization: A bunch of independent self-govening entities that co-operate with other entities to assist each other in moderation.
A good non-social network example here would be adblockers.
- Each adblocker uses at least one ad tracking list, with most adblockers allowing for multiple lists to be used and a sensible default for their own users to use.
- Each list has it's own moderators that add/update/remove entries on their list based on their own values.
- Adblockers (and their users) can collaborate on requesting changes to lists, resulting in faster reactions to advertising changes on the web, and in turn faster updates passed down to users of those adblockers who participate.
- If an adblocker can't do their job anymore (e.g. their owners/workers can't do their job anymore, the owner sells out, etc...) users can switch to (or create) a new adblocker.
- If a list fails, adblockers can switch to other lists (or create a new one).
No adblocker and no list holds all the power. Adblocking as a whole is strengthened by always having viable alternatives that can be switched to, and methods to quickly create new alternatives if the need arises.
That's the power of federation: the strengths of centralization without the weaknesses.
The social media version of a federated twitter is mastodon. A whole bunch of groups running their own mastodon servers that can interact with each-other as if they were a centralized mastodon website, with similarly aligned servers sharing co-operatively maintained bad-actor lists.
People always had irrational populist and conspiratorial beliefs, but that was mediated by popular media generally not platforming kooks. Now you have the top 10 podcasts allowing people to mainline validation for conspiracies.
I don't see how centralization helps. Allowing (or demanding) that a media provider to regulate more could lead to less platforming for conspiracy theorists and populists.
It's disappointing because I've mostly been able to replicate my Twitter experience there. It's better actually, because more funny people moved and fewer journalists so it's less of a doomscroll.
Bluesky in particular has this problem because it inherited a kind of leftist crustpunk poster from 2016 Twitter. They had a weird affect where they hated "nerds" for some reason and pretended to be those jock bully characters from 80s high school movies.
The modern Bluesky form has evolved into being terrified of "AI" and screaming at anyone who uses it or has ever heard of it that it doesn't work and will never work but is also using up all the water and steals everyone's art and is going to make everyone unemployed and also you're a STEMlord who needs to take humanities classes to learn to be ethical.
They're currently working on inventing new slurs for AI chatbots which are mostly remarkably offensive.
That sounds awesome. Thanks for the tip. I'm gonna join this effort immediately.
- posting about saying it "with a hard R"
- posting TikToks of yourself yelling "dirty clanker" at delivery robots on the street
- posting TikToks of yourself saying it in a sketch where you're a waitress in the South in the 1950s
- replying to people with prosthetic robot arms calling them "half clankas"
Cause those are all real. It's the internet, you should assume anything bad you can imagine is real.
https://www.tiktok.com/@supervilliansprax/video/754524076599...
The other words are worse.
I think I have backup: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samm...
Note Peter Thiel (the source of literally everything this sort of person is upset about) is a philosophy major.
Whatcha gonna do when we come for you?
It's either centralized and moderated system wide or decentralized and moderated locally.
The problem with being connected and moderated locally is your creating global moderation problems for a local system, typically that means massive amounts of work for said moderators.
The problem, if you can call it that, is Singal hasn't broken any of their TOS or guidelines.
Right now, AFAICT this is a people with pitchforks problem, who are asking for something which they don't have any business asking.
Sure, if you want to stick your fingers in your ears, block Singal. There are widely used block lists for people who even merely follow Singal. Asking for his ban from a public use platform is too much without more than "He wrote some articles for the NY Times, The Atlantic, and NY Magazine, I didn't personally enjoy."
Well, no, he did unambiguously break the TOS back when he originally joined. Then Bluesky amended their TOS, which gave them an avenue to avoid banning him.
Care to explain? The links in the article re: potential violations are mostly BS.
People mix up “users wanting him banned for having abhorrent views” (which is the opinion of some people) with “users wanting him banned for the same stuff they see other people get banned for”. It serves as a kind of cover because even when you point to a concrete example of him violating the rules the moderation team will dismiss your report as being personally motivated. It’s a funny defense, “This guy couldn’t possibly be breaking the rules and be near-universally considered an asshole by the users on this site! It has to be one or the other!”
