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   Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Dec-2024 04:49:33 JST Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

   I wish I could never think about Bluesky again. I wish I could think about more interesting, wonderful, and fulfilling.

   But the fact that they're endorsing Jesse Singal is very bad, and not something I can safely ignore.

   • Embed this notice
     Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Dec-2024 04:55:03 JST Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Like, I don't know. Social media can and should be a preference, right? Except for a few things:

     1) Network effects like Metcalfe's Law mean that it's not just *my* preference, it's a *collective* preference that drives my day-to-day.
     2) Centralized ownership exacerbates and amplifies those network effects.
     3) Centralized governance exacerbates and amplifies any missteps to have extreme consequences.

     All of the above is even more true going into 2025 and a second Trump administration.

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     Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Dec-2024 05:19:47 JST Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Compare to if Website Boy does something awful, like federating m.s with Threads. That has a huge, disproportionate impact, no question. But it also is something that can be meaningfully dissented from. You can go to a different instance. An instance admin can use a fork of Mastodon, or even something like one of the *keys. None of that is good enough, all of that has giant gulfs which can leave you in a lurch.

     But it's more than you get from corporate social media, and it's not nothing.

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     Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Dec-2024 05:21:44 JST Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I don't hate Jay Graber. I don't think she's an awful person or anything. I don't like all the wild conspiracy theories about her.

     But I also don't *trust* her. That's nothing personal, I don't trust most people, because it's 2024 and I've seen how much most people can be trusted.

     That means that I look to moderation decisions on Bluesky to learn whether I trust her or not. Because Bluesky is centralized, it also means that I *need* to trust her implicitly to use Bluesky.

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     Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Dec-2024 05:22:56 JST Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     That's the context in which I read about her and her team going to bat on behalf of one of the people who created the whole transphobic panic that now has consumed US politics and helped usher in a new fascist government.

     And it fucking sucks.

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     Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)'s status on Wednesday, 11-Dec-2024 05:52:03 JST Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I should, in fairness, note that Bluesky does have one major difference from other corporate social media platforms: they've built infrastructure that could, in principle, make it decentralized one day.

     They haven't yet done so in a way that allows for dissenting from their governance and moderation decisions, so the thread above stands for now, but it is noteworthy that they could exit in a more positive way.

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     Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 14-Dec-2024 05:04:54 JST Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     Update: the Bluesky team has effectively if not literally doubled down. They have made it clear that Signal encouraging transphobic hate mobs to go after individual users is perfectly fine by their rules.

     My assumption of good faith in this matter may need revised.

     https://bsky.app/profile/safety.bsky.app/post/3ld7e2hsd322r

   • Embed this notice
     Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 14-Dec-2024 05:33:07 JST Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be mean or antagonistic or to start flamewars, but if you're literally making Jesse Singal–shaped holes in your moderation rules, that's very very bad news indeed.

   • Embed this notice
     Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 14-Dec-2024 05:35:53 JST Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I've said a few words about Bluesky and Jesse Singal now, but I do think it's important. I suspect he'd disagree catagorically, and I don't think this was an explicit goal of his, but I don't think it's unfair to say that Singal was a large part of the causal chain that led to Trump getting re-elected.

     His Atlantic article was a huge part of the radicialization pipeline that has so much created transphobic hate, and that Trump spent $200M of Musk's money to exploit.

   • Embed this notice
     Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)'s status on Saturday, 14-Dec-2024 05:39:57 JST Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     I don't know how much of that should directly concern Bluesky's T&S team, how much of that is fair to consider in moderation decisions. It does, however, lend substantial weight and importance to the decisions that they do make. Singal was, by his own statement, the single most blocked user on all of Bluesky, so the community there seems to share that assessment to at least some degree.

     This was a real make-or-break moment for their moderation approach, and they doubled down on transphobia.

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     Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)'s status on Thursday, 19-Dec-2024 08:30:49 JST Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️

     in reply to

     • JP

     @jplebreton omfg

   • Embed this notice
     JP (jplebreton@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 19-Dec-2024 08:30:50 JST JP

     in reply to

     @xgranade Singal is the textbook Level 2 Moderation test: someone who's not shouting slurs, makes a big show of how "civil" they are, but acts in incredibly bad faith, stirs up mobs of users who *do* shout slurs, breaks bread with the worst bigots around, makes the whole place undeniably worse over the long term, and acts attacked when called on any of that. incredibly basic pass/fail shit, and it sounds like they blew it.

   • Embed this notice
     JP (jplebreton@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 19-Dec-2024 08:30:50 JST JP

     in reply to

     @xgranade and this was how he rewarded their complicity!