@Walrus

First port of call would be to ask your admin to defederate bsky.brid.gy

If they won't do this, you can at least block your own account from seeing it by finding an account from it such as @bsky.app@bsky.brid.gy, then going to its profile and clicking ⋯, then "Block domain" or "Block bsky.brid.gy".

@gtr

"Nobody is forced to follow these accounts"

You are totally missing the point, here is an explanation why: social.chinwag.org/@FediThing/…

@TinaSohl

Substack is unfortunately very deeply in the far right camp:

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…

Substack’s “Nazi problem” won’t go away after push notification apology

Substack may be legitimizing neo-Nazis as “thought leaders,” researcher warns.

^{Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)}

@ceremus

No, the "block and forget" thing does not work in real life: social.chinwag.org/@FediThing/…

FediThing 🏳️‍🌈

2024-06-08 13:35:46

Imagine a stranger spreads lies about you. They tell everyone you're doing horrible stuff, the worst crimes imaginable. They make videos, articles, livestreams, all pushing the same lies designed to make everyone hate and fear you.

Would you "just block them"?

What happens when other people don't block them? When other people believe them, follow them, share their lies?

What if this turns into real life abuse? If someone attacks you or your family?

This is what vulnerable minorities face because of badly-moderated social media:

thebureauinvestigates.com/stor…

🙏 Please defederate threads.net or ask your server admin to do so.

#Threads

Facebook accused by survivors of letting activists incite ethnic massacres with hate and misinformation in Ethiopia

Fact checkers and civil society organisations describe company's virtually 'non-existent' support for their work tackling misinformation

^{Jasper Jackson (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism)}

Right! So what we’re talking about here is a failure of moderation, or more broadly, a failure of Trust & Safety. Bluesky *was* a functioning social network because its users temporarily browbeat them into doing actual T&S, and not just leaving everything to public blocklists as they originally intended to do. But now their failures in moderation have outed them as the crypto-enthusiast neo-reactionaries that many suspected them of being, and their most vulnerable users will not be protected on that platform.

But also, let’s not pretend like T&S was a solved issue here on the fedi. As if the biggest de facto instance mastodon dot social, currently federating with Meta, wouldn't host those same government accounts if approached.

Large swaths of vulnerable minority users came to Mastodon first looking for places safer than twitter and quickly abandoned it for bsky because Mastodon did NOT protect them. The servers they adopted repeatedly failed their minority users because intersectional moderation is a rarity, and fundamental T&S is routinely ignored in the fedi.

I’ve repeatedly seen server meltdown after meltdown because a mod wouldn’t restrict obvious hate speech, or a mod turned out to be a fascist and the admin team shrugged it off, or an admin showed their ass so blatantly it was clear to all their judgment was not to be trusted.

Adding troublesome accounts to blocklists on bsky and defederating troublesome servers on Mastodon are both technical workarounds that do not address the underlying problem of moderation failure. We can point at bsky’s failures, but they do not detract from the planks in our own eyes. The network the platform is built on, while important, is not as vital as Trust & Safety.

"As if the biggest de facto instance mastodon dot social, currently federating with Meta, wouldn't host those same government accounts if approached."

If mastodon.social was hosting Trump & co, I would be calling for them to be defederated in exactly the same way.

Unlike Bluesky, the Fediverse is not under anyone's control, each server is truly independent in every sense. Servers can defederate mastodon.social (which is only about 20% of overall network), and many do that already.

@OhOkayKay
Maybe am I too optimistic, but nobody will create a Bluesky account in order to follow this dictator.
And as there is no "trendy threads" algorithm to hijack, there won't be an X like echo chamber.

So will these accounts really have any impact?

@MrRaptor @OhOkayKay

Once you have millions of people on a platform, there will always be a certain amount of people who can be radicalised by hateful lies.

And it's not just about the accounts themselves, it's about Bluesky being so happy to host them and verify them. There's no law compelling them to host far right politicians, but here they are doing so willingly. It implies that Bluesky is comfortable spreading these lies about vulnerable groups.

@OhOkayKay
I understand.

Let's just hope that being more isolated than on X will limit the damage.

@foxbasealpha

No, the idea of defederation is to prevent hateful lies spreading and radicalising people on your server. It happens, I've seen it IRL.

"Isn’t at least part of the *point* of Fedi services that individuals get choice in what they want to see and interact with?"

You have the choice of which server you join or move to, or you can even set up your own.

But it's up to the owner of each server who it federates with, because the owner is responsible for the content of their server.