bluesky – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Techdirt Podcast Episode 404: From The Streisand Effect To Bluesky

from the back-for-now dept

It’s been a few weeks, but we’re back! Although the podcast schedule is still going to be sporadic for a little while longer (Mike explains further in the intro) we’ve got a couple cross-post episodes lined up, starting with today’s. Recently, Mike joined Ed Zitron on his Better Offline podcast for a far-reaching interview about (among other things) the history of Techdirt, the future of Bluesky, and the origins of the Streisand Effect. You can listen to the whole conversation here on this week’s episode.

You can also download this episode directly in MP3 format.

Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Filed Under: better offline, ed zitron, podcast, streisand effect, techdirt
Companies: bluesky

Some (Slightly Biased) Thoughts On The State Of Decentralized Social Media

from the decentralize-all-the-things dept

Last week, Bluesky, where I am on the board (so feel free to consider this as biased as can be), announced that it had raised a $15 million seed round, and with it announced some plans for building out subscription plans and helping to make the site sustainable (some of which may be very cool — stay tuned). A few days prior to that happening, Bluesky hit 13 million users and continues to grow. It’s still relatively small, but it has now done way more with a smaller team and less money than Twitter did at a similar point in its evolution.

I’m excited with where things are trending with Bluesky for a few reasons, but I wanted to actually talk about something else. Just before I joined the board, I had met up with a group of supporters of “decentralized social media,” who more leaned towards ActivityPub/Mastodon/Threads over Bluesky. Even though I wasn’t officially representing Bluesky, they knew I was a fan of Bluesky and asked me how I viewed the overall decentralized social media landscape.

Similar questions have come up a few times in the last few months, and I thought that it made sense to write about my thoughts on the wider decentralized social media ecosystem, just as we’ve hit the two year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Since then, he’s wiped out billions of dollars in value and revenue, turned what had been a pretty neutral open speech platform that fought globally for free speech, into a one-sided, bot-filled partisan platform that only fights for free speech when it disagrees with the government, but is happy to cave if the authoritarians in charge are friendly with Musk.

But the one key thing is that the decentralized social media landscape has been invigorated and supercharged, almost entirely because of Elon Musk. Thank you, Elon.

I previously told the story of my attendance at a conference in New York in October of 2022, where there was a very interesting presentation predicting the adoption of decentralized alternatives to centralized social media with this chart being shown:

As I noted, this chart and the “events that trigger disillusion” in particular struck me as a bit too underpants gnomey:

What those “events that trigger disillusion” actually are becomes pretty damn important. So, I had asked a question to that effect at the event. For years since my Protocols, Not Platforms paper came out, I had struggled with what would actually lead to real change. I didn’t find the presenter’s answer all that satisfying, but little did I know that literally while that presentation was happening, Elon Musk was officially saying that he would drop his attempt to get out of buying Twitter, and would move forward with the acquisition.

At that point, Bluesky was still just a concept of a protocol. It was far from any sort of app (it wasn’t even clear it was going to be an app). But in the events that followed over the next few weeks and months, as Elon’s approach to dismantling basically everything that he claimed he supported with ExTwitter became clear, Bluesky realized it needed to build its own app.

Indeed, it’s astounding how much Elon has become the one man “events that trigger disillusion” from that chart above. With it, he has become a singular driving force towards driving adoption in alternative platforms.

I’m not betraying any internal secrets in noting that people within Bluesky have referred to some of the big influxes of new users on the platform to “EME: Elon Musk Events.” Whenever he chooses to do something reckless — ban popular users, launch a poorly planned fight with a Brazilian judge, take away the block feature — it seems to drive floods of traffic to Bluesky. But also to other new alternative platforms.

Thank you, Elon, for continuing to supply “events that trigger disillusion.”

But waiting for Elon to fuck up again and again is not a long-term strategy, even if it keeps happening. It is introducing more and more people to the alternatives, and many people are liking what they’ve found. For example, well-known engineer Kelsey Hightower recently left ExTwitter and explained how ATProtocol (which underlies Bluesky and enables much of what’s great about it from a technical standpoint) is one of the most exciting things he’s seen in years.

But, the reality is that no one quite knows what is going to really “click” to make decentralized social media more appealing long term and for more people than centralized social media. Many of us have theories, but the reality is that what makes something really click and go from a niche (or dying!) thing to essential is only possible to understand in retrospect, rather than prospectively.

Just as I spent a few years trying to work out what kinds of things might be “events that trigger disillusion,” I think we’re still in the discovery stage of “events that trigger lasting value.” People leaving the old place because they’re disillusioned is a starting point. It’s an opportunity to show them there are alternatives. But to make it last, we need to create things that people find real value out of that weren’t available at the old place.

The key to every “killer app” on a new system, even ones that start out mimicking the old paradigm, is enabling something that couldn’t be done on the old system. That’s when things get really fun. Early TV was just radio with video until people figured out to embrace the medium. Smartphones were initially just tiny computers, until services that embraced native features like location were better understood.

We need that for decentralized social media.

But right now, we don’t really know what that trigger is going to be. I can think that some of Bluesky’s features — things like domains as handles, using standardized decentralized IDs, composable and stackable moderation, and algorithmic choice — are part of what will get us there, but I don’t know for sure what the big breakthroughs will be. And neither does anyone else.

As such, we need more experiments and experimenting, and not all of that should be done directly within the ATProtocol system (the ATmosphere). Because, even while I think it’s extremely clever in what it enables, the choices made in its approach might limit somethings enabled by other approaches. So I don’t so much see other decentralized social media systems like ActivityPub (Mastodon, Threads, etc.), nostr, Farcaster, Lens, DSNP, etc., as competitors.

