"Inside Twitter rival Bluesky’s first major crisis, as investors pressured CEO Jay Graber to speak out about racist incident"
The fact this is a thing at all speaks of the fact we still have no clue what we're doing with social networks.
Let me change something in the headline, see if it still makes sense:
"Inside World Wide Web's first major crisis, as CERN investors pressured inventor Tim Berners-Lee to speak out about racist incident."
It doesn't make sense because the Internet, the Web, DNS, HTTP, HTML, those are technological components which have no moderation component, they're just technology on TOP of which you can apply moderation and regulation where you need it.
Social networks are exactly like IP, but instead of devices getting an IP address, people do. So an identifier is tied to a person, then this person can publish messages. Those messages can be wired around to other people based on preferences and subscription. That's it.
As long as we keep fusing together issues of moderation with issues of networking, this will happen. They're like two layers that want to freely adapt to one another, not be part of one monolith.
Note I AM NOT SAYING that we need no moderation. We absolutely do need moderation. I'm just saying "moderation" as an issue should be decoupled from the network layer.
This is why we can't have nice things. The tech is easy to build but there are some people who will gladly tear it all down if they detect even the slightest hint of impropriety. Bluesky is doomed if they try to please everyone.
This in itself isn't the issue. The issue is one of architecture and separation of responsibilities. Say you're Reddit, and allow people to have "sub-reddits" and they have their own moderators, and you rarely get involved in moderation yourself, except in extreme circumstances.
Reddit is still the only means of accessing Reddit, but moderation is not baked as hard into its architecture (now, Reddit itself is not an ideal example of this in practice, but I hope good enough as structural example).
This sort of incident is something where I think the fediverse has an edge. Can someone sign up on the fediverse with an offensive name? Yes. And they can suffer the consequences when they are blocked and defederated. On the fediverse, no one is held responsible except the offender themselves. And there is built-in social accountability for server admins. On a corporate controlled platform, people expect the platform to control the actions of users and make decisions that are universally considered morally acceptable. That's an impossible task. You can't make everyone happy.
The fact this is a thing at all speaks of the fact we still have no clue what we're doing with social networks.
Let me change something in the headline, see if it still makes sense:
"Inside World Wide Web's first major crisis, as CERN investors pressured inventor Tim Berners-Lee to speak out about racist incident."
It doesn't make sense because the Internet, the Web, DNS, HTTP, HTML, those are technological components which have no moderation component, they're just technology on TOP of which you can apply moderation and regulation where you need it.
Social networks are exactly like IP, but instead of devices getting an IP address, people do. So an identifier is tied to a person, then this person can publish messages. Those messages can be wired around to other people based on preferences and subscription. That's it.
As long as we keep fusing together issues of moderation with issues of networking, this will happen. They're like two layers that want to freely adapt to one another, not be part of one monolith.
Note I AM NOT SAYING that we need no moderation. We absolutely do need moderation. I'm just saying "moderation" as an issue should be decoupled from the network layer.