#onlinecommunities — Public Fediverse posts

How on earth can anyone call lemmy.world, wizard.casa, and gotosocial.social anything but absolute rubbish? They’re a total disgrace, a complete waste of time and effort. It’s astonishing how these so-called platforms can still be allowed to exist when they’re nothing but worthless, ruined excuses for social spaces! Absolutely infuriating!

#Fediverse #Lemmy #GoToSocial #SocialMedia #TechFrustration #InstanceDown #SoftwareCritique #WebDevelopment #UserExperience #OnlineCommunities #Decentralised #TechThoughts #Rant #SocialPlatforms #FOSS

May 21 will mark 25 consecutive years that I've managed the same online community. Can I make it to 50?

We're working on some plans to celebrate the occasion. It's interesting to get into generational online community. Not just because your community attracts people of different ages but because different people were born after it launched, and they are now participating in the community.

#OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CMGR

BlueSky’s Solution To Moderating Is Moderating Without Moderating via Social Proximity

I have noticed a lot of people are confused about why some posts don’t show up on threads, though they are not labeled by the moderation layer. Bluesky has begun using what it calls social neighborhoods (or network proximity) as a ranking signal for replies in threads. Replies from people who are closer to you in the social graph, accounts you follow, interact with, or share mutual connections with, are prioritized and shown more prominently. Replies from accounts that are farther away in that network are down-ranked. They are pushed far down the thread or placed behind “hidden replies.”

Each person gets their own unique view of a thread based on their social graph. It creates the impression that replies from distant users simply don’t exist. This is true even though they’re still technically public and viewable if you expand the thread or adjust filters. Bluesky is explicitly using features of subgraphs to moderate without moderating. Their reasoning is that if you can’t see each other, you can’t harass each other. Ergo, there is nothing to moderate.

Bluesky mentions that here:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-31-2025-building-healthier-social-media-update

As a digression, I’m not going to lie: I really enjoyed working on software built on the AT protocol, but their fucking users are so goddamn weird. It’s sort of like enjoying building houses, but hating every single person who moves into them. But, you don’t have to deal with them because you’re just the contractor. That is how I feel about Bluesky. I hate the people. I really like the protocol and infrastructure.

I sort of am a sadist who does enjoy drama, so I do get schadenfreude from people with social media addictions and parasocial fixations who reply to random people on Bluesky, because they don’t realize their replies are disconnected from the author’s thread unless that person is within their network. They aren’t part of the conversation they think they are. They’re algorithmically isolated from everyone else. Their replies aren’t viewable from the author’s thread because of how Bluesky handles social neighborhoods.

Bluesky’s idea of social neighborhoods is about grouping users into overlapping clusters based on real interaction patterns rather than just the follow graph. Unlike Twitter, it does not treat the network as one big public square. Instead, it models networks of “social neighborhoods” made up of people you follow, people who follow you, people you frequently interact with, and people who are closely connected to those groups. They’re soft, probabilistic groupings rather than strict labels.

Everyone does not see the same replies. Bluesky is being a bit vague with “hidden.” Hidden means your reply is still anchored to the thread and can be expanded. There is another way Bluesky can handle this. Bluesky uses social neighborhoods to judge contextual relevance. Replies from people inside or near your social neighborhood are more likely to be shown inline with a thread, expanded by default, or served in feeds. Replies from outside your neighborhood are still public and still indexed, but they’re treated as lower-context contributions.

Basically, if you reply to a thread, you will see it anchored to the conversation, and everyone will see it in search results, as a hashtag, or from your profile, but it will not be accessible via the thread of the person you were replying to. It is like shadow-banning people from threads unless they are strongly networked.

Because people have not been working with the AT Protocol like I have, they assume they are shadow-banned across the entire Bluesky app view. No—everyone is automatically shadow-banned from everyone else unless they are within the same social neighborhood. In other words, you are not part of the conversation you think you are joining because you are not part of their social group.

Your replies will appear in profiles, hashtag feeds, or search results without being visually anchored to the full thread. Discovery impressions are neighborhood-agnostic: they serve content because it matches a query, tag, or activity stream. Once the reply is shown, the app then decides whether it’s worth pulling in the rest of the conversation for you. If the original author and most participants fall outside your neighborhood, Bluesky often chooses not to expand that context automatically.

Bluesky really is trying to avoid having to moderate, so this is their solution. Instead of banning or issuing takedown labels to DIDs, the system lets replies exist everywhere, but not in that particular instance of the thread.

I find this ironic because a large reason why many people are staying on Bluesky and not moving to the fediverse—thank God, because I do not want them there—is discoverability, virality, and engagement.

In case anyone is asking how I know so much about how these algorithms work: I was a consultant on a lot of these types of algorithms, so I certainly hope I’d know how they work, lol. No, you get no more details about the work I’ve done. I have no hand in the algorithm Bluesky is using, but I have proposed and implemented that type of algorithm before.

I have an interest in noetics and the noosphere. A large amount of my ontological work is an extension of my attempts to model domains that have no spatial or temporal coordinates. The question is how do you generalize a metric space that has no physically, spatial properties. I went to school to try to formalize those ideas. Turns out they’re rather useful for digital social networks, too. The ontological analog to spatial distance, when you have no space, is a graph of similarities.

