How would you defend against it? Making an alternative social network? Isn’t that only going to lead to more and more echo chambers of limited reach? Or am I not understanding the approach? I am not sure what ATProto is exactly or how it plays a role in this defense.
> In the early days of Bluesky, Black users felt they were being pushed off. Blacksky became a platform for Black users to feel heard and seen. To create Blacksky, we wrote our own implementation of AT Protocol (called “rsky” and pronounced “risky”). An underlying premise of Blacksky’s rsky is to not only “seize the means of production,” as well as the distribution, but to also act as a “dual power” structure.
> Blacksky’s rsky guarantees our community a seat at the table, and ensures that we can leave and easily make our own table if we need to. That’s the true promise of decentralized social media. [My note: Most relevant part, the rest included for context]
> Clearly I think that decentralization is great, not only for the problems it prevents, but also the new possibilities it creates. But if everyone’s running their own servers, apps, and moderation teams, how do we do global social media? That’s where our vibrant open source developer community comes in.
> Blacksky runs our own global relay at https://atproto.africa, which we built from scratch. Every day, our relay stores its own copy of the hundreds of gigabytes of data of all known AT Protocol accounts — 36 million and counting. We also developed what we call our “moderation relay,” which lets us know about all of the moderation decisions ever made by all mod teams globally.
Think of Bluesky not as a Twitter equivalent platform, but a funded experiment and incubator for bootstrapping a protocol where multiple platforms can operate independently of each other. You can scale a community to tens of millions of users for under a few hundred dollars per month in tech spend (storage, compute, transfer). This is very accessible imho.
Broadly speaking, I understand that there might be speech out there that I find exceptionally distasteful, but that is the speech in many cases (but not all) I am willing to protect, because you don't know when the capability to censor will be weaponized. This remains in constant tension so long as humans are humans. There is no solution, only constant evolution.
I think there are existing 4chan like social networks where you can post away although no one much may notice. Open protocols like the internet provide a way to say what you want but not a way to force people to listen to it.
