#socialmediaalgorithm — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #socialmediaalgorithm, aggregated by home.social.
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I saw this on Mastodon and almost had a stroke.
@davidgerard wrote:
“Most of the AI coding claims are conveniently nondisprovable. What studies there are show it not helping coding at all, or making it worse
But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.
These guys had one good experience with the bot, they got one-shotted, and now if you say “perhaps the bot is not all that” they act like you’re trying to take their cocaine away.”
First, the term is falsifiable, and proving propositions about algorithms (i.e., code) is part of what I do for a living. Mathematically human-written code and AI-written code can be tested, which means you can falsify propositions about them. You would test them the same way.
There is no intrinsic mathematical distinction between code written by a person and code produced by an AI system. In both cases, the result is a formal program made of logic and structure. In principle, the same testing techniques can be applied to each. If it were really nondisprovable, you could not test to see what is generated by a human and what is generated by AI. But you can test it. Studies have found that AI-generated code tends to exhibit a higher frequency of certain types of defects. So, reviewers and testers know what logic flaws and security weaknesses to look for. This would not be the case if it were nondisprovable.
You can study this from datasets where the source of the code is known. You can use open-source pull requests identified as AI-assisted versus those written without such tools. You then evaluate both groups using the same industry-standard analysis tools: static analyzers, complexity metrics, security scanners, and defect classification systems. These tools flag bugs, vulnerabilities, performance issues, and maintainability concerns. They do so in a consistent way across samples.
A widely cited analysis of 470 real pull requests reported that AI-generated contributions contained roughly 1.7 times as many issues on average as human-written ones. The difference included a higher number of critical and major defects. It also included more logic and security-related problems. Because these findings rely on standard measurement tools — counting defects, grading severity, and comparing issue rates — the results are grounded in observable data. Again, I am making a point here. It’s testable and therefore disproveable.
This is a good paper that goes into it:
In this paper, we present a large-scale comparison of code authored by human developers and three state-of-the-art LLMs, i.e., ChatGPT, DeepSeek-Coder, and Qwen-Coder, on multiple dimensions of software quality: code defects, security vulnerabilities, and structural complexity. Our evaluation spans over 500k code samples in two widely used languages, Python and Java, classifying defects via Orthogonal Defect Classification and security vulnerabilities using the Common Weakness Enumeration. We find that AI-generated code is generally simpler and more repetitive, yet more prone to unused constructs and hardcoded debugging, while human-written code exhibits greater structural complexity and a higher concentration of maintainability issues. Notably, AI-generated code also contains more high-risk security vulnerabilities. These findings highlight the distinct defect profiles of AI- and human-authored code and underscore the need for specialized quality assurance practices in AI-assisted programming.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21634
Something I’ve started to notice about a lot of the content on social media platforms is that most of the posts people are liking, sharing, and memetically mutating—and then spreading virally—usually don’t include any citations, sources, or receipts. It’s often just some out-of-context screenshot with no reference link or actual sources.
A lot of the anti-AI content is not genuine critique. It’s often misinformation, but people who hate AI don’t question it or ask for sources because it aligns with their biases. The propaganda on social media has gotten so bad that anything other than heavily curated and vetted feeds is pretty much useless, and it’s filled with all sorts of memetic contagions with nasty hooks that are optimized for you algorithmically. I am at the point where I will disregard anything that is not followed up with a source. Period. It is all optimized to persuade, coerce, or piss you off. I am only writing about this because this I’m actually able to contribute genuine information about the topic.
That they said symbolic propositions written by AI agents (i.e., code) are non-disprovable because they were written by AI boggles my mind. It’s like saying that an article written in English by AI is not English because AI generated it. It might be a bad piece of text, but it’s syntactically, semantically, and grammatically English.
Basically, any string of data can be represented in a base-2 system, where it can be interpreted as bits (0s and 1s). Those bits can be used as the basis for symbolic reasoning. In formal propositional logic, a proposition is a sequence of symbols constructed according to strict syntax rules (atomic variables plus logical connectives). Under a given semantics, it is assigned exactly one truth value (true or false) in a two-valued logic system.