I don't like platforms that try to keep me ignorant of what others are publicly saying, keeping me in a non-consensual information bubble. It is basically deception.
That’s neither here nor there. The nuclear block is a big part of how Bluesky works, and abiding by it/was part of the rules for users other than Jesse Singal.
The point I made is that other users that share your disagreement with the nuclear block would get suspended or banned for evading it, whereas Jesse Singal would not/does not. The message to other users was “if you don’t like it, tough”
I say is/was because I don’t read his posts. I stopped paying close attention to all that some time after it became clear that retroactive changes to the ToS to justify (lack of) actions is the baseline for how Jay and Aaron run the site.
I don't use Bluesky, but it sounds insane. It sounds like the bank robber who openly robbed a bank, made no attempt to disguise himself, and when questioned by the police, said he didn't understand because he'd rubbed lemon juice on his face so the cameras couldn't see him. He was so certain that would work.
Or when the idiot Boris Johnson said to national newspapers that he'd negotiate with the EU by promising them something, but he'd get the drop on dirty Brussels and he'd stick up for the plucky UK by undermining that agreement later (playing to his safe space / audience of Daily Telegraph readers)... and then he'd turn up at the negotiating table and the EU say to him "er, you know we can read your newspapers, right?"
Having some site rule about how person X can't seen person Y's posts is a trifling irrelevance if person X is a public figure and there's a legitimate journalistic interest in what person Y is saying about person X, in public.
Here are some of the things I understand Bluesky users have said:
* "i think if we all tried hard enough we could get Jesse Singal to kill himself, but that's just me"
* "me and my friends would beat Jesse Singal to death with hammers i can tell you that much"
* "I think Jesse Singal should be beat to death in the streets"
* "Jesse singal get fucked and die stupid kiddy fucker piece of shit trash sub human bitch. Fuck I hope someone breaks every bone in your body and castrated you penis and balls then beat you to death stupid bitch."
* "Jesse Singal has said many times he enjoys getting punched in the face. I am in no way endorsing or inciting violence. I am simply asking the question why not punch Jesse Singal in the face as hard as you can? It's not wrong to ask questions after all."
Now, firstly do you think Bluesky users should be posting these messages at all? But if you do, do you think Bluesky should do its utmost to make sure the target of these threats never gets to see them, and should sanction him if any concerned citizens pass on these messages to him and he acknowledges on Twitter that he has seen them?
This is an insane thing to ban in the terms of service, and it is in and of itself a good reason to avoid using BlueSky. I would not want to rely on any service to communicate that made it against the rules to post a screenshot of a public message from someone who blocked my account on their end.
That’s a perfectly reasonable opinion to have. The post you were responding to was not about the merits of the rule, it is about uneven enforcement of it.
That rule would be a reason to avoid BlueSky if you are not Jesse Singal, because you could get banned for breaking it. If you are Jesse Singal it is not a reason to avoid BlueSky, because that rule does not exist for you.
The strange thing about this is that Jay and the moderation team are sympathetic to your point. They don’t think that evading blocks (or doxxing) should always be grounds for taking action against an account. For at least one user they ignore all instances of it
Screenshotting someone's public post is not block evasion.
Even by the loosest definition what Singal did was not doxxing?
For instance, Alejandra Caraballo, like it or not, is a public figure. A role, I would add, that she has chosen for herself. She testifies before Congress FFS. When she says something in public, including on Bluesky, I'm not sure she deserves some radical right to not have it heard anywhere else. No matter what vague term you can point to in the Bluesky guidelines or TOS.
Before they amended the ToS, they did do that. It's completely possible to enforce, especially when the person in question is the one sharing the evidence of the offending behavior. There's no dispute of facts at play.
Bluesky has a problem of its user base demanding purity, and it will 100% be the death of it.
A decentralized system would allow for that to happen tbh. That 85% can exist in their bubble but other actors who see them as dangerous and unsafe should have the means to mute/disconnect.
yeah but that's an accusation without basis in reality.
https://www.professorwatchlist.org/
https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-makes...
https://www.azregents.edu/news-releases/abor-chair-statement
He's exceptionally skilled at taking complex and highly polarized topics and picking them apart in a way that invites readers to consider different perspectives.