Rather, I see them as all presenting unique experiments to see where the real value can show up. I think there’s a ton to learn from all of them. For example, I think Mastodon’s focus on local community and the power of defederation is a fascinating experiment. We’re also seeing some interesting new systems built on ActivityPub that challenge the way we think about decentralized apps. I think that nostr’s simplicity that makes it ridiculously easy for anyone to build clients and relays is important. Farcaster has a number of really cool ideas, including things like Frames that allow you to create apps within social feeds.

In other words, there is a lot of experimentation going on right now, and all of that helps the wider ecosystem of decentralized social media, because we can all learn from each other. We already see that Mastodon has been making changes in response to the things that people like about Bluesky. I’m sure that everyone working on all of these systems are looking at what others are doing and learning from each other.

The simple reality is that right now, no one really knows what will “click.” We don’t know what the real “killer app” is that convinces more people to switch over from centralized systems to decentralized ones. “Events that trigger disillusion” are great for getting people to look. But, getting people to stay and eagerly participate requires adding real value.

I’m happy to see all this experimentation going on to figure out what that is. Just “being decentralized” is not a value that attracts most users. It has to be what that decentralization enables, preferably the kinds of things that a centralized system can’t actually match, that will create the next breakthrough.

Since no one can predict exactly what that breakthrough is, the best way to find out what will really make it work is having the wider decentralized ecosystem all experimenting. This isn’t even a “rising tide lifts all boats” kinda thing. It’s more of a “we need lots of folks digging holes to see where the oil is” kinda thing. Letting each of these systems test things out with their own unique approach is the best way to discover what will actually excite and attract users positively, rather than just in response to yet another Elon Musk Event.

I’m enthusiastic about Bluesky’s approach. I think the ATProtocol gives us the best chance of reaching that breakthrough. But I’m happy to see others trying different ideas as well, because all of these experiments will help bring us to a world where more people embrace decentralized systems (whether they know it or not) and move away from old walled gardens. Not because of “events that trigger disillusion” but because what’s happening over here is just that much more useful and powerful.

Filed Under: atprotocol, competition, decentralization, decentralized social media, elon musk, social media
Companies: bluesky, farcaster, mastodon, twitter, x

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Regulate, Rinse, Repeat

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund, and by our launch sponsor Modulate, which builds prosocial voice technology that combats online toxicity and elevates the health and safety of online communities. Mike Pappas joins us for our bonus chat, talking to Mike about the ever important decision between building your own trust & safety tools versus buying them from vendors.

Filed Under: ai, artifical intelligence, content moderation, disinformation, misinformation, regulation
Companies: bluesky, instagram, meta, twitter, x

Twitter’s Pre-Musk Plans Mirrored Elon’s Vision—Until He Abandoned, Trashed Or Ignored Them

from the so-much-missed-opportunity dept

Today, the new book by NY Times reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac, C_haracter Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter_, comes out. If you’re at all interested in what went down, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s a well-written, deeply researched book with all sorts of details about the lead-up to the acquisition, the acquisition itself, and the aftermath of Elon owning Twitter.

Even if you followed the story closely as it played out (as I did), the book is a worthwhile read in multiple ways. First, it’s pretty incredible to pull it all together in a single book. There was so much craziness happening every day that it’s sometimes difficult to take a step back and take in the larger picture. This book gives readers a chance to do just that.

But second, and more important, there are plenty of details broken by the book, some of which are mind-boggling. If you want to read a couple of parts that have been published, both the NY Times and Vanity Fair have run excerpts. The NY Times one covers Elon’s infatuation with “relaunching” Twitter Blue as a paid verification scheme a week after he took over. The Vanity Fair one looks at the actual closing of the deal and how chaotic it was, including Elon coming up $400 million short and demanding that Twitter just give him the money to cover the cost of closing the deal.

Both excerpts give you a sense of the kinds of amazing stories told in the book.

But as I read an advance copy of the book, two things stood out to me. The first was Elon’s near total lack of understanding of the concept of Chesterton’s Fence. The second was how much the old regime at Twitter was already trying to do almost everything that Elon claimed he wanted to do. But as soon as he took over, he was so sure (1) that the old regime were complete idiots and (2) that he could reason his way into solving social media, that he not only ignored what people were telling him, he actively assumed they were trying to sabotage him, and did away with anyone who could be helpful.

Elon rips out some fences

If you’re unaware of the concept of Chesterton’s Fence, it’s that you shouldn’t remove something (such as a fence) if you don’t understand why it was put there in the first place. Over and over in the book, we see Elon dismiss all sorts of ideas, policies, and systems that were in place at Twitter without even caring to find out why they were there. Often, he seems to assume things were done for the dumbest of all reasons, but never bothered to understand why they were actually done. Indeed, he so distrusted legacy Twitter employees that he assumed most were lying to him or trying to sabotage him.

It’s perhaps not that surprising to see why he would trust his own instincts, not that it makes it smart. With both Tesla and SpaceX, Elon bucked the conventional wisdom and succeeded massively. In both cases, he did things that many people said were impossible. And if that happens to you twice and makes you the world’s wealthiest person, you can see how you might start assuming that whenever people suggest that something is a bad idea or impossible, you should trust your gut over what people are telling you.

But the point of Chesterton’s Fence is not that you should never do things differently or never remove policies or technology that is in place. The point is that you should understand why they’re there. Elon never bothers to take that tiny step, and it’s a big part of his downfall.

In Character Limit, we see that Elon has almost no actual intellectual curiosity about social media. He has no interest in understanding how Twitter worked or why certain decisions were made. Propped up by a circle of sycophants and yes-men, he assumes that the previous regime at Twitter must have been totally stupid, and therefore there is no reason to listen to anything they had to say.

It is stunning how in story after story in the book, Elon has zero interest in understanding why anything works the way it does. He is sure that his own instincts, which are clouded by his unique position on the platform with tens of millions of followers, represent everyone’s experience.

