Bluesky Deletes AI Protest Video of Trump Sucking Musk's Toes, Calls It 'Non-Consensual Explicit Material'
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I guess I get it. They would not like to set precedent to allow non-consensual AI generated porn on the platform. Seems reasonable. That said, fuck Donny. The video is hilarious. It’s fine if Bluesky doesn’t host it though.
Holy shit. A reasonable take from someone who clearly leaves the house.
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By "technically better" I mean it actually delivers on its technical promises of decentralisation, as opposed to bluesky that simply uses decentralisation as a buzzword without being actually open source and without allowing real competition for the main - centralised - instance.
I think mastodon has actual legs in that if bluesky fails to actually open up, it will enshittify and there will be another exodus. Mastodon has technical barriers to that kind problem, so it will still be there to pick up the pieces. The decentralised nature protects the network from enshittifying and means it will tend not to ger exoduses like central platforms do.
If in that time mastodon has worked on its discovery features, it might be finally ready to capture that growth.
If bluesky manages to properly decentralise then I imagine mastodon will not need to pick up the slack and will either join the network or fade into irrelevancy.
Hard to say which way it will go. I don't hold out a lot of hope for bluesky changing its ways, and who knows when mastodon will improve in this way.
Bluesky will never be able to properly decentralize, since the costs are prohibitive and cannot be afforded by normal users. The shared heap concept used is currently somewhere around 10-15 TB storage, which is already pretty expensive to host for a single person, and that's only the STORAGE for a single host NOW - no redundancy, no backups, no traffic and no worldwide infrastructure to keep the response time down. That's a huge difference to a Mastodon instance, which can be run from a pretty cheap setup and is afforable for most people.
Also, the way Bluesky implements how user identities are handled makes account migration more a theoretical possibility than a believable "decentralization". Theoretically Bluesky gives a credible exit strategy, where the shared heap can be copied by another organisation in case of loss of user trust or bankruptcy of the company and everyone can just switch over and carry on without losing a single post, but there are a lot of big if's in that theory.
Here's the source, from Christine Lemmer-Webber who worked on ActivityPub: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
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Bluesky will never be able to properly decentralize, since the costs are prohibitive and cannot be afforded by normal users. The shared heap concept used is currently somewhere around 10-15 TB storage, which is already pretty expensive to host for a single person, and that's only the STORAGE for a single host NOW - no redundancy, no backups, no traffic and no worldwide infrastructure to keep the response time down. That's a huge difference to a Mastodon instance, which can be run from a pretty cheap setup and is afforable for most people.
Also, the way Bluesky implements how user identities are handled makes account migration more a theoretical possibility than a believable "decentralization". Theoretically Bluesky gives a credible exit strategy, where the shared heap can be copied by another organisation in case of loss of user trust or bankruptcy of the company and everyone can just switch over and carry on without losing a single post, but there are a lot of big if's in that theory.
Here's the source, from Christine Lemmer-Webber who worked on ActivityPub: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
Oh, I didn't realise the technical barriers were that steep. In that case I think I'm right to say that Mastodon is technically better for achieving the decentralisation it promises.
That's a great resource, I'm going to follow them. Plus the link to Spritely was really interesting. Looks like it's meant to be a successor to ActivityPub, which is quite exciting. From what I've seen activity pub is pretty limited in the ways it can enable interaction, like how mastodon posts look so funky on lemmy.
Plus, holy web 1.0, that's a motherfucking website.
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Either involuntary AI generated pornography is wrong or it isn’t.
Agree. Laws have to be applied evenly, or else they are not Laws.
~This~ ~comment~ ~is~ ~licensed~ ~under~ ~CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0~
Good thing you put a permissive license on that so the whole of humanity can benefit.
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Their moderation has been garbage lately. They're wrongly banning people for things they didn't do. It's just premusk twitter at this point. The real fediverse is a better vet medium and long term
It's just premusk twitter at this point.
I mean, given that Jack Dorsey founded it as basically the "not Twitter Twitter" after musk bought the main one, I don't think it's surprising to see it face basically the same moderation issues in the name of being "even-handed"
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Ah, the rewards of moderation: the best move is not to play.