Unfortunately, that in itself is a polarizing approach, as many people just want their pre-existing beliefs reinforced.
Who else have you read on this 'controversial issue'? Why did you consider them less persuasive than a journalist with no particular expertise?
Why have you not named what the 'issue' is?
Are 'people' an 'issue' to be solved in general, or just in this case?
If we changed topics to 'what should be done about the "autism issue"', does your opinion change? If so, why? There are perfectly valid questions being brought up by heterodox thinkers all the time. We're not even certain that those people experience emotions, there's literally no way to tell, and we shouldn't shy away from hard questions and even harder truths, don't you think?
Do you believe that the executive branch of the federal government is best-suited to dealing with undesirable minorities generally? If so, what national-level 'solutions' currently being discussed in the halls of power are your favorites?
In the spirit of cooperation, I'll go first. Openly trial-ballooning the revocation of the second amendment for trans people is my favorite in terms of pure audacity.
That is absolutely how some of the more "passionate" activist types have been for the past 5+ years on a number of social topics, not just trans.
First though, a clarifying question, do you think the civil-rights movement, as it existed in history, was 'too passionate'?
If not, in what specific way is the current 'activist' movement worse than those movements of our recent past?
Which civil rights organization has gone too far recently and what is the preferred middle ground that you do accept?
I'm not American but looking in from the outside i can't figure out anything 85% of you would agree on there right now.
As evidence, consider the fact that from your comment, I literally have absolutely no idea which political side you are on.
It used to be common sense to immediately ban creeps of all stripes, especially the obvious ones. Singal certainly qualifies. Putting aside the super annoying 'just asking questions' vitriol that he publishes to national papers, his pdf-file chat log stuff alone would warrant an instant perma from me without a second thought.
Speaking to your broader point about the 'death' of a platform. The people that made bsky what it is now (good and ill) are precisely the people you are blaming for its downfall, which is weird. Normally when you run a business you want your users to remain so that you might profit.
Relatedly, I'm very very tired of the 4chan/crypto/ai gas-leak that has enshittified everything, aren't you?
I've seen bsky users chat casually about their rpe and death-threat ratio before and after leaving twitter, and for that alone, I would choose the 'threat lite' platform for as long as it remained so.
> "The question is not whether those views are right, it's whether those are mainstream."
I don't agree that this is the question, nor do I agree with the your unsupported number. This isn't an election, and popularism is a coward's appeal. Was the Gaza genocide not a genocide until the polls caught up with what we could all see was happening?
I don't even think you believe what your wrote. If the 'views' in question are truly shared by
85%!* of a population that never agrees on anything, then surely there's no problem with sharing them on this forum? A guarantee of 85% positive karma is awaiting you if you just speak your truth. It's the Trump era, and you can say the 'r-word' and the 't-slur' now. What was actually holding you back?These platforms were supposed to be the "digital town square". Implicit in that is the idea that anyone and everyone can discuss and share their ideas. When would you remove someone from an actual town square? Only when they are being extremely disruptive or violent.
Further, it cannot be a "town square" if half the town isn't allowed to be there.
These are privately owned for-profit hundred-billion+ dollar publicly traded advertising companies. These are, almost definitionally, not honest actors! Are you serious, you still believe their marketing copy from 8 years ago verbatim?
What am I witnessing here?
I haven't used FB in years but Twitter is very (stupidly and incoherently, but very actively) moderated. Unless you are being technical and saying that Twitter doesn't exist and so isn't moderated, and the moderated thing is X, but...
I'm sure some actual humans manage to still get banned from time to time, but you can't be telling me that things haven't changed for the worse right? Do they even have a 'trust and safety' team anymore?
Well, except the groypers, but that's a feature, not a bug, as they otherwise are not breaking the law or platfom rules and therefore deserve to be on the platform just as anyone else does.
The experience on these platforms is somewhat better than it was five years ago, because the people making moderation decisions for these platforms have been largely replaced by people who are less prone to banning people because someone who dislikes their political speech labels them a creep. There are still serious moderation issues on these platforms, but yeah compared to five years ago there is somewhat more freedom to speak without risking getting arbitrarily banned, and a wider range of topics being talked about.