They are essentially saying that code written by AI is not binary, isn’t symbolically logical at all, and cannot be evaluated as true or false by implying it is nondisproveable. At the lowest level, compiled code consists of binary machine instructions that a processor executes. At higher levels, source code is written in symbolic syntax that humans and tools use to express logic and structure. You can also translate parts of code into formal logic expressions. For example, conditions and assertions in a program can be modeled as Boolean formulas. Tools like SAT/SMT solvers or symbolic execution engines check those formulas for satisfiability or correctness. It blows my mind how confidently people talk about things they do not understand.
Furthermore that they don’t realize the projection is wild to me.
@davidgerard wrote:
“But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.”
They are presenting a story—i.e., saying that the studies are not disprovable—and accusing computer scientists of using anecdotal evidence without actually providing evidence to support this, while expecting people to take it prima facie. You’re doing what you are accusing others of doing.
It comes down to this: they feel that people ought not to use AI, so they are tacitly committed to a future in which people do not use AI. For example, a major argument against AI is the damage it is doing to resources, which is driving up the prices of computer components, as well as the ecological harm it causes. They feel justified in lying and misinforming others if it achieves the outcome they want—people not using AI because it is bad for the environment. That is a very strong point, but most people don’t care about that, which is why they lie about things people would care about.It’s corrupt. And what’s really scary is that people don’t recognize when they are part of corruption or a corrupt conspiracy to misinform. Well, they recognize it when they see the other side doing it, that is. No one is more dangerous than people who feel righteous in what they are doing.
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I saw this on Mastodon and almost had a stroke.
@davidgerard wrote:
“Most of the AI coding claims are conveniently nondisprovable. What studies there are show it not helping coding at all, or making it worse
But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.
These guys had one good experience with the bot, they got one-shotted, and now if you say “perhaps the bot is not all that” they act like you’re trying to take their cocaine away.”
First, the term is falsifiable, and proving propositions about algorithms (i.e., code) is part of what I do for a living. Mathematically human-written code and AI-written code can be tested, which means you can falsify propositions about them. You would test them the same way.
There is no intrinsic mathematical distinction between code written by a person and code produced by an AI system. In both cases, the result is a formal program made of logic and structure. In principle, the same testing techniques can be applied to each. If it were really nondisprovable, you could not test to see what is generated by a human and what is generated by AI. But you can test it. Studies have found that AI-generated code tends to exhibit a higher frequency of certain types of defects. So, reviewers and testers know what logic flaws and security weaknesses to look for. This would not be the case if it were nondisprovable.
You can study this from datasets where the source of the code is known. You can use open-source pull requests identified as AI-assisted versus those written without such tools. You then evaluate both groups using the same industry-standard analysis tools: static analyzers, complexity metrics, security scanners, and defect classification systems. These tools flag bugs, vulnerabilities, performance issues, and maintainability concerns. They do so in a consistent way across samples.
A widely cited analysis of 470 real pull requests reported that AI-generated contributions contained roughly 1.7 times as many issues on average as human-written ones. The difference included a higher number of critical and major defects. It also included more logic and security-related problems. Because these findings rely on standard measurement tools — counting defects, grading severity, and comparing issue rates — the results are grounded in observable data. Again, I am making a point here. It’s testable and therefore disproveable.
This is a good paper that goes into it:
In this paper, we present a large-scale comparison of code authored by human developers and three state-of-the-art LLMs, i.e., ChatGPT, DeepSeek-Coder, and Qwen-Coder, on multiple dimensions of software quality: code defects, security vulnerabilities, and structural complexity. Our evaluation spans over 500k code samples in two widely used languages, Python and Java, classifying defects via Orthogonal Defect Classification and security vulnerabilities using the Common Weakness Enumeration. We find that AI-generated code is generally simpler and more repetitive, yet more prone to unused constructs and hardcoded debugging, while human-written code exhibits greater structural complexity and a higher concentration of maintainability issues. Notably, AI-generated code also contains more high-risk security vulnerabilities. These findings highlight the distinct defect profiles of AI- and human-authored code and underscore the need for specialized quality assurance practices in AI-assisted programming.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21634
The big problem in discussions about AI in programming is the either-or thinking, when it’s not about using it everywhere or banning it entirely. Tools like AI have specific strengths and weaknesses. Saying ‘never’ or ‘always’ oversimplifies the issue and turns the narrative into propaganda that creates moral panic or shills AI. It’s a bit like saying you shouldn’t use a hammer just because it’s not good for brushing your teeth.