He’s quite sure that his own instincts can get him to the right answers. This includes thinking he could (1) double advertising revenue in a few years (when he’s actually driven away over 80% of it) and (2) eclipse even that erroneously predicted increased advertising revenue by getting millions of people to pay for verification. In actuality, as the book details, a tiny fraction of users are willing to pay, and it’s bringing in just a few million dollars per quarter, doing little to staunch the losses of billions of dollars in advertising that Elon personally drove away.

The stories in the book are jaw-dropping. People who try to explain reality to him are fired. The people who stick around quickly learn the only thing to do is to lie to him and massage his ego. And thus, the book is full of stories of Elon ripping out the important pillars of what had been Twitter and then being perplexed when nothing works properly anymore.

He seems even more shocked that tons of people don’t seem to love him for his blundering around.

Old Twitter was already planning on doing what Elon wanted, but way better

Perhaps this is somewhat related to the last point, but the book details multiple ways in which Parag Agrawal, who had just taken over from Jack Dorsey a few months earlier, was already looking to do nearly everything Elon publicly claimed he wanted to do with Twitter.

When Elon first announced the deal to buy Twitter, I suggested a few (unlikely, but possible) ways in which Elon could actually improve Twitter. First up was that by taking the company private, Elon could remove Twitter from the whims of activist investors who were more focused on the short-term than the long-term.

The book goes into great detail about how much activist investors created problems for both Dorsey and Agrawal, pre-Musk. Specifically, their revenue and user demands actually made it somewhat more difficult to put in place a long-term vision.

In my original post, I talked about continuing Twitter’s actual commitment to free speech, which meant fighting government attempts to censor information (not just when you disagreed with the political leaders).

But beyond that, there were things like further investing in and supporting Bluesky (see disclaimer)* and its ATprotocol. After all, Elon claimed that he wanted to “open source” the algorithm.

Moving to an open protocol like ATProtocol would have not just allowed the open sourcing of the recommendation algorithm, it would have opened up the ability for anyone to create their own algorithm, both for recommendations and for moderation. Instead, that’s all happening on the entirely independent Bluesky app, which really only exists because Elon threw away Twitter’s deal to work with Bluesky.

Furthermore, the book reveals that well before Elon came on the scene, Parag and other top execs at the company were working on something called Project Saturn, which was discussed a bit in Kurt Wagner’s earlier book on this topic, but which is explained in more detail here.

The book reveals that Parag very much agreed with Elon (and Jack) that expecting companies to constantly completely remove problematic content was not a very effective solution.

So they created a plan to basically rearchitect everything around “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach.” Ironically, this is the very same motto that Elon claimed to embrace soon after taking over the company (and after firing Parag).

Image

But Parag and others at Twitter had already been working on a system to operationalize that very idea. The plan was to use different “levels” and “circles” in which users who were following the rules would have their content eligible to be promoted to varying degrees within the algorithm. The more you violated the site’s rules, you would move to further and further outer layers/rings of the system (which is where the Project Saturn name came from). This would lead to less “reach,” but also less of a need for Twitter to fully remove accounts or tweets.

It was a big rethinking of how social media could work and how it could support free speech. In reading about it in the book, it sounds like exactly what Elon said he wanted. A small team within Twitter, pushed by Parag’s vision, had been working on it since way before Elon purchased his shares and started the takeover process. According to the book, even as Elon caused such a mess in the summer of 2022 trying to back out of the deal, Parag kept pushing the team to move forward with the idea.

Once Elon took over, it appears that a few remaining people at the company tried to show him Project Saturn and explain to him how it would match the ideals he had talked about.

But Elon ignored them, tossed out all the work they had done on it, and just randomly started unbanning people he thought belonged back on the platform without any plan on how to deal with those users if they started causing problems (and driving away advertisers). He assumed that his new verification plan would solve both the revenue issues for the company and all moderation issues.

Even the idea that Twitter was too bloated with excess employees and a lack of vision seemed to be part of Agrawal’s plans. Before Elon had made his move, the book reveals that Agrawal had drawn up plans to lay off approximately 25% of the company and greatly streamline everything with a focus on building out certain lines of business and users. He did move to lay off many senior leaders as part of that streamlining, though it wasn’t as clearly explained at the time what the larger plan was. Elon’s effort to buy Twitter outright (and then back out of the deal) forced Agrawal to put the layoff plans on hold, out of a fear that Elon would view those layoffs as an attempt to sabotage the company.

It’s truly striking how much of what Elon claimed he wanted to do, Parag and his exec team were already doing. They were making things more open, transparent, and decentralized with Bluesky. They were decreasing the reliance on “takedowns” as a trust & safety mechanism with Saturn. They were betting big on “freedom of speech, not reach” with Saturn. They were fighting for actual free speech with legal actions around the globe. They were cutting employee bloat.

But the company was doing all of those things thoughtfully and deliberately, with a larger strategy behind it.

As the book details, Elon came in and not only tore down Chesterton Fences everywhere he could, he dismissed, ignored, or cut loose all of those other projects that would have taken him far along the path he claimed he wanted to go.

So, now he’s left with a site that has trouble functioning, has lost nearly all of its revenue, and is generally seen as a laughingstock closed system designed just to push Elon’s latest political partisan brain farts, rather than enabling the world’s conversation.

Of course, in the wake of all that destruction, it has enabled things like Bluesky to spring forth entirely unrelated to Twitter, and to put some of this into practice. Just this weekend, Bluesky passed 10 million users, helped along by Elon’s (again) hamfisted fight with Brazil, which (like so many other things Elon) may have a good reason at its core (fighting against secretive government demands), but was done in the dumbest way possible.

If there’s one thing that is painfully clear throughout the book, it is that Elon was correct that there were all sorts of ways that Twitter could be more efficient, more open, and less strict in takedowns. But he handled each in the worst way possible and destroyed what potential there was for the site.

Later today on the podcast, I’ll have an interview with Kate Conger about the book and Elon where we talk some more about all of this.