> Putting aside the super annoying 'just asking questions' vitriol that he publishes to national papers, his pdf-file chat log stuff alone would warrant an instant perma from me without a second thought.
You should be able to perma-ban anyone you want from your own feed for any reason. If it is possible for you to make the platform ban Singal (or anyone else) in a way that affects anyone other than ypu, then that platform is not meaningfully decentralized. I've occasionally read articles by Singal but I don't follow his output closely and don't have a strong opinion about him one way or the other. I should still be able to read what he posts even if you think it is not worth reading.
> Relatedly, I'm very very tired of the 4chan/crypto/ai gas-leak that has enshittified everything, aren't you?
I don't think 4chan, cryptocurrency, or AI have much to do with each other, nor that online discussion related to to these phenomena in some way universally constitutes enshittification or not.
crypto (and gambling I suppose these days) is a barometer of the advertising/fake user space. There's a fundamentally different vibe to a site trying to trick the gullible into getting 'free' crypto from musk and a site trying to sell you 75% off crocs at Target. You are free to disagree.
AI is the source of a huge wave deeply inauthentic and frankly boring/weird content. This reduces the signal/noise ratio, and thus the perceived value of any website. Again, your are free to disagree, but to me this is all symptomatic of cyclical autophagy.
Yup.
As someone who describes themselves as Leftist, I wanted to enjoy Blue Sky, but the purity tests are insane.
To give a concrete example, I was called a Nazi for owning a Tesla Model 3. The fact that I bought the car 6 years ago, long before Elon Musk made his hard-right turn, was irrelevant. They literally expected me to sell the car and take a huge financial loss (Since I need a car and would then need to buy a new one, and the trade-in value of my M3P is shit) just to virtue signal.
It's not 2012 anymore, and the modern mainstream social media ecosystem has turned into an utter disaster area. If you're going to do social media in the 2020's, you need something better, not the same tired ideas and empty promises about "We'll do it _right_ this time around, honest."
Mastodon, for all its faults, at the very least was truly and demonstrably decentralized.
good moderation requires discretion and keeping the users happy, not slavish legalism
even on a free service, users have some tiny leverage; they can vote with their feet
Do you mean null? Ironically, 4chan actually still uses Cloudflare to this day, and did through that whole controversy too.
I assure you there is way, way worse things posted to /pol/ than there ever was, or will be, to Kiwi Farms.
I enjoyed his interview with Nina Paley and Chris Cohn on life after cloudflare: https://heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-107-how-the-internet-...
I have been halfway following the Farm's status for the past couple years from null's telegram/forum posts, I didn't know he spoke about the situation at length anywhere.
Discretion should be rarely used. For everything else, create a set of rules and stick to them.
For the most part they’re fairly easy to avoid, but reading the replies for popular accounts is a minefield.
This is sort of like email in the old days before the spam filters got good. Bluesky needs better reply-spam filters. Or maybe they already exist somewhere, but it needs better ways to find the good filters?
If that gets fixed then maybe it has a chance to become a more welcoming place.
I mean, I get "ignoring" someone so they don't show up when you log into whatever instance you're in, whether it's the AT Protocol or ActivityPub, but like... if someone somehow decides to do work on top of one of these protocols and extend it to allow people to basically comment on things that a victim user doesn't want to allow an antagonist to take part in, I mean, aren't you just like effectively putting fingers in your ears while someone in another room talks about you?
I don't see how, without centralization, you can say to the world, "Hey, here's my content, interact with it," and then also say, "Oh you, over there, you can't participate in this thing that I am doing."
Like, depending on the shape of the graph, that doesn't make any sense. You effectively cannot do that without just creating a bunch of silos that are non-cooperative.
Bam, you've reinvented centralization with extra steps.
While anybody can host their own PDS, the public bsky.app instance can and will “block” users by preventing their login and not pulling data from the PDS of the banned user or showing it in feeds.
Since, to date, the BlueSky “AppView” (the service backend itself that handles aggregating data, generating feeds, etc.) continues to be closed, being banned from the public instance is effectively being banned from the network. The data model (lexicon) is well documented and somebody else is free to write their own, but, for now, BlueSky is just as centralized as other platforms even if you can store your data elsewhere.