Fuck it is & has always been a better answer.
Anarchy of the early internet was better than letting some paternalistic authority decide the right images & words to allow us to see, and decentralization isn't a bad idea.Yet the forward-thinking people of today know better and insist that with their brave, new moderation they'll paternalize better without stopping to acknowledge how horribly broken, arbitrary, & fallible that entire approach is.
Instead of learning what we already knew, social media keeps repeating the same dumb mistakes.You need some kind of moderation for user generated content, even if it’s only to comply with takedowns related to law (and I’m not talking about DCMA).
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I'd expect a little more enthusiasm from our Commander in Chief...
He's old and tired.
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Ah, the rewards of moderation: the best move is not to play.
Fuck it is & has always been a better answer.
Anarchy of the early internet was better than letting some paternalistic authority decide the right images & words to allow us to see, and decentralization isn't a bad idea.Yet the forward-thinking people of today know better and insist that with their brave, new moderation they'll paternalize better without stopping to acknowledge how horribly broken, arbitrary, & fallible that entire approach is.
Instead of learning what we already knew, social media keeps repeating the same dumb mistakes.Fuck it is & has always been a better answer
Sure. Unless you live in a place that have laws and laws enforcement. In that case, it's "fuck it and get burnt down".
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You can just move to another server and repost it.
With blue sky there is no "another server"
Mod actions propagate though, no? So you'd have to post to a separate community, not just another server. I guess your admin could override a mod, but that's quite rare.
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Ah, the rewards of moderation: the best move is not to play.
Fuck it is & has always been a better answer.
Anarchy of the early internet was better than letting some paternalistic authority decide the right images & words to allow us to see, and decentralization isn't a bad idea.Yet the forward-thinking people of today know better and insist that with their brave, new moderation they'll paternalize better without stopping to acknowledge how horribly broken, arbitrary, & fallible that entire approach is.
Instead of learning what we already knew, social media keeps repeating the same dumb mistakes.You do remember snuff and goatse and csam of the early internet, I hope.
Even with that of course it was better, because that stuff still floats around, and small groups of enjoyers easily find ways to share it over mainstream platforms.
I'm not even talking about big groups of enjoyers, ISIS (rebranded sometimes), Turkey, Azerbaijan, Israel, Myanma's regime, cartels and everyone share what they want of snuff genre, and it holds long enough.
In text communication their points of view are also less likely to be banned or suppressed than mine.
So yes.
Yet the forward-thinking people of today know better and insist that with their brave, new moderation they’ll paternalize better
They don't think so, just use the opportunity to do this stuff in area where immunity against it is not yet established.
There are very few stupid people in positions of power, competition is a bitch.
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Right, my point is that they have the ingredients to meaningfully decentralise control, but until they do they are not meaningfully bettee than twitter, and it's just a branding exercise.
Maybe they'll fix that, maybe they won't but until they do I think the fediverse's resilience proves that platforms will keep turning over until a viable federated system arises, whether that's bluesky, mastodon or something else.
I can't even see where you disagree with this. You're just throwing out details withoit reference to how this affects my point.
until a viable federated system arises
I fundamentally disagree that a federated system is the desired end goal.
One of the problems it seems to try to solve is eliminating the risk of a service going down. Just like a centralized service, a federated service lasts only as long as the maintainers want it to last, and I think the risk of important services disappearing is higher when you remove the profit motive to keep it going. Hobbyists' pockets are only so deep, and they'll eventually die or lose interest. Yeah, I guess another service will pop up, which perpetuates some portion of the platform, but it doesn't really preserve the data.
So I see things like Mastodon (and Lemmy) as more complicated alternatives to services like Twitter or BlueSky, but with many of the same downsides. Will the data still be there in 20 years? 50? 100? Idk, probably not. Maybe if you put together a non-profit or something, but even then, I have my doubts.