* As I’ve said before, I’m now on the board of Bluesky, which wouldn’t have been necessary if Elon hadn’t immediately cut Bluesky free from Twitter upon taking over the company.

Filed Under: character limit, chesterton fences, content moderation, elon musk, free speech, kate conger, parag agrawal, project saturn, ryan mac, social media
Companies: bluesky, twitter, x

Why I’m Joining The Bluesky Board To Support A Vision Of A More Open, Decentralized Internet

from the making-the-internet-a-better,-more-decentralized-place dept

I am excited to announce that I am joining the board of Bluesky, where I will be providing advice and guidance to the company to help it achieve its vision of a more open, more competitive, more decentralized online world.

In the nearly three decades that I’ve been writing Techdirt I’ve been writing about what is happening in the world of the internet, but also about how much better the internet can be. That won’t change. I will still be writing about what is happening and where I believe we should be going. But given that there are now people trying to turn some of that better vision into a reality, I cannot resist this opportunity to help them achieve that goal.

The early internet had tremendous promise as a decentralized system that enabled anyone to build what they wanted on a global open network, opening up all sorts of possibilities for human empowerment and creativity.

But over the last couple of decades, the internet has moved away from that democratizing promise. Instead, it has been effectively taken over by a small number of giant companies with centralized, proprietary, closed systems that have supplanted the more open network we were promised.

There are, of course, understandable reasons why those centralized systems have been successful, such as by providing a more user-friendly experience on the front-end. But there was a price to pay: losing user autonomy, privacy and the benefits of decentralization (not to mention losing a highly dynamic, competitive internet).

The internet need not be so limited, and over the years I’ve tried to encourage people and companies to make different choices to return to the original promise and benefits of openness. With Bluesky, we now have one company who is trying.

For me to get involved with Bluesky now, to help its efforts, is a logical next step, given how we got here. Nine years ago, right here on Techdirt, I wrote about a “half-baked” idea of separating out the “protocol” of social media from the companies providing social media services. And, almost exactly five years ago, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University published my much deeper dive on “Protocols, Not Platforms.”

That paper laid out a more complete (though still not fully baked) theory of how a decentralized, protocol-based social media system might work to create a better (though not perfect) world for online speech. It would be a world where we retain the lessons we’ve learned about from giant, centralized players about how to make platforms so user-friendly, but which brings back the promises of user autonomy, privacy, competition, and empowerment.

I’ve been clear all along that such an approach can never solve all problems, because that’s impossible. But it could create a better framework and better incentives for a better, more open internet, where user control is more important and impactful than centralized control. As power over the online experience moves to the ends of the network, rather than the center, it allows for more expression, more creativity, and more solutions that everyone is now free to develop and use.

That 2019 paper received plenty of attention, and many people reached out to say they wanted to make that vision a reality. But the most serious and thoughtful person I spoke to about the paper was Jay Graber, who is now Bluesky’s CEO. She had already been thinking deeply and researching similar ideas. Unlike most others I spoke to, she not only believed in the vision of a more decentralized internet, but saw a clear path to making it a reality.

Over the years since then, I watched as Jack Dorsey & Parag Agrawal at Twitter embraced the ideas of my paper and funded Jay to try to build a decentralized social protocol that actually worked and could achieve mainstream adoption. Importantly, Bluesky is not alone in trying to pursue this new reality for the internet, and I’ve chronicled many of the various developments being made by many others engaged in this world-improving project of decentralizing the internet. And while I support many of the attempts at building decentralized social media systems, Bluesky remains the most interesting experiment in the space.

Bluesky is the service that is coming closest to making the vision I articulated in my paper a reality. And while I’ve offered informal support and advice in the past when asked, I’ve never had any formal or official connection with the company, until now. When the opportunity arose to join the board it seemed, after some thoughtful conversations with Jay and others on the board and at the company, to make sense to make that relationship more formal, allowing me to better help Bluesky make this vision a reality.

The challenges are already exciting. One of the key things that has fascinated me about Bluesky is that they have made it clear from the beginning that they recognize how a future version of the company could, itself, be a threat to the vision the current team has. As a result, they are designing the system to be technically resistant to such a threat — which is why building an open protocol is so important. In my view, one of my roles as a board member is to ensure the company stays true to that more open vision, and resists the pressures that could lead it down the more enclosed, centralized path that has captured so many of its predecessors.

One other aspect that has kept me interested in Bluesky is how the team there understands that most users not only don’t care about that decentralized vision, and shouldn’t have to care about that vision. Those users just want a service that works well, and works for them. Many other decentralized social media networks have focused on different approaches to building their communities, which is great. Experimentation and differentiation is how we will figure out what works for which communities. But I particularly appreciate the emphasis that Bluesky places on building a system that works for a wide spectrum of users.

And, while there have been hiccups along the way (and more will come), the company has consistently built thoughtfully with users in mind, while still staying true to the underlying vision. As a result it’s built unique and exciting features like algorithmic choice, an open source labeling system, and “hidden” federation — most users have no idea the system is federated, and that’s the way it should be. You should be able to build a decentralized, open, protocol-based social network without most users knowing or even caring about it. You should be able to build a system just as usable and feature-filled as traditional, centralized social media systems, while still creating underlying technology and infrastructure that prevents it from exploiting users like those centralized platforms do.

It is, of course, exciting to see thoughts I’ve expressed for how to fix the Internet actually start to become tangible reality, which is why I’m excited to be involved with Bluesky to help it continue to move forward.

But I am still a writer, with many more thoughts to continue to express. Including here at Techdirt, which won’t change. We’ll still be writing about the Internet as it is, and as it should be, as well as the legal, technological, and sociological forces that keep shaping it, just as we have for more than a quarter of a century.

