Massively Multiplayer Governance
I'm writing this mostly for the sake of my own mental accounting, so I can look back at this years from now and gauge whether my assumptions or position has since changed.
Until recently I had no idea who Jesse Singal was. I still don't know much, but my Bluesky feed has told me all I really need to know:
- Jesse Singal's presence on the mainline Bluesky network makes many tens of thousands of people feel unsafe.
- Several people whom I defer to for their expertise in community health have proposed Jesse's removal from the network as the best course of action.
There's been a lot of talk about whether Jesse's behavior has explicitly violated Bluesky's Terms of Service, i.e. their declarative community rules. But a community is primarily successful on the merits of its implicit ruleset, as determined by cultural norms.
Emerging out of this debacle, two things stand out to me as techno-social utilities currently lacking in Bluesky:
- Multiple sandboxes
- Community governance
Multiplayer Sandboxing
Many have rightly pointed out that this clash between Bluesky's moderation policies and the wishes of the community would have been a trivial issue in the ActivityPub-powered fediverse. In the federated model, Jesse would “simply” have to find himself an instance that aligns with his values and general demeanor.
That's not to say Bluesky has to be fully federated in the same way as ActivityPub to support a similar kind of community sandboxing. That “simple” after all is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Massively Multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, which are operated as fully centralized cloud services, still have multiple different instances for their players to inhabit. Partly this is due to scaling concerns that don't apply to Bluesky's architecture, but these games also have specific types of instances that allow players to self-sort into the style of gameplay they're looking for.
The most common distinction is between PvE (Player versus Environment) and PvP (Player versus Player) instances, or designated zones therein.
This separation is necessary because while some players just wanna enjoy the expansive world and story on their own terms, others enjoy the thrill of clashing with player-characters who present a greater threat than any dungeon boss the game can muster up, since they can literally chase you to the ends of the earth with the tenacity that only a human foe possesses.
We don't all want the same things in our online experience, so it's essential that we have separate sandboxes to play in. I am not however advocating for an instance-picker at the start of the Bluesky signup process, nor is this about seperating The Good Place from The Bad Place.
What I'm saying is that the decision space available to the T&S team becomes a very binary block-or-not when Bluesky is operated as a monolithic super-instance with no further segmentation possible.
Jesse Singal makes my friends deeply uncomfortable, so I don't want him in the same room as us, simple as. That doesn't mean I think Jesse has no right to exist on the open social web. We need a separate room for Jesse.
I can't say yet exactly how I think this should work, but I've jotted down some initial thoughts on “How fedi-instance belonging can be resolved”:
be a member of more than one instance (think dual citizenship)
able to view/follow any public instance’s local feed
default way for instances to ‘disagree’ should be default-hide whole instances, not hard block (no walls between tenants, just tall shrubs)
ratio-blocks per instance should block user from that instance
instance-blocks are enacted democratically
This isn't specific to any protocol, it's just what I believe ought to be possible as a happy middle ground between the prior art of the AP-based fediverse and the emerging ATmosphere.
The main idea here is multi-instance belonging. You may already be familiar with composable moderation; let's also have composable spaces. The difference is that moderation protections are chosen defensively, whereas we choose our spaces on the basis of being drawn in by the people already there, and the notable absence of those who are not.
Erin Kissane talks about picking the right pair of shoes. I recently heard her say on a podcast that we shouldn't have to pick just the one pair; that's exactly what a proper implementation of nomadic identity ought to make possible for us. Credible exit implies a pluriverse if spaces to enter and leave at will.
Let the server instances provide the party venue and then, if you're feeling the vibe, Bring Your Own Identity over for a good time.
Community Governance
'Is Bluesky Decentralized?' has been an ongoing conversation (a delightful one at that). Technicalities aside, it's pretty clear that governance power in the Bluesky community is highly centralized.
Christine Lemmer-Webber's definition of decentralization applies just as well here, even though we're not talking about protocols:
Decentralization is the result of a system that diffuses power throughout its structure, so that no node holds particular power at the center.
Stack as many moderation services together as you want, but there's only one institutional node with the power to delete Jesse Singal from Bluesky inc's public square.
That centrality of authority is exactly what is making a lot of people very upset, especially when the authority insists that their hands are tied so long as there’s no egregious violation of their ToS, as if there cannot be other levers of change to address edge cases unfit for standard procedure.
Note: I vehemently disapprove of anyone who directed their anger at the Bluesky team in harmful ways. The best explanation I can come up with for their behavior is that they want the people in authority to experience the unsafety that was imposed on them by the authority’s inaction. I understand the emotional response, but I do not excuse it, and I hope the worst offenders have faced consequences for the harms they caused. Be better.
It seems pretty clear that if the network held a referendum by putting the issue of 'Ban Jesse Singal?' to a vote, the network would vote him off the island. This can be inferred from the very loud signal of Jesse being the most blocked person on the Bluesky network by a large margin.
And this is where instance segmentation comes in to lower the stakes, because the people of Bluesky Island can then resort to shipping the unwanted resident over to a neighboring island, as opposed to dropping him in the water.
I don’t have all the answers, but I believe there’s a great opportunity here for liquid democracy in action. Democratic community governance is arguably even more challenging than designing a user-friendly, open and plausibly decentralized social network, so I know I'm asking for a lot.
Still, if you have brought 25 million people together and you're not trying to leverage the wisdom of the crowd for communal sense-making, what is the point of your platform?