So in that sense, I don't really see a technical advantage that the Fediverse has that BlueSky doesn't. If anything, I'd expect BlueSky to potentially stick around longer, assuming they can find a decent profit model, because money coming in tends to keep the servers running. Maybe they go bad like Reddit, maybe they get bought like Twitter, or maybe they stick it out longer (or maybe they open up to hobbyists). Whatever the case, I highly doubt Mastodon and friends will actually take over when they do disappear. It'll likely remain a hobbyist project until the next hot thing comes out (Fedi v2?), and never really reach mainstream success.
Maybe I'm wrong. But given how the Reddit and Twitter exoduses have worked out, I don't think so.
I want to see more projects looking into P2P, so that's where my interest lies. That way data and platforms can truly live forever, provided new people constantly come around to provide more storage. Communities and posts wouldn't live anywhere in particular (no single point of failure), but instead get distributed so there's a very low chance that any given bit of data will be truly lost, kind of like how torrents tend to keep on keeping on as long as someone is seeding (but people would only need to seed a small subset of the total data). I think that's a much more interesting idea than the Fediverse.
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Mod actions propagate though, no? So you'd have to post to a separate community, not just another server. I guess your admin could override a mod, but that's quite rare.
I meant a community on another server.
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until a viable federated system arises
I fundamentally disagree that a federated system is the desired end goal.
One of the problems it seems to try to solve is eliminating the risk of a service going down. Just like a centralized service, a federated service lasts only as long as the maintainers want it to last, and I think the risk of important services disappearing is higher when you remove the profit motive to keep it going. Hobbyists' pockets are only so deep, and they'll eventually die or lose interest. Yeah, I guess another service will pop up, which perpetuates some portion of the platform, but it doesn't really preserve the data.
So I see things like Mastodon (and Lemmy) as more complicated alternatives to services like Twitter or BlueSky, but with many of the same downsides. Will the data still be there in 20 years? 50? 100? Idk, probably not. Maybe if you put together a non-profit or something, but even then, I have my doubts.
So in that sense, I don't really see a technical advantage that the Fediverse has that BlueSky doesn't. If anything, I'd expect BlueSky to potentially stick around longer, assuming they can find a decent profit model, because money coming in tends to keep the servers running. Maybe they go bad like Reddit, maybe they get bought like Twitter, or maybe they stick it out longer (or maybe they open up to hobbyists). Whatever the case, I highly doubt Mastodon and friends will actually take over when they do disappear. It'll likely remain a hobbyist project until the next hot thing comes out (Fedi v2?), and never really reach mainstream success.
Maybe I'm wrong. But given how the Reddit and Twitter exoduses have worked out, I don't think so.
I want to see more projects looking into P2P, so that's where my interest lies. That way data and platforms can truly live forever, provided new people constantly come around to provide more storage. Communities and posts wouldn't live anywhere in particular (no single point of failure), but instead get distributed so there's a very low chance that any given bit of data will be truly lost, kind of like how torrents tend to keep on keeping on as long as someone is seeding (but people would only need to seed a small subset of the total data). I think that's a much more interesting idea than the Fediverse.
If you can explain the existence of wikipedia under your theory then I'll listen to you, but like... wow. Profit motive, what a joke. That's literally what causes enshittification.
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WTF bluesky.
More trash
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Bluesky deleted a viral, AI-generated protest video in which Donald Trump is sucking on Elon Musk’s toes because its moderators said it was “non-consensual explicit material.” The video was broadcast on televisions inside the office Housing and Urban Development earlier this week, and quickly went viral on Bluesky and Twitter.
Independent journalist Marisa Kabas obtained a video from a government employee and posted it on Bluesky, where it went viral. Tuesday night, Bluesky moderators deleted the video because they said it was “non-consensual explicit material.”
Other Bluesky users said that versions of the video they uploaded were also deleted, though it is still possible to find the video on the platform.
Technically speaking, the AI video of Trump sucking Musk’s toes, which had the words “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING” shown on top of it, is a nonconsensual AI-generated video, because Trump and Musk did not agree to it. But social media platform content moderation policies have always had carve outs that allow for the criticism of powerful people, especially the world’s richest man and the literal president of the United States.
