Considering Custom Communities Inside Bluesky

Preface To The Preface

Bluesky made nazi bar moves. This post considers staying on their network temporarily, but pulling into a smaller community. I'm thinking of it like folks gathering at the exit while figuring out where to go next.

Preface

I learned about Non-Ideal Solutions from Dr. Johnathan Flowers in these posts. I'm not sure if this qualifies, but it might.

The Ideal Solution would be for Bluesky (or some other service) to be a place where folks felt safe. That's not happening. That leaves us with Non-Ideal Solutions. The first thing that comes to mind is to leave. That choice would be instant if I knew a place to go, but I don't. The question for me became: is there's a way to build a space designed for safety inside a space that isn't.

The idea I keep coming back to is custom communities. Ones that would let individual communities take control of their own Trust and Safety and moderation practices. A setup where they could, for example, ban people who make death threats.

Here's where my head's at:

Bluesky

• Like other social networks, the core of Bluesky is made of posts that get turned into feeds. The default feeds being "Following", "What's Hot", etc...
• The service is designed to be open-source and federated which means it is/will-be possible to setup and run your own server with your own community.
• A key aspect of federated servers is that banning someone on one server doesn't ban them from the entire network. They can jump to another server. (This is like Discord where you can kick folks from your server but not from other servers or the entire Discord network)

Custom Feeds

• Bluesky now has the capability of making/using custom feeds
• The feeds are separate from the app. Or, more to the point, you can use different apps to access the feeds which lets you control what you see
• Combined, that provides the opportunity to setup customized feeds and apps where community moderation is controlled by community members instead of Bluesky
• For example, you could create a community with a blocklist of banned users. Those banned users would still be on the Bluesky network, but they wouldn't show up inside community members' feeds
• This would be like shared block lists but individual community members wouldn't have to do anything. The block/ban would happen at the community/feed level
• You could go the other way and use a clearlist to make an invite only community
• It doesn't have to be explicit invites either. For example, you could setup so that anyone in the larger Bluesky network could join your community by making a post with a specific hashtag. That could add them automatically while letting mods know someone new has come in. Similar to having a public link to a Discord server
• (Note: my understanding is that everything is public as this point. If that's accurate it means you wouldn't see blocked users but they could still see your posts. But, if everything really is public, that would be the case regardless. I need to look into that more)

The Critical Piece

• All this stuff is just implementation details that provide the ability to enforce a policy. It doesn't matter at all without a solid policy in place

Finishing Up

• This is like the federated model but instead of expanding out and having to set up full servers, you filter things inward and ride on top of the existing Bluesky infrastructure and servers to get the community and moderation control through the use of the custom feeds
• It would take some work to get this all going. It's not awful, but it would take time and energy. There would also be cost for upkeep to maintain the feeds. It likely wouldn't be overwhelming, but it's worth pointing out
• This does not address bluesky moderation itself. It won't change their practices. It merely offers an opportunity to create a subset of the network with additional moderation controls in the hands of the community
• I'm wary that this ends up being an attempt to use technology to solve community problems. I hope it's not that. I hope this is more using existing technology to empower people to make and have oversight over their own communities but I fully acknowledge I could be way off base

Other Thoughts

• A group I'm familiar with has starting trying to figure out an alternative place to go that includes the possibility of building software after they define their moderation practices. Depending on the path that could take a fair amount of time.
• If the Bluesky/ATProtocl modes works the way I understand these communities would be able to move to other servers when that functionality becomes available. The communities would still be on the protocol, but not the Bluesky server itself. That's far enough in the future that I'm not advocating for it one way or the other.
• Rudy Fraser is way ahead of me and has already done an initial version of this type of thing with #blacksky.
• I mentioned Discord a few times. This would be like that. For example, I can join multiple Discord servers/communities. Each one will have their on moderation practices that I could be banned from violating. But, being banned from one doesn't ban me from the entire network or from the other servers I'm on. Discord could ban me at the network level in the same way Bluesky can. But, with Discord, the brunt of moderation falls on the communities themselves. The same would apply with custom communities on Bluesky
• There's a slew of app interaction/user experience things that would crop up. For example, if you where in five communities with someone else you'd see each one of there posts in all five feeds. That's not something that would just happen with custom communities, it's what happens with all the custom feeds. (That stuff doesn't matter in context of the larger question of if this is an idea worth pursuing, but it's the kind of thing some folks bring up which creates noise. So, yes, there's a bunch of stuff like that which would need to be addressed)
• Custom apps wouldn't be required. You could still use the base app to just view your feeds that way. The custom apps just offer the ability to make that nicer and completely do away with the default feeds (e.g. you wouldn't have to see the default "What's Hot" you could switch to a custom "What's Hot" for just your community)
• The Bluesky moderation practices would still be in place. The communities would layer their own moderation on top. So, a community could ban people from their space but they would remain on the Bluesky network unless Bluesky decided to ban them as well (which hopefully they'll get better about). However, if Bluesky bans someone the community wouldn't be able to override that to let them back in
• This is not a perfect solution, but it's the best I can come up with given the primary goal of serving people in as safe a way as I know how