This is somewhat new territory for me. While I am on my own company’s board, as well as the boards of two non-profits, this is the first outside corporate board position I’ll be taking. So because I am now wearing that second hat I will endeavor to be as transparent as possible when wearing this other hat. I don’t foresee it being an issue in most cases, including when writing about any of the larger, centralized commercial platforms — the editorial independence that has always left us willing to call things as we see them, to either praise or criticize, as warranted, isn’t going anywhere. I still want a better internet for users, and getting there still requires being able to speak the truth about where we are right now. But for stories involving Bluesky, decentralization, or other competing decentralized platforms I promise to be as transparent as possible, and if necessary hand off stories to others (and even remove myself from the editing process) when my two hats may be in conflict.

But I don’t plan to shy away from those stories altogether. Over the years we’ve tried to chronicle here at Techdirt as much as we can about the internet we have, because that record is itself important to be able to reflect on, especially if better choices for the future are to be made. And I still have that job to do.

Filed Under: atprotocol, decentralized, jay graber, open, protocols, protocols not platforms
Companies: bluesky

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Deepfake It Till You Make It

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund, and by our sponsor TaskUs, a leading company in the trust and safety field providing a range of platform integrity and digital safety solutions. In our Bonus Chat at the end of the episode, TaskUs SVP of Global Offerings Phil Tomlinson tells us about his time at the Trust and Safety Professional Association summit in Dublin, his key takeaways from the event, and the trust and safety lessons learned from well-designed conference lanyards.

Filed Under: artificial intelligence, australia, content moderation, deepfakes, france, india, spam
Companies: bluesky, coinbase, meta, tiktok, twitter, x

Bluesky Is Building The Decentralized Social Media Jack Dorsey Wants, Even If He Doesn’t Realize It

from the directionally-right,-specifically-wrong dept

There was a bit of news in the world of decentralized social media over the past few weeks. It kicked off with the announcement that Jack Dorsey had left the board of Bluesky. This was followed by an interview Jack gave to Mike Solana where he explained his thinking on all of this. There was also a flurry of talk claiming (misleadingly) that Jack had endorsed ExTwitter.

As with many things related to Jack, I think a lot of what happened and what he’s saying has been misinterpreted (by people across a wide variety of ideological viewpoints). A lot of what he said is the same stuff he’s been saying for years and is actually quite sensible.

But, the one area where I do think he’s wrong is in some of his commentary about Bluesky, which surprised me a bit. Because I think he greatly misrepresents what is happening with Bluesky and why I still find it to be the most interesting experiment going on these days in social media.

I do think some of his views of Bluesky are colored by his experience at Twitter over the few years leading up to his stepping down from that company (a few months before the Elon saga began).

I want to go through parts of his interview with Solana, but I think understanding where Jack is coming from is actually really important, because when laid out clearly, it explains it colors his perspective on these things. Basically from the start, Twitter was pretty much the most permissive in allowing all kinds of speech on its platform with an extremely light touch toward moderation, but not no moderation.

As everyone who creates a speech platform learns at some point, you need some form of moderation. Otherwise, your platform gets filled with (1) spam, (2) scams/fraud, (3) illegal material.

However, there is a step up from there towards other moderation issues. Those who stop at the point of moderating just those three things quickly discover two other challenging issues. First, your site gets overrun with jerks, assholes, and trolls who make life miserable for all your other users. As we’ve discussed in the past, so much moderation is really “would y’all just stop being so awful to each other?”

Then, secondly, you have the Nazi bar problem. Many people get confused by this. It’s not just saying that a site is overrun by Nazis. It’s saying that in tacitly blessing the appearance of proverbial (or real!) Nazis, a site is blessing the space as a Nazi hangout, and then it gets that reputation among others, who realize maybe they’d prefer to hang out elsewhere. That leads to new challenges, often limiting growth of both users and business model options.

There’s a ton of nuance and challenges in figuring out how to draw the lines. You can easily see how sites can go too far in one direction or another, creating larger problems. Sites can (and do!) overblock in many cases. And sites can (and do!) underblock in many cases. And much of that is subjective anyway. What appears as overblocking to some may appear as underblocking to others. This is the old impossibility theorem at work.

This also means that if you’re “the decider” in these situations, everyone’s going to be mad at you. This is the nature of running a public platform. This was some of the thinking behind my protocols, not platforms paper. It was a look at whether or not we could, maybe, move away from the world in which we had one single “decider” to get mad at, and allow for a lot more experimentation.

The truth is that Jack had to deal with at least some of that. He was never really “the decider” at Twitter on moderation calls. The company had others who had to make most of the tough calls along the way. But Jack often got blamed for those decisions. And I think that getting blamed for that sort of stuff got to him. He’s made it clear over the years (including in this interview) that he would prefer not to have done much moderation at all. But the realities of the business say you have to for all the reasons listed above. He mostly delegated those calls so that it wasn’t on him to decide. But, he was still the face of the company getting yelled at for all of those decisions, and he really seemed to dislike that (which to some degree is understandable).

That appeared to be a big part of what appealed to Jack about my original paper. He had built a tool that was designed (successfully) to enable all sorts of speech and was celebrated for that fact. But over the last few years, he was increasingly being beat up on all sides, in part because of people (on all sides) were upset with moderation choices. And no, it wasn’t just “censoring conservatives” (a thing that didn’t really happen). Across the political spectrum, you had complaints about what was left up and what was taken down.

Jack, like others, reasonably thought: maybe it’s not great that a single person in a company gets blamed for all these decisions (that seems to have been a bigger concern than the fact that there was someone who could make those decisions in the first place, but it’s easy to merge those two concepts).

Yes, some people will say “suck it up, if you run such a platform, that’s part of your responsibility.” But it’s really important to impress upon you how deeply impossible this is, and how damaging it feels to be in a role where you’re just trying to enable a community to exist, but which requires some level of moderation to keep the community from destroying itself. Yet everyone is blaming you for basically everything.