Without the backend that handles all of the XRPC endpoints [1] being available, BlueSky still effectively maintains centralized control over their part of the 'atmosphere'. Somebody could, of course, make an open source implementation of the app.bsky lexicon and users would only need to update their DID to point at their preferred instance, but AFAIK none exists right now.
[1]: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/api/at-protocol-xrpc-api
What is missing?
Would projects like this one, which pulls only a subset of Bluesky data straight from the firehose, and can be processed as the end user pleases, help mitigate this limitation?
Theoretically they could maintain that filtering only occurs on the client level but they've made the choice to exclude banned users from the firehouse so their moderation choices effect everyone
So the expectation is that the vice president of the United States should be banned because he says stuff people don't like? What's the benefit of ignoring reality like this? He's not going to magically disappear if Bluesky bans him - indeed he'll remain VP with all the power that entails.
This is worse than performative activism, it's like some kind of political denialism. You can't change reality by pretending it doesn't exist.
> One of these people now sits in the White House, in part because of backlash to the deplatforming of him and others with similar politics.
It's not because of anything. Cause and effect doesn't apply to the brain of the median American voter - they live in a world of pure imagination. You could say they thought prices would go back down to 2016 levels, but that makes too much sense. If you look up what they actually think it's like "I voted for Trump because I want to protect abortion".
Good evidence that it worked to do what? Limit his influence and popularity? This is false. His unbanning had little effect besides the right wing giving Musk brownie points, but the initial ban fueled grievance politics and became a huge rallying cry for the right. It was an extraordinary backfire.
> It's not because of anything. Cause and effect doesn't apply to the brain of the median American voter - they live in a world of pure imagination.
I flatly disagree with this. Human beings are endlessly deep and complex. The extremes of the internet cause us to group people together and create 1-dimensional strawmen of them, but if you talk to any American voter -- offline and 1-on-1 -- you will find complexity, nuance, and surprise in their opinions. At least, that has been my experience, with a pretty decent sample size.
Edit: I've been loosely watching the score on these comments, and it's interesting to see how rapidly it fluctuates up and down. For those that disagree, please leave a comment. IMO what I wrote is pretty common sense and moderate, so I'm interested in hearing disagreements.
I've noticed there are usually wild swings depending on the active timezone. It would be interesting to try to extract a rough sentiment of each longitude, by looking at the timing.
But I guess you say you should know the reputation of every person coming into your shop, and if their reputation is deemed inappriopriate by a certain group, they should not be allowed into the shop to prevent them from harassing any other customers.
But how are you gonna regulate that? Who is gonna decide who is inappropriate and who isn't?
I think we already have a fairly well organized system for that: law & order. If someone breaks laws, they are punished for it. So if someone is violent, whether it's inside or outside a shop, they can be punished for it.
And you as a shop owner don't have to also individually take the effort to investigate and punish the individual. Although if you want to you have the freedom to; it's your shop in the end.
The problem with that is two-fold. One, it neuters any political impact - you're effectively driving away the very voters you need to convince. And two, it creates an echo chamber that distorts reality because everywhere you look people are agreeing with you. Then 2028 rolls around and you're shocked that "the bad guys" won again.
That seems like a good goal. I want to chat with friends about formula one or whatever, not have to have everything messed up by some weirdo who always wants to debate whether minorities have rights.
Not everyone wants to debate politics all the time. Sometimes they just want to exist as trans people, share posts with their other queer friends and enjoy their day.
Is it? No one I know uses it at all, the only time I even remember it exists is when seeing screenshots of Trump's posts reposted on mainstream media and twitter from his account there. It's essentially the "trump-branded-twitter" and I never even hear of anyone else actually using it.
Compared to twitter, where most people I know still have an account in one way or another, including most notable mainstream figures.
> Not everyone wants to debate politics all the time. Sometimes they just want to exist as trans people, share posts with their other queer friends and enjoy their day.
Well they'd be poorly served by Bluesky, seeing as how someone merely existing on the platform without even breaking any rules has become a hot-button issue.