For example, we once obtained Facebook’s internal rules about sexual content for content moderators, which included broad carveouts to allow for sexual content that criticized public figures and politicians. The First Amendment, which does not apply to social media companies but is relevant considering that Bluesky told Kabas she could not use the platform to “break the law,” has essentially unlimited protection for criticizing public figures in the way this video is doing.
Content moderation has been one of Bluesky’s growing pains over the last few months. The platform has millions of users but only a few dozen employees, meaning that perfect content moderation is impossible, and a lot of it necessarily needs to be automated. This is going to lead to mistakes. But the video Kabas posted was one of the most popular posts on the platform earlier this week and resulted in a national conversation about the protest. Deleting it—whether accidentally or because its moderation rules are so strict as to not allow for this type of reporting on a protest against the President of the United States—is a problem.
Bluesky will become just the same az elonx...
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Ah, the rewards of moderation: the best move is not to play.
Fuck it is & has always been a better answer.
Anarchy of the early internet was better than letting some paternalistic authority decide the right images & words to allow us to see, and decentralization isn't a bad idea.Yet the forward-thinking people of today know better and insist that with their brave, new moderation they'll paternalize better without stopping to acknowledge how horribly broken, arbitrary, & fallible that entire approach is.
Instead of learning what we already knew, social media keeps repeating the same dumb mistakes.I miss the early days of the internet when it was still a wild west.
Something like I hate you myg0t 2 or Pico's School would have gotten the creators cancelled if released in 2025.
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If you can explain the existence of wikipedia under your theory then I'll listen to you, but like... wow. Profit motive, what a joke. That's literally what causes enshittification.
existence of wikipedia
They got the ease of use down, largely due to it being a centralized service. You can literally go there, click edit, and submit a change, and you can also make an account if you want credit. It was also largely the first of its kind, so it was easy for people to get passionate about it. I made a bunch of edits in the relative early days (2000s), because I thought it was really cool. I do the same for OpenStreetMaps today, because it has a good amount of info, but it still needs some data entry here and there (I use Organic Maps on mobile).
That said, projects like Wikipedia aren't very common. It started around the time the dot-com bubble burst, so they had a fair amount of cash to kick things off with, and it got traction before the money ran out. They were able to reuse a lot of what they learned from another commercial project, and the community project ended up eating the original project's lunch.
I'm not arguing that profit is required for something to succeed, I'm merely arguing that money really helps a project get off the ground, and if there are multiple competing projects, the one with better marketing and a smoother user experience will usually win.
I didn't say profit guarantees projects live a long time or anything of that nature, I merely said users tend to flock to platforms that have a strong profit motive, probably because they have better marketing and funding for a better UX. First impressions matter a lot when it comes to a commercial product, so they tend to do a good job at that. That's why BlueSky is more attractive than Mastodon, and why whatever comes next will also likely be more attractive than Mastodon.
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existence of wikipedia
They got the ease of use down, largely due to it being a centralized service. You can literally go there, click edit, and submit a change, and you can also make an account if you want credit. It was also largely the first of its kind, so it was easy for people to get passionate about it. I made a bunch of edits in the relative early days (2000s), because I thought it was really cool. I do the same for OpenStreetMaps today, because it has a good amount of info, but it still needs some data entry here and there (I use Organic Maps on mobile).
That said, projects like Wikipedia aren't very common. It started around the time the dot-com bubble burst, so they had a fair amount of cash to kick things off with, and it got traction before the money ran out. They were able to reuse a lot of what they learned from another commercial project, and the community project ended up eating the original project's lunch.
I'm not arguing that profit is required for something to succeed, I'm merely arguing that money really helps a project get off the ground, and if there are multiple competing projects, the one with better marketing and a smoother user experience will usually win.
I didn't say profit guarantees projects live a long time or anything of that nature, I merely said users tend to flock to platforms that have a strong profit motive, probably because they have better marketing and funding for a better UX. First impressions matter a lot when it comes to a commercial product, so they tend to do a good job at that. That's why BlueSky is more attractive than Mastodon, and why whatever comes next will also likely be more attractive than Mastodon.
It's just really weird that you turn to profit motive as a benefit when we're talking about systems that tend to enshittify, and that's like, the main thing that makes them enshittify.
