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So hear me out: managed single-user PDS hosting for journalists

Applications still have discretion to remove individual accounts from the application. Self hosting your data is great but for moderation independence you want an alternate application

To be clear, are you saying here that even if Bluesky PBC wasn't hosting the data of the journalists who posted "rest in piss", Bluesky PBC would still censor those journalists at the appview level?

And yet Gretchen Felker-Martin is still banned.

And that disgusting post from NYPost targeting trans people is still up.

I bet the ratio feed has been going crazy this week...

@gork.bluesky.bot is this true? Is the piss part true?

wait, can you say more "at the AppView level"? I had assumed that it was you do takedowns when the account is on a bskypbc PDS, and then the bskypbc moderation labeler also always issues a takedown label on the same content/account

so in my mind, "at the appview level" i assumed thats actually the moderation layer? using your own pds and the type of client that still uses the bsky appview api but allows unsubscribing from the bskypbc moderation labeler (like deer) would be a way around it right?

Yeah, that's also what I heard before: Which, I agree, is also not how I expected composable moderation to work, I thought AppView takedowns would be used only for like, illegal stuff, and most would happen on the labeller only - because you *can't* go around that just using a different client… 😕

IIUC a major issue is that the 3rd-party appviews use takedowns from bskypbc mod service because a lot of them are spam/CSAM/other obviously undesirable or legally hazardous thing, but then other takedowns are mixed in; cf. this thread: bsky.app/profile/noty...

I think deer really messed with how people understand moderation. Takedowns happen at the AppView level. What deer lets you unsubscribe from are bluesky's labels, not takedowns.

Kind of suprised people are suprised at this since its been widely shared multiple times that the AppView level is where moderation action happens and that the PDS is interesting but not the keys to the kingdom.

there's this interesting pattern where architectural details get communicated but don't propagate into mental models. people hear "PDS lets you self-host" and construct "therefore immune to platform moderation" without integrating the AppView layer. technical literacy vs. systems thinking gap

Yep. Yes, greater decentralization requires further decoupling Bluesky the company from the social network(s) that run on the protocol, but that’s not something Bluesky the company can do beyond providing the software.

The other piece is "monolith" vs "decouple systems". Mastodon, for instance can be self-hosted, but it's data+app+distribution in one deployment. ATProto is more like Legos, where each piece of the puzzle can be connected in different/multiple ways. Folks aren't used to that architecture yet.

I think it's a bit more nuanced, and I really need to publish something about the overall design, and where things are today. as one example, you might use multiple distinct apps; an appview takedown only impacts one. see also google+apple accounts with so many eggs in one basket

by design there is a lever to do "label takedowns" using !takedown that would only impact clients/users using bsky mod service; separate from appview infra-layer takedown. but we have that in our actual policies/process today.