At the same time, Jack was also dealing with an extremely dysfunctional board at Twitter. He had activist investors threatening to fire him if he didn’t enshittify the platform by squeezing more money out of its users, even as he took steps towards moving Twitter to a protocol. Jack, for all his faults, did seem to want Twitter to actually be a good platform, more than just one that sucked money out of people.

I believe Jack viewed the original plans for Bluesky as something of a lifeline, separating out the protocol layer, and allowing there to be competitive moderation services/interfaces for interacting with content on Twitter. In an early conversation I had with him regarding what Twitter would do in such a world, he suggested they could still beat the competition by focusing on “conversational health.” This would still involve moderation, but just at the Twitter service level, rather than the protocol level.

This is not to say that people should sympathize with Jack. Realistically, the people who actually were making the tough calls at Twitter and trying to balance all of these factors deserve way more sympathy. But Jack was getting yelled at the most over this stuff, and I think that really got to him. He was being blamed for not doing the impossible. To outsiders, the solution always seems “easy.” Stop the bad stuff, promote the good stuff. But, the “easy” solution that outsiders always seem to think will “work” is probably not dealing with the realities and competing pressures of managing a global community like Twitter. Understanding the realities, pressures, and (impossible) trade-offs at least helps understand the perspective, and why it can get exhausting to be constantly blamed from all sides from not magically “solving” things.

That takes us to the interview with Solana, where Jack more or less says all of this in expressing his desire to support decentralized social media protocols, first through Bluesky, and then later through nostr. As I said a few months back, even before Bluesky had launched, Jack had told me that he thought nostr was closer to my vision of decentralized protocols than Bluesky was going to be. And, as such, I was kind of surprised that he remained on the Bluesky board as long as he did. But his explanation here isn’t all that surprising.

He makes it clear that he looked on protocols as a better approach for all the reasons discussed above (and which Jack has spoken about multiple times before, including when he first announced the Bluesky project). He viewed it as a way of separating some of the tough moderation calls from being pointed back at a single CEO.

We were doing something similar to what we did at Square at the time, which was fund a bunch of open source developers to work on the Bitcoin protocol, because it directly benefited everything Square was doing in terms of money movement.

I wanted to do something similar with Twitter, because it was the only way to get out of a lot of the issues we were seeing around the decisions we had to make on accounts, and the pressures we had as a public company based entirely on a brand advertising model. The only way to do it was to remove the protocol layer from Twitter and make it something we didn’t control.

So what if we created a team that was independent to us, that built a protocol that Twitter could use, and then build on top of? Then we wouldn’t have the same liabilities, because the protocol would be an open standard, like HTTP or SMTP. Twitter would become the interface, and we could build a valuable business by competing to be the best view on top of this massive corpus of conversation that’s happening in real time.

So it took us about two years to interview people [who would build the protocol]. We actually looked at Nostr — I think the team even talked with fiatjaf [Nostr’s creator] — early on, but for whatever reason decided to pass. I wasn’t really privy to a lot of that conversation, or more likely, I wasn’t paying enough attention.

We eventually landed on Jay [Graber]. She seemed great, and we decided to fund her. Around that time, I was also planning my exit [from Twitter], and Parag [Agarwal] was going to take over. And when Elon made the offer to buy the company, I think she had this general fear of — what do we do? Like, is there any way that the funding could be taken back? We gave them $14 million to work on the protocol.

Again, all of that is accurate, and is completely consistent with everything Jack has said from the day he announced Bluesky. But, also, some of it is just unrealistic. Part of the nature of the Impossibility Theory is that no matter what, even in a decentralized system, it will be impossible to do moderation well, and people are still going to hunt down someone to blame. That is human nature.

Thus, I think part of Jack’s negative reaction to Bluesky was that he saw that the blame and demands were still coming. But that’s inevitable. That’s how this is always going to work, even in a decentralized system. He prefers nostr because he knows that while he’s still supporting nostr people know there’s no clear person to blame, and they know that they can’t yell at him about the moderation failures (and, yes, nostr has a ton of moderation failures, with spam and scams). But, as we’re seeing with nostr, it also creates some very real limitations, especially with regards to user adoption and growth.

Indeed, initially, Bluesky was supposed to be like that, but Twitter was still going to be the main service component above the original Bluesky protocol. Jack would still be getting the blame for running the service.

However, the Elon situation changed things.

The thing about my Protocols paper was that it was designed to convince someone like Jack to go down this kind of path. I believe in the power of protocols, but the challenge was always going to be how to get users to embrace such a system. The easiest path was to have a platform with an existing audience embrace it and bring the users.

The other possibility — building something brand new that was just so good people would flock to it — is just incredibly difficult.

There was a third possibility, though, that I definitely didn’t expect: Elon buying Twitter and repeatedly making a mess of things, driving users away in droves, causing many people to seek alternatives.

In this chaos, Bluesky became a sort of weird hybrid approach. It started out building for that first scenario (Twitter’s gonna bring the audience) and ended up having to do the second (build something new and hope the users come) all because of the third scenario (Elon bringing complete chaos to the ecosystem) suddenly opened up a new opportunity for the second scenario.

In other words, in the past, Bluesky was supposed to be the protocol, with Twitter being one platform using Bluesky’s protocol. But when Elon killed everything, Bluesky also had to step up and replace the Twitter part — the service part — itself, offering a reference app built on the protocol.

Reading Jack’s interview, that’s the part that made him disillusioned with Bluesky. Bluesky’s Jay Graber recognized, smartly, that having Bluesky set up as a public benefit corporation separate from Twitter enabled it to do some important things. This included pivoting to building out a service that could take people fleeing Twitter, while also setting it up to be (hopefully) more sustainable long term. It allowed Bluesky to neatly detach from Twitter right after Elon took over and canceled the contract that Twitter previously had with the Bluesky team.