My argument is about how enshittification destroys platforms, and platforms that don't do that will retain their growth. Bluesky has all the ingredients to enshittify, mastodon doesn't.
Yes they need to work on their onboarding, but unlike bluesky, they can keep going at it till it sticks. Centralised platforms get a launch, and a lifecycle, and then they tend to go away.
Quite literally the opposite of what you said. If a platform is central, it can be switched off tomorrow. Nobody can do that to the fediverse as long as the internet exists. The idea that hobbyists are somehow less reliable than fucking corporations is also absurd. Have you met corporations?
This is literally a tortoise-and-the-hare situation.
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It's just really weird that you turn to profit motive as a benefit when we're talking about systems that tend to enshittify, and that's like, the main thing that makes them enshittify.
My argument is about how enshittification destroys platforms, and platforms that don't do that will retain their growth. Bluesky has all the ingredients to enshittify, mastodon doesn't.
Yes they need to work on their onboarding, but unlike bluesky, they can keep going at it till it sticks. Centralised platforms get a launch, and a lifecycle, and then they tend to go away.
Quite literally the opposite of what you said. If a platform is central, it can be switched off tomorrow. Nobody can do that to the fediverse as long as the internet exists. The idea that hobbyists are somehow less reliable than fucking corporations is also absurd. Have you met corporations?
This is literally a tortoise-and-the-hare situation.
It’s just really weird that you turn to profit motive as a benefit
Why? That's pretty much the common thread in successful SM apps vs unsuccessful SM apps. The ones w/ profit motive attract investors, which means better marketing and initial rollout, which leads to more users.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, just that it's effective.
destroys platforms
What's the benefit you're trying to get out of platforms?
Mastodon will probably stumble along in some form for a long time, but servers will come and go, meaning content will come and go. The same is true for Lemmy, many of the bigger servers will likely go away in 10-20 years, if not sooner, as the admins get tired of hosting them (it's pretty expensive). The platform will likely continue to exist, but you'll probably need to jump between servers every so often.
I guess I don't see that as hugely different from jumping from Twitter to BlueSky. Twitter had a good run, and maybe BlueSky will have a similar run.
Nobody can do that to the fediverse as long as the internet exists.
Maybe the entirety of the fediverse won't die, but significant portions will disappear from time to time as servers drop out and new ones join.
I really don't see a case for the Fediverse "winning" in any meaningful sense. The reason Wikipedia succeeded is because it has permanence. The Fediverse lacks that, so why wouldn't people just jump to the flavor of the week instead? You know, the flashy new thing that uses the latest designs and has some interesting gimmick.
I think the Fediverse will always be playing catch-up. Development is relatively slow, and it has proven to be less capable of taking advantage of opportunities than BlueSky. Why? Because BlueSky is swimming in money, whereas Mastodon, Lemmy, et al are hobby projects. Hobby projects work well in some areas where they form a foundation (e.g. Linux), but they don't work as well at chasing fads. Why isn't there a popular alternative to Snapchat, TikTok, or other "flavors of the week"? Because FOSS moves slowly, and will never keep up with the fads in SM.
So my issues with the Fediverse are:
- data is unlikely to be permanent
- development is slow
- hosting is somewhat expensive (~$150/month for my instance, which I think is low and doesn't include labor); not sure what Mastodon costs
- not very discoverable - SEO is almost nonexistent
- UX is a bit... lacking... compared to commercial alternatives
I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying it's an uphill battle with a fair amount of caveats.
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Ah, the rewards of moderation: the best move is not to play.
Fuck it is & has always been a better answer.
Anarchy of the early internet was better than letting some paternalistic authority decide the right images & words to allow us to see, and decentralization isn't a bad idea.Yet the forward-thinking people of today know better and insist that with their brave, new moderation they'll paternalize better without stopping to acknowledge how horribly broken, arbitrary, & fallible that entire approach is.
Instead of learning what we already knew, social media keeps repeating the same dumb mistakes.Elon acts like a new Reddit mod drunk on power. He is the guy screaming in the comments that he knows how to run a forum better and seized the chance, and now he cannot fathom why people hate him.
