I would like to inform you that Bluesky is fun
Disturbed by controversy: Jake Tapper, CEO of Bluesky, apologizes for stepping in on the first US Senator Schatz
Bluesky’s team has wrestled with an endless number of issues, some ofwhich are extremely niche, such as artificial intelligence accounts that make threads of replies run so long that the app or website will error out.
In the midst of the chaos on Thursday, the CEO took a moment to beg people to please stop calling posts “skeets” — a putative amalgam of “sky” and “tweet,” but really mostly a slangy reference to seminal emissions. The interface only refers to posts. Many users from the most recent influx ofTwitter refugees insist that posts were definitely skeets after this plea from on high.
Jake Tapper was going to ask his guests to respond to the statement made by Sen. Brian Schatz, the first US senator on Bluesky. Tapper broadcasted the skeet on Bluesky, before reading the skeet out loud.
Bluesky was originally incubated at—and funded by—Twitter in 2019; it only became a stand-alone company in late 2021. As on Mastodon, the decentralized structure was meant to be its selling point; it was designed so that no one person can own or control it and users can create their own apps and communities within it. Bluesky was also designed with interoperability in mind, so it may someday allow cross-posting from other apps (like Twitter, if it still exists).
Jay Graber said in her Bluesky account that the developers were balancing moderation between federation and they had asked people to stop calling posts skeets. There is no feature that will help curb harassment on the platform. When the user base suddenly jumped in size, the block function had not yet been added.
This was not ideal for anyone but worse for pundit and Substack writer, Matt Yglesias, formerly of Vox.com. On Twitter, Yglesias has a history of stating a lot of opinions — some benign, some offensive, all immensely dunkable. People on Bluesky were upset with Yglesias, but it wasn’t clear what he was going to do about trans rights issues. Regardless, on Thursday, his posts were under fire, with over a hundred replies ranging from merely hostile to descriptively violent. “WE ARE GOING TO BEAT YOU WITH HAMMERS,” said one user going by “hannah :)” who identified herself as a teen girl.
Even if the tone is one of shitposting, platforms often draw the line at direct calls to violence. Hannah cheerfully posted that she was engaged incoordinated harassment, which is a category of bannable offense on Twitter. She was banned immediately after, so she could not be contacted for comment.
Graber described it as “[taking] down several accounts from our server,” adding that those users would be “welcome to join elsewhere in the federation and perhaps reconnect with us after we exit beta.” A group of people added a hammer symbol to their usernames in support of Hannah.
Bluesky Weather Report Moderation Revisited: The Hellthread, Where Are We Going? The Bluesky News Editor’s Digest
Within 24 hours, the Bluesky developers had deployed a change to their codebase that added blocking as a function. The update was supposed to arrive on Saturday, but it was held up in the App Store. According to a post by Bluesky developer Paul Frazee, Apple wanted to do a deeper review, perhaps because of the platform’s suddenly high profile.
Yet even as the developers heroically sprinted to save Yglesias, the service was straining under something that would become known as “the hellthread” — an unending series of stringed replies fueled by auto-replying bot accounts and users who were incredibly amused by the prospect of jumping headfirst into a JSON error.
On Thursday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arrived on Bluesky, as did the internet’s most revered poster, #dril. Jake Tapper was the first to show up, followed by MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan. “Real psycho hours, just how we like it,” Hayes skeeted, impressed by the terrifying chaos unfolding on the feed.
Manning talked about the virtues of decentralization. Director Rian Johnson demanded to see the hellthread. Quinta Brunson of Abbott Elementary was mistakenly flagged as fake and wreathed with a pink exclamation mark when she arrived. An account for the Pope was also flagged as fake.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/2/23708385/bluesky-weather-report-moderation-app-store
The First Day of What’s Hot on Facebook: An Empirical Learning Curve and the First Steps Towards Human Modification of Harassment
The small size of the platform made it hard for power users to figure it out. There was an audience, sure, but it was so much tinier and so much more positive than on Twitter (except to Matt Yglesias) that it was easy to relax, let loose, and really start posting.
A person who might be used to seeing a hundred reposts in an hour was in for an emotional learning curve. The ‘What’s Hot’ tab included posts with as few as 15 likes, regardless of whether or not you follow the poster. The funniest, most ironic posters on the internet have been happily posting pictures of dogs, cats, and pet pigs and are happy to receive a few likes and replies.
The people tend to invite others in their communities. I invited journalists and local media due to the fact I thought it would be funny. The invitations began to skew towards the trans community at some point, possibly due to the fact that trans users were the most desperate to get away from a platform that didn’t protect them from harassment.
On Saturday, a user arrived seemingly hellbent on starting trouble. Bluesky was soon in an uproar as ryanlee made their way from person to person, offending and denigrating every trans user they could find. Graber said, ” Nobody has a right to access an invite-only closed alpha, and if they are creating accounts exclusively to harass people in replies they will be removed.” She did not tell anyone that ryanlee could possibly come back in the future.
As interest in the invite-only Bluesky increased, some unscrupulous people began to brute force codes in order to get into it. The flow of invites has slowed down due to revocation and re-issuing in a more secure format. On eBay, codes were being listed for up to $400. Author William Gibson resorted to begging on Twitter for an invite.
On Monday, a technical advisor to the BlueSky team announced that they would be implementing a “no boobs (or dicks, oras) on whats hot” policy. He said that the posts would be checked to detect nudity.
Is there a meaningful difference between full-on, policy-driven human moderation of harassment versus removing someone from a closed beta while a grand scheme to automate moderation is still in the works? Can Bluesky actually be said to be a service provider and a builder of a protocol rather than just another platform, albeit with an anemic Trust & Safety department? And what on earth is federation even going to look like?
The energy that people like the most about Bluesky seems to be dependent on fortune. She is there because she likes posting about Stardew Valley and her dresses, not because she is excited about the future of federation. Bluesky’s final form will be without it’s own vibe.
What makes it special? When you log in to the app (there’s no desktop experience yet) That isn’t apparent right away. The Bluesky is a stripped-down version of the popular networking service, missing some of its features. It is very easy to use and you will be familiar with the interface. It’s decentralized, but that’s not unique either; Mastodon is too. Mastodon got off to a good start and was the early front-runner for Replacement Twitpic, but it lost its popularity and is unlikely to return. Too confusing!
Instead, there is an infectious fuck-around energy, like everyone chugged a Red Bull on Friday afternoon and the boss was away. Users are playfully creating their own lingo; they call posts “skeets.” (Threaded posts are “ropes.”) The vibe is similar to the weeks in the past when Clubhouse was invite only and looked like the next big thing.
In a eulogy for pre-Musk Twitter, New York Times Magazine editor Willy Staley described the platform’s current atmosphere as “the part of the dinner party when only the serious drinkers remain.” I was scrolling Bluesky while thinking about that comparison. The new app has a loose, slaphappy quality too—but it’s more like the part of a dinner party where everyone has had two or three martinis but hasn’t eaten food yet, when it seems like absolutely anything could happen that night.