AI tends to produce code that’s simple, often a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It’s usually pretty easy to read and tweak. This helps with long-term maintenance. But AI doesn’t reason about code the way an experienced developer does. It makes mistakes that a human wouldn’t, potentially introducing security flaws. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use for where it works well, which is not everywhere.
AI works well for certain tasks, especially when the scope is narrow and the risk is low. Examples include generating boilerplate code, internal utilities, or prototypes. In these cases, the tradeoff is manageable. However, it’s not suitable for critical code like kernels, operating systems, compilers, or cryptographic libraries. A small mistake memory safety or privilege separation can lead to major failures. Problems with synchronization, pointer management, or access control can cause major problems, too.
Other areas where AI should not be used include memory allocation handling, scheduling, process isolation, or device drivers. A lot of that depends on implicit assumptions in the system’s architecture. Generative models don’t grasp these nuances. Instead of carefully considering the design, AI tends to replicate code patterns that seem statistically likely, doing so without understanding the purpose behind them.
Yes, I’m aware that Microsoft is using AI to write code everywhere I said it should not be used. That is the problem. However, political pundits, lobbyists, and anti-tech talking heads are discussing something they have no understanding of and aren’t specifying what the problem actually is. This means they can’t possibly lead grassroots initiatives into actual laws that specify where AI should not be used, which is why we have this weird astroturfing bullshit.
They’re taking advantage of the reaction to Microsoft using AI-generated code where it shouldn’t be used to argue that AI shouldn’t be used anywhere at all in any generative context. AI is useful for tasks like writing documentation, generating tests, suggesting code improvements, or brainstorming alternative approaches. These ideas should then be thoroughly vetted by human developers.
Something I’ve started to notice about a lot of the content on social media platforms is that most of the posts people are liking, sharing, and memetically mutating—and then spreading virally—usually don’t include any citations, sources, or receipts. It’s often just some out-of-context screenshot with no reference link or actual sources.
A lot of the anti-AI content is not genuine critique. It’s often misinformation, but people who hate AI don’t question it or ask for sources because it aligns with their biases. The propaganda on social media has gotten so bad that anything other than heavily curated and vetted feeds is pretty much useless, and it’s filled with all sorts of memetic contagions with nasty hooks that are optimized for you algorithmically. I am at the point where I will disregard anything that is not followed up with a source. Period. It is all optimized to persuade, coerce, or piss you off. I am only writing about this because this I’m actually able to contribute genuine information about the topic.
That they said symbolic propositions written by AI agents (i.e., code) are non-disprovable because they were written by AI boggles my mind. It’s like saying that an article written in English by AI is not English because AI generated it. It might be a bad piece of text, but it’s syntactically, semantically, and grammatically English.
Basically, any string of data can be represented in a base-2 system, where it can be interpreted as bits (0s and 1s). Those bits can be used as the basis for symbolic reasoning. In formal propositional logic, a proposition is a sequence of symbols constructed according to strict syntax rules (atomic variables plus logical connectives). Under a given semantics, it is assigned exactly one truth value (true or false) in a two-valued logic system.
They are essentially saying that code written by AI is not binary, isn’t symbolically logical at all, and cannot be evaluated as true or false by implying it is nondisproveable. At the lowest level, compiled code consists of binary machine instructions that a processor executes. At higher levels, source code is written in symbolic syntax that humans and tools use to express logic and structure. You can also translate parts of code into formal logic expressions. For example, conditions and assertions in a program can be modeled as Boolean formulas. Tools like SAT/SMT solvers or symbolic execution engines check those formulas for satisfiability or correctness. It blows my mind how confidently people talk about things they do not understand.
