Oh no. I don’t be needin’ no internet enabled legislation! Good, old fahsioned, airgapped legislation was good enough before, and it’s good enough today!

Because among the users it does have are some of the most influential people in the world.

Like, the US Senate’s pretty small, too, but people from the world over have to pay attention to its members.

“Like DNS” there is an analogy. And DNS is actually a distributed system.

Imagine if every web DNS had to go through Facebook. That’s how all of the ATproto traffic works. It’s all funneled through Bluesky’s servers.

It does nothing. Verification is only important in general for public individuals, anyway. Public officials, celebrities, etc. Those people have the means to do it. They also have the means to host their own instance on their own domain, or on a government domain, which is even better verification of identity.

But most of us do not need to give a damn.

Decentralization is inherently inefficient. Efficiency is a double-edged sword, though. One which our modern, business focused culture actively tries to ignore the self-facing blade of.

The shared block lists need to keep up with bad faith signups, which will stop happening once the trolls are actually trying, though. So, it’s going to be on the shoulders of the subscriber feed.

Which was something that Twitter augmented long before they were bought by Elon. And is something that will probably show up once the shareholders start pushing the company towards an IPO, which will happen eventually.

But maybe they’ll add other interesting safety features before then.

It will be interesting to see what happens as they follow their victims over. Right now, people seem to be experiencing Bluesky as a breath of fresh air, and are attributing it to things like block lists (which, yeah, that’s a good idea, and one that we’ve been asking for for a long while), but a big part of it is just that the ratio of trolls to liberals is way lower right now. They’ll figure out how to break through the algorithm eventually, and around the block lists.

And when that happens, Twitter’s going to bleed out rapidly as the fashy mouth breathers show up to flex over how they cannot be stopped. Because, yeah, there’s nothing keeping them on Twitter once their victims are gone.

But what about the comments? How many are reading those?

Uh, probably the default web interface. And Masto servers still lack quite a bit of functionality found on other fedi services.

That is not moderation. Moderation involves removing bad actors from the site, not underground black lists that let you pretend the Nazis aren’t living next door.

Mastodon has local and global feeds, and has for years. Did you just sit in your home feed and wonder where all the stuff you haven’t subscribed to was?

There’s no way to fight them on platforms where they are welcomed by the platform itself. Bluesky doesn’t want to moderate its platform, so there is no fighting the Nazis there.

And we can do this all over again in a couple of years thanks to BlueSky’s refusal to moderte its service, all because internet users refuse to thi:k abput how the internet works, and peoples addictions to being told what to read.

Heaven forbid someone point out the reasons things suck and the ways we could do thibgs different, even if you know no one’s going to change.

Better to just shrug everything off and tell folks “that’s life, get used to it”, right? That does a lot of good!

It’s just absolutely bonkers that they’re using a gun game to campaign while disallowing gun use. You may as well partner with the NFL and then ban tackling, or host a Monopoly game while banning money.

No one is arguing that they don’t have the legal right.

But they believe they have the moral right, and they do not.

The price is still elastic because many people have another streaming service they can drop. But as they all raise prices, they’ll all be whittled down to just one. And then possibly none.

Locking your front door won’t keep someone out who really wants to get in.

Is that stupid, too?

Mastodon is also somewhat hostile towards new users. Significant swaths of it treat this shared public network as a small private chatroom, and get cranky when September stretches on too long.

Same for almost every book you’ve ever read, every CD you’ve ever listened to, and every movie you’ve ever watched. You owned the leaves of paper the book was printed on, or the plastic disc the music or movie was stamped into, but never the words, the songs, or the movie itself.

We’ve only ever had licenses to consume.