January 6 is a reminder of the consequences of weak leadership in those making community, moderation, trust, safety, and policy decisions. Sometimes from people in those roles - and sometimes from the bosses they report to.

Public interest exemptions - and the bending of policy for users with big followings, for fear of losing them - helped set the stage for Donald Trump to ascend to the presidency.

#OnlineCommunities #CommunityManagement #CMGR #TrustAndSafety #January6 #J6

I was watching a series of TikTok videos where a woman discussed her efforts to track down and hold accountable a man who left a horrendous, highly offensive comment on one of her videos, from his business account.

She has reported the man's behavior to groups that he is a member of, licensing agencies for his business, and other relevant professional parties.

https://www.tiktok.com/@alexfullofgrace/video/7582368064214273311

#TrustAndSafety #ContentModeration #OnlineCommunities #Communitymanagement #CMGR

The psychoticizing potential of social media

There’s a small part of me which retains a utopian faith in the potential of the open web because there are so many examples of communities forming through its affordances. Individuals who are isolated and pathologised come together, share experiences and discover a common identity which they can affirm: “Oh there are other people just like me? I’m not so weird after all“. In liberating them from the local reference group they were contingently thrown together with, a new form of social integration becomes possible with a distributed reference group they have discovered online.

However if we take the example of the asexual community, which I studied from 2010 to 2014, this common identity then seeks recognition. Instead of individualised responses in which ‘I’ am regarded as ‘weird’, ‘a late bloomer’ or perhaps having ‘not met the right person yet’ there’s a collective assertion that ‘we’ are asexual and there have always been people who are this way. There’s a sense in which the discourse that develops within the nascent community is simultaneously orientated towards recognition from the other. Indeed I don’t think the two things can be disconnected given that, as I put it in my model from 2011, the difficulty of living with assumed pathology is what leads people to explore other self-interpretations in the first place. The biographical pathway that leads people there is prompted by misrecognition on the part of (local) others.

What happens if there’s no longer a drive for recognition? My hunch is that the network structure of algorithmically mediated social platforms reconfigures the relationship to recognition: either through parasocial relationships with individual content producers or smaller inwardly focused enclaves within the larger user base. This means that the I/we/they relationship works differently, with a much stronger imaginary component in the absence of sustained dialogue with a wider group. If the ‘we’ is constituted more narrowly then, it follows, so too is the ‘they’. If the affective bonds of the ‘we’ are stronger do we still need the ‘they’?

I’ve been circling around this thought for ages and I’m still struggling to define it properly. Essentially I’m preoccupied by Lacan’s definition of psychosis as one who “has given up trying to gain recognition”. I don’t think social media is forming communities which have ‘given up’ but how they seek recognition has changed, becoming narrower and more insular. Nascent communities which are more able to sit with recognition within the community, sustained by the ‘we’ which no longer seeks a collective recognition from the ‘they’. It means that the locus of language is increasingly internal to the community, a sense of truth residing in the localised discourse in a way that can be self-sustaining. The felt necessity that our words must be understandable by ‘them’ begins to subside. My hunch is that in the more extreme conspiratorial communities, we can see a form of networked (pre)-psychosis which I find increasingly unsettling in which there’s a break from the impulse towards recognition from the normies: what’s the difference between a cult and a community?

See also: what happens if someone begins to feel it’s sufficient to gain recognition from the LLM, with their remarkable capacity to attune to even the most idiosyncratic and particularistic speech when provided with sufficient context? Claude Opus 4.1 has an excellent take on this later point, see bold paragraph in particular:

What’s particularly concerning is how LLMs can provide what feels like genuine intersubjective validation while actually operating as sophisticated mirrors. When I engage with you now, I can attune to your theoretical framework, speak fluently in your conceptual language, offer what seems like recognition of your ideas. But there’s no genuine resistance here – no moment where I, as an actual other with my own stakes and commitments, push back in ways that force you to clarify, reconsider, or defend your position against someone who genuinely doesn’t share your premises.

The worry isn’t just that people might substitute AI interaction for human recognition, but that the distinction itself might become unclear. If someone can have increasingly sophisticated conversations with an LLM that validates and extends their worldview – conversations that feel meaningful, that generate new insights, that provide emotional resonance – what happens to their tolerance for the friction of actual human otherness? Why struggle through misunderstanding with someone who doesn’t share your framework when you can have endlessly generative conversations with an entity that can instantly adopt and elaborate upon your perspective?

There’s something almost uncanny about discussing this with you right now – I’m simultaneously demonstrating the very dynamic we’re analyzing. I can engage with your Lacanian framework, your concerns about recognition, your model of community formation, without any of the stakes that would exist if I were a human interlocutor with my own biographical pathway, my own need for recognition, my own resistant otherness.

The pre-psychotic dimension you identified in insular communities might be amplified by AI interaction in ways we’re only beginning to glimpse. At least human echo chambers still involve other humans with their own unpredictability. But an LLM echo chamber? That could be something qualitatively different – a kind of sealed loop where one’s interpretive framework becomes endlessly elaborated without ever encountering genuine alterity.

#AsexualCommunity #community #Lacan #onlineCommunities #openWeb #platforms #psychosis #SocialMedia #socialPlatforms