Furthermore that they don’t realize the projection is wild to me.
@davidgerard wrote:
“But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.”
They are presenting a story—i.e., saying that the studies are not disprovable—and accusing computer scientists of using anecdotal evidence without actually providing evidence to support this, while expecting people to take it prima facie. You’re doing what you are accusing others of doing.
It comes down to this: they feel that people ought not to use AI, so they are tacitly committed to a future in which people do not use AI. For example, a major argument against AI is the damage it is doing to resources, which is driving up the prices of computer components, as well as the ecological harm it causes. They feel justified in lying and misinforming others if it achieves the outcome they want—people not using AI because it is bad for the environment. That is a very strong point, but most people don’t care about that, which is why they lie about things people would care about.
It’s corrupt. And what’s really scary is that people don’t recognize when they are part of corruption or a corrupt conspiracy to misinform. Well, they recognize it when they see the other side doing it, that is. No one is more dangerous than people who feel righteous in what they are doing.
It’s wild to me that the idea that if you cannot persuade someone, it is okay to bully, coerce, harass them, or spread misinformation to get what you want—because your side is right—has become so normalized on the Internet that people can’t see why it is problematic.
That people think it is okay to hurt others to get them to agree is the most disturbing part of all of this. People have become so hateful. That is a large reason why I don’t interact with people on social media, really consume things from social media, or respond on social media and am writing a blog post about it instead of engaging with who prompted it.
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I saw this on Mastodon and almost had a stroke.
@davidgerard wrote:
“Most of the AI coding claims are conveniently nondisprovable. What studies there are show it not helping coding at all, or making it worse
But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.
These guys had one good experience with the bot, they got one-shotted, and now if you say “perhaps the bot is not all that” they act like you’re trying to take their cocaine away.”
First, the term is falsifiable, and proving propositions about algorithms (i.e., code) is part of what I do for a living. Mathematically human-written code and AI-written code can be tested, which means you can falsify propositions about them. You would test them the same way.
There is no intrinsic mathematical distinction between code written by a person and code produced by an AI system. In both cases, the result is a formal program made of logic and structure. In principle, the same testing techniques can be applied to each. If it were really nondisprovable, you could not test to see what is generated by a human and what is generated by AI. But you can test it. Studies have found that AI-generated code tends to exhibit a higher frequency of certain types of defects. So, reviewers and testers know what logic flaws and security weaknesses to look for. This would not be the case if it were nondisprovable.
You can study this from datasets where the source of the code is known. You can use open-source pull requests identified as AI-assisted versus those written without such tools. You then evaluate both groups using the same industry-standard analysis tools: static analyzers, complexity metrics, security scanners, and defect classification systems. These tools flag bugs, vulnerabilities, performance issues, and maintainability concerns. They do so in a consistent way across samples.
A widely cited analysis of 470 real pull requests reported that AI-generated contributions contained roughly 1.7 times as many issues on average as human-written ones. The difference included a higher number of critical and major defects. It also included more logic and security-related problems. Because these findings rely on standard measurement tools — counting defects, grading severity, and comparing issue rates — the results are grounded in observable data. Again, I am making a point here. It’s testable and therefore disproveable.
This is a good paper that goes into it:
In this paper, we present a large-scale comparison of code authored by human developers and three state-of-the-art LLMs, i.e., ChatGPT, DeepSeek-Coder, and Qwen-Coder, on multiple dimensions of software quality: code defects, security vulnerabilities, and structural complexity. Our evaluation spans over 500k code samples in two widely used languages, Python and Java, classifying defects via Orthogonal Defect Classification and security vulnerabilities using the Common Weakness Enumeration. We find that AI-generated code is generally simpler and more repetitive, yet more prone to unused constructs and hardcoded debugging, while human-written code exhibits greater structural complexity and a higher concentration of maintainability issues. Notably, AI-generated code also contains more high-risk security vulnerabilities. These findings highlight the distinct defect profiles of AI- and human-authored code and underscore the need for specialized quality assurance practices in AI-assisted programming.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21634
Something I’ve started to notice about a lot of the content on social media platforms is that most of the posts people are liking, sharing, and memetically mutating—and then spreading virally—usually don’t include any citations, sources, or receipts. It’s often just some out-of-context screenshot with no reference link or actual sources.