It also created echoes of things Jack didn’t like. Just the fact that there was a “board” at all made him worried about the dysfunctional board that Twitter had, which caused him all sorts of problems. And as Bluesky launched and was growing, it faced some of those early speedrun issues, as users showed up and demanded specific moderation choices and tools (faster than Bluesky was able to build them).

But it was making those choices at the platform level, while continuing to build the underlying protocol.

That has created some real challenges for the Bluesky team. I believe in their original thinking, they weren’t going to have to deal with the most thorny moderation challenges directly. That would be passed off to the service level: Twitter (and then hopefully others who might embrace the protocol). But, in this world, Bluesky also became that layer.

And the fact that most users don’t separate out the protocol and the service layer meant that now Bluesky was under a lot more pressure as if the protocol and the service were one and the same (in part, because at least for the time being, they kinda are). Also, in building things out, I think Bluesky (probably correctly) realized that passing off moderation to the service layer rather than the protocol layer does not solve for all harms, and there are times when other solutions may need to come into play.

It seems all that just gave Jack flashbacks to all the problems at Twitter:

In Jay’s case, she decided she wanted to set up a completely different entity, a B Corp. That accelerated even more when Elon made the acquisition offer, and it very quickly turned into more of a survival thing, where she felt she needed to build a company, and build a model around it, get VCs into it, get a board, issue stock, and all these things. That was the first time I felt like, whoa, this isn’t going in a direction I’m really happy with, or that wasn’t the intention. This was supposed to be an open source protocol that Twitter could eventually utilize.

And then, as you know, Elon backed off [on the acquisition], and that disaster happened [laughs], until he finally bought it, which was the worst timeline ever. But throughout all that, it became more and more evident that Bluesky had a lot of great ideas. And they’re ideas I believe in. I think the internet needs a decentralized protocol for social media. I think Elon needs it. I think X needs it. I think it removes liability for the company, to separate those layers.

But what happened is, people started seeing Bluesky as something to run to, away from Twitter. It’s the thing that’s not Twitter, and therefore it’s great. And Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd.

This tool was designed such that it had, you know, it was a base level protocol. It had a reference app on top. It was designed to be controlled by the people. I think the greatest idea — which we need — is an algorithm store, where you choose how you see all the conversations. But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it.

That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that’s truly decentralized. It’s another app. It’s another app that’s just kind of following in Twitter’s footsteps, but for a different part of the population.

Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That’s not what I wanted, that’s not what I intended to help create.

So here’s where I think Jack’s understandable concerns about the very existence of a board and the pressures of being a corporation offering a social media service begin to diverge a bit from reality.

Bluesky has continued to build exactly what he has wanted. And it’s almost exactly what Jay promised when she interviewed for the job. I know this because, at Jack and Parag’s request, I sat in on a bunch of the interviews of the various people they were considering to lead Bluesky to provide feedback. And Jay’s pitch matches extraordinarily closely to what Bluesky has become, including the corporate setup.

Indeed, one of the things that struck me about Jay’s original pitch, unlike most others that I remember, was that she included a discussion of how the setup had to be sustainable on its own, and not just as a thing Twitter funded. That turned out to be prescient, but also what has made things work.

Bluesky has built a protocol, ATprotocol, which was built by folks who had experience with the same protocol that inspired Jack’s current favorite, nostr: Secure ScuttleButt. SSB was a really neat decentralized protocol, but it was nearly impossible for the average person to use (trust me, I tried, and I’m even more motivated than your average social media user). Bluesky’s original developer previously worked on SSB. nostr’s creator has admitted that he based many of the ideas on SSB, he just wanted it to work better.

And, while Jack talks up the need for an “algorithm store” where users get to choose their own algorithm, Bluesky has that! Its feeds solution is amazing and there are over 50,000 different feeds you can choose to give you views into the conversation. It’s great, with some upgrades coming soon to make it even more user friendly. Plus, they’ve added in the ability through its composable moderation tools for there to be more customized moderation offerings, which are already creating really unique and user-empowering offerings. So everything that Jack is saying he wanted from Bluesky is there.

It didn’t go in a different direction. It built the fundamentals, as promised.

But the one main difference was that, due to the implosion of Twitter, Bluesky also had to build the service layer. And Jack was really done with taking the blame for moderation decisions at a platform (even if he wasn’t the one actually making those calls). Being blamed for everything sucks. And that was starting to happen with Bluesky, which was not what Jack signed up for.

But it was necessary.

In order to get regular people to use it, Bluesky needs to have a user experience that feels like a centralized provider. One that feels familiar. That doesn’t require them to learn about the underlying infrastructure, or understand what “federated instances” means, or learn how to store a private key securely, or what the fuck a NIP-05 identifier is.

Without Twitter to provide that front end, it made total sense for Bluesky to build that. And, just as Jack had planned for Twitter to still provide an interface on top of Bluesky that promoted “conversational health” while allowing others to surface other aspects of the global conversation, Bluesky chose to do that as well.

Yes, some of that process was messy, especially with some of the demands from users at a very early stage, when the company had limited staff and resources. And, early on, I think the Bluesky team had to come to terms with the fact that it was now taking on that side of things as well, which wasn’t intended. But what has continued to impress me in watching Bluesky as an outsider over the past year and a half, is how true it has stayed to its underlying vision, while also still trying to make its own app-layer usable by people who will never care about the decentralized protocol.

But the interesting thing about where Bluesky has gone over the past year is that, now that it’s building both the protocol and the service layer, the team there is actually thinking deeply about how moderation can work effectively in such a world. How it can use this different structure to actually look for ways to minimize the very real harms that happen in internet communities, but without being as heavy handed and all controlling as a centralized service would be. Jack was trying to offload that because he didn’t like taking the blame for it, but that doesn’t mean the harms aren’t real. And some people do need to think about how to try to minimize them. And to do that in a way that still builds a platform people want to use without having to worry about all the details.