The whole platform is filled with politics, and people complaining about politics(/political figures). Perhaps politics they agree with are more tolerable than having to see opposing politics on their feed, but I find it hard to believe they truly are attracted to Bluesky for the total lack of politics.
Well, unless they go there for furry porn. There's so much of it for those that seek out such content, perhaps it really goes drown out any semblance of political discussion.
Decreasing the reach of his propaganda. And reality isn't ignored since posts about him and his words/actions aren't removed
At a certain scale, social media tilts humanity in one direction. We can't seem to escape the trajectory of our very nature; it will outcompete any complex system we devise to outwit it.
I still think there's room for something better technically. Mastodon seems more true to the decentralized ethos but I've never quite gotten used to the server dependency experience.
Nostr appeals to me technically but every time I'm on it seems swamped completely by discussion of cryptocurrency.
I guess to me it feels like one of these catch 22 (necessary but not sufficient?) problems where you have to have the right technical base for a platform, which seems doable, but even then you have to have the right userbase also.
And for social media that isn't their userbase.
I’d like to see Bluesky’s long-term business plan and what they will do when someone inevitably wants return on investment.
[0] Yes, this describes all of current social media, but it doesn’t have to be this way. This business model should not be legal: as long as there is one “free” social media platform, that is the platform that is going to be used, simply because even $1 is infinitely more than $0 and no one can compete with free.
It's why I found it so dismaying when we went through years of apparently serious newspapers reporting on every twitter-storm as if it was important. Yes, it was a good if unreliable source of breaking news, but the general noise of people fighting back and forwards about whatever it was that week ... was just noise, among a relatively small group of motivated crazies. Using it as a societal barometer just results in skewed coverage and an emphasis on American social issues that aren't necessarily as relevant everywhere else.
I don't need to go find loonies. I can get on Twitter or Truth Social and get it from the horse's mouth.
The choice need not be limited to the familiar corporate hellscape vs decentralized usability nightmare dichotomy. Middle grounds can exist if we want them to.
I've seen a lot of general support for the criticisms and concepts described in this article:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
Anyone who builds what they describe there can expect it to take off faster than ever.
[0] https://abner.page/post/exit-the-feed/
I'm not sure that's true. It's important to note that these bans are from the Bluesky App View (one component of the infra), and that these users can continue to post under their identity (if they own it, which they can), and users on App Views that haven't banned these users could continue to follow them.
None of that works with Mastodon. An admin bans you from the instance, and you can no longer post, use your identity, interact on the platform, etc. You have to start from scratch.
In short, Mastodon reduces the blast radius, but the "blast" is the same as on any private platform. Bluesky/AT Proto changes the impact to a different, strictly lesser type.
I think there's a great value to the "small community" ethos that the fediverse supports much better than bluesky.
Bluesky is trying to build something as decentralized as email where still few providers dominate the market and most use few common ip/domain blacklists.
Yet it is one of the most decentralized protocols on the internet.
I a not saying Bluesky is a masterpiece but I think it is naive to hold it to a higher standard than email as a protocol.
If it fails due to little adoption then it is a fail, if it succeed there is a possibility of it becoming a good decentralized protocol
I am making a parallel to how email works. With my own domain I can configure my DNS to use various different email providers and move however I like.
This is both decentralized and federated.
I can also use someone else's domain like gmail.com but then I lose portability for ease of use.
This is federated but not centralized.
Or I can host my own email server on my own domain and deal with spam fileters, bots, etc. directly
This is decentralized but less federated.
Mastodon is federated between instances but each instance is entirely centralized. Even account portability requires admin consent IIRC.
Bluesky is trying to create a space where users can own their own data like you can own your email AND aiming for widespread adoption.
I am not particularly focused on Mastodon, it is just the only part of the fediverse with a modicum of adoption.
[1] See my bio about GoActivityPub.
ActivityPub's lack of portable identity is a pretty serious problem, but the fact that significant portions of ATProto still rely on centralized infrastructure with no credible path to decentralization is pretty clearly worse[1].
[1] There are only two credible relays, and only one credible app view, and building/running either requires hundreds of times more capital than spinning up a Mastodon instance.
221 more comments available on Hacker News