A lot of the anti-AI content is not genuine critique. It’s often misinformation, but people who hate AI don’t question it or ask for sources because it aligns with their biases. The propaganda on social media has gotten so bad that anything other than heavily curated and vetted feeds is pretty much useless, and it’s filled with all sorts of memetic contagions with nasty hooks that are optimized for you algorithmically. I am at the point where I will disregard anything that is not followed up with a source. Period. It is all optimized to persuade, coerce, or piss you off. I am only writing about this because this I’m actually able to contribute genuine information about the topic.
That they said symbolic propositions written by AI agents (i.e., code) are non-disprovable because they were written by AI boggles my mind. It’s like saying that an article written in English by AI is not English because AI generated it. It might be a bad piece of text, but it’s syntactically, semantically, and grammatically English.
Basically, any string of data can be represented in a base-2 system, where it can be interpreted as bits (0s and 1s). Those bits can be used as the basis for symbolic reasoning. In formal propositional logic, a proposition is a sequence of symbols constructed according to strict syntax rules (atomic variables plus logical connectives). Under a given semantics, it is assigned exactly one truth value (true or false) in a two-valued logic system.
They are essentially saying that code written by AI is not binary, isn’t symbolically logical at all, and cannot be evaluated as true or false by implying it is nondisproveable. At the lowest level, compiled code consists of binary machine instructions that a processor executes. At higher levels, source code is written in symbolic syntax that humans and tools use to express logic and structure. You can also translate parts of code into formal logic expressions. For example, conditions and assertions in a program can be modeled as Boolean formulas. Tools like SAT/SMT solvers or symbolic execution engines check those formulas for satisfiability or correctness. It blows my mind how confidently people talk about things they do not understand.
Furthermore that they don’t realize the projection is wild to me.
@davidgerard wrote:
“But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.”
They are presenting a story—i.e., saying that the studies are not disprovable—and accusing computer scientists of using anecdotal evidence without actually providing evidence to support this, while expecting people to take it prima facie. You’re doing what you are accusing others of doing.
It comes down to this: they feel that people ought not to use AI, so they are tacitly committed to a future in which people do not use AI. For example, a major argument against AI is the damage it is doing to resources, which is driving up the prices of computer components, as well as the ecological harm it causes. They feel justified in lying and misinforming others if it achieves the outcome they want—people not using AI because it is bad for the environment. That is a very strong point, but most people don’t care about that, which is why they lie about things people would care about.It’s corrupt. And what’s really scary is that people don’t recognize when they are part of corruption or a corrupt conspiracy to misinform. Well, they recognize it when they see the other side doing it, that is. No one is more dangerous than people who feel righteous in what they are doing.
-
I saw this on Mastodon and almost had a stroke.
@davidgerard wrote:
“Most of the AI coding claims are conveniently nondisprovable. What studies there are show it not helping coding at all, or making it worse
But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.
These guys had one good experience with the bot, they got one-shotted, and now if you say “perhaps the bot is not all that” they act like you’re trying to take their cocaine away.”
First, the term is falsifiable, and proving propositions about algorithms (i.e., code) is part of what I do for a living. Mathematically human-written code and AI-written code can be tested, which means you can falsify propositions about them. You would test them the same way.
There is no intrinsic mathematical distinction between code written by a person and code produced by an AI system. In both cases, the result is a formal program made of logic and structure. In principle, the same testing techniques can be applied to each. If it were really nondisprovable, you could not test to see what is generated by a human and what is generated by AI. But you can test it. Studies have found that AI-generated code tends to exhibit a higher frequency of certain types of defects. So, reviewers and testers know what logic flaws and security weaknesses to look for. This would not be the case if it were nondisprovable.
You can study this from datasets where the source of the code is known. You can use open-source pull requests identified as AI-assisted versus those written without such tools. You then evaluate both groups using the same industry-standard analysis tools: static analyzers, complexity metrics, security scanners, and defect classification systems. These tools flag bugs, vulnerabilities, performance issues, and maintainability concerns. They do so in a consistent way across samples.
A widely cited analysis of 470 real pull requests reported that AI-generated contributions contained roughly 1.7 times as many issues on average as human-written ones. The difference included a higher number of critical and major defects. It also included more logic and security-related problems. Because these findings rely on standard measurement tools — counting defects, grading severity, and comparing issue rates — the results are grounded in observable data. Again, I am making a point here. It’s testable and therefore disproveable.
This is a good paper that goes into it:
In this paper, we present a large-scale comparison of code authored by human developers and three state-of-the-art LLMs, i.e., ChatGPT, DeepSeek-Coder, and Qwen-Coder, on multiple dimensions of software quality: code defects, security vulnerabilities, and structural complexity. Our evaluation spans over 500k code samples in two widely used languages, Python and Java, classifying defects via Orthogonal Defect Classification and security vulnerabilities using the Common Weakness Enumeration. We find that AI-generated code is generally simpler and more repetitive, yet more prone to unused constructs and hardcoded debugging, while human-written code exhibits greater structural complexity and a higher concentration of maintainability issues. Notably, AI-generated code also contains more high-risk security vulnerabilities. These findings highlight the distinct defect profiles of AI- and human-authored code and underscore the need for specialized quality assurance practices in AI-assisted programming.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21634
The big problem in discussions about AI in programming is the either-or thinking, when it’s not about using it everywhere or banning it entirely. Tools like AI have specific strengths and weaknesses. Saying ‘never’ or ‘always’ oversimplifies the issue and turns the narrative into propaganda that creates moral panic or shills AI. It’s a bit like saying you shouldn’t use a hammer just because it’s not good for brushing your teeth.
AI tends to produce code that’s simple, often a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It’s usually pretty easy to read and tweak. This helps with long-term maintenance. But AI doesn’t reason about code the way an experienced developer does. It makes mistakes that a human wouldn’t, potentially introducing security flaws. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use for where it works well, which is not everywhere.
AI works well for certain tasks, especially when the scope is narrow and the risk is low. Examples include generating boilerplate code, internal utilities, or prototypes. In these cases, the tradeoff is manageable. However, it’s not suitable for critical code like kernels, operating systems, compilers, or cryptographic libraries. A small mistake memory safety or privilege separation can lead to major failures. Problems with synchronization, pointer management, or access control can cause major problems, too.
Other areas where AI should not be used include memory allocation handling, scheduling, process isolation, or device drivers. A lot of that depends on implicit assumptions in the system’s architecture. Generative models don’t grasp these nuances. Instead of carefully considering the design, AI tends to replicate code patterns that seem statistically likely, doing so without understanding the purpose behind them.
Yes, I’m aware that Microsoft is using AI to write code everywhere I said it should not be used. That is the problem. However, political pundits, lobbyists, and anti-tech talking heads are discussing something they have no understanding of and aren’t specifying what the problem actually is. This means they can’t possibly lead grassroots initiatives into actual laws that specify where AI should not be used, which is why we have this weird astroturfing bullshit.
They’re taking advantage of the reaction to Microsoft using AI-generated code where it shouldn’t be used to argue that AI shouldn’t be used anywhere at all in any generative context. AI is useful for tasks like writing documentation, generating tests, suggesting code improvements, or brainstorming alternative approaches. These ideas should then be thoroughly vetted by human developers.
Something I’ve started to notice about a lot of the content on social media platforms is that most of the posts people are liking, sharing, and memetically mutating—and then spreading virally—usually don’t include any citations, sources, or receipts. It’s