I think this is important. Some (including many people on nostr) argue that users need to understand the power of a decentralized protocol to embrace it, but I disagree. Even if most of the users of a decentralized system don’t know or care about the fact that it’s decentralized, the fact that the underlying protocol is that way and is set up such that others can build and provide services (algorithms, moderation services, interfaces, etc.) means that Bluesky itself has strong, built-in incentives to not enshittify the service.

In some ways, Bluesky is building in the natural antidote to the activist investors that so vexed Jack at Twitter. Bluesky can simply point out that going down the enshittification path of greater and greater user extraction/worsening service just opens up someone else to step in and provide a better competing service on the same protocol. Having it be on the same protocol removes the switching costs that centralized enshittified services rely on to keep users from leaving, allowing them to enshittify. The underlying protocol that Bluesky is built on is a kind of commitment device. The company (and, in large part, its CEO Jay) is going to face tremendous pressures to make Bluesky worse.

But by committing to an open protocol they’re building, it creates a world that makes it much harder to force the company down that path. That doesn’t mean there won’t still be difficult to impossible choices to make. Because there will be. But the protocol is still there.

And that’s why, even as Jack namechecks my paper here, I think he’s wrong in the conclusion of this paragraph, saying that Bluesky went in another direction. It didn’t:

All that said, I really respect Jay. She was under a lot of pressure to survive and do the things that she did. But directionally, I just don’t align with it. And I’d love to see more effort placed on open protocols akin to Nostr, which hits every single attribute that I was searching for when we originally kicked this idea off. If you go back to my thread, and Mike Masnick’s Protocols, Not Platforms article, it hits every single one of those things, whereas Bluesky ultimately just went another direction.

Bluesky went in the same direction it planned. But it was forced to add on another layer — the service layer that Twitter was supposed to provide — and that was the part that Jack was already sick of.

I like nostr as well. I think it’s cool and has some really cool development happening. Some of the new services that have popped up using nostr are great. But Bluesky has an open protocol, ATprotocol, which actually has many similarities to nostr, but in a manner that hides the technical complexities from users, making it more approachable by the average user.

That’s important! Because the coolest, most elegant protocol in the world is useless without a userbase. And so far, Bluesky is set up in a way that “normie” users can just use it without caring about all of these details. And that has made a difference that even folks endorsing nostr have seen.

Up above, Jack bemoans the “common crowd” that found and enjoys Bluesky, but that’s who you need to build for if you’re not just building a small clubhouse for the technically savvy.

It’s entirely possible that someone will build a nostr client or service that does something similar. I hope that happens, honestly, because I think it would be a good thing. But right now it’s just not there. And if Bluesky followed a similar path, it would just be one of a list of rudderless protocols like nostr, farcaster, and a variety of others that people never remember.

There are some cool things being built on nostr and farcaster (and ActivityPub and Bluesky). I don’t think anyone needs to be particularly tribal about these things. But I think Jack is overcorrecting for his negative experience at Twitter. He thought Bluesky’s role was just to build an open protocol. But the Elon situation necessitated also building a reference app on top of it, which is actually helping to drive the entire ecosystem forward.

There’s a lot more worth commenting on in the interview, but this piece is getting long enough already. I think Jack’s explanation of why he’s embraced nostr (and pushed Bluesky originally) still makes sense, especially given the situation he was in over the last decade or so. Even as many people seem to want to dismiss what he’s saying, he’s right that the approach he’s pushing would be the best for an open internet instead of one controlled by just a few internet giants.

He’s also correct (as he notes later on in the piece) that the traditional advertising business model creates some difficult pressures for companies. He hoped that Elon taking Twitter private would help deal with those, but I think he overlooks how badly Elon miscalculated in creating those new business models.

What he’s missing is that Bluesky is, in fact, building exactly the kind of solution he wants (including one that is exploring other, better, business models). It’s just that they’re building it in a way that the underlying protocol issues aren’t important to the everyday user, but are still there if they ever want to go deep and explore.

That means the incentive structure for a better system is there. The risk of enshittification is diminished. The ability for users to “choose their own algorithm” is there. The ability for others to build their own interfaces, and algorithms, and moderation services, and more is there. It’s all there. Every bit of it.

Yes, it also has a board and venture backing. It also has all sorts of people using it, beyond a crew who revels in the technology infrastructure, which remains a niche audience. Bluesky remains the closest approximation I’ve seen to what I hoped for in my paper. It’s disappointing that Jack doesn’t see it, but I’m glad he kicked it off, and I’m glad that he is still pushing for decentralized social media protocols via nostr.

I’ve seen some people worry that Jack completely disconnecting from Bluesky harms the project, but I don’t think so. It’s true that Jack’s name helped generate a lot of the initial interest (and media coverage). But Jack has been checked out of Bluesky for at least a year (and really a year and a half).

If Bluesky is going to succeed, it needs to shine on its own, separate from Jack. Having some people (falsely) think it was “Jack’s new site” may have generated some initial interest (and some initial backlash!), but Jack publicly cutting the cord means that Bluesky now gets to succeed or fail on its own terms, out of Jack’s shadow. And, for a true decentralized protocol to succeed, that’s probably a good thing.

Filed Under: decentralization, jack dorsey, jay graber, nostr, protocols, protocols not platforms, social media
Companies: bluesky, twitter, x

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: The Most Moderated Word On Meta

from the ctrl-alt-speech dept

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.

In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation, and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:

The episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund. We weren’t able to schedule our usual Bonus Chat at the end of the episode so Mike and Ben talk about their thinking on podcast sponsorship, why advertising content doesn’t have to be all bad and how you get in touch if you’re a company or organization looking to reach Ctrl-Alt-Speech’s growing and global audience.

Filed Under: content moderation, oversight board, spain
Companies: bluesky, facebook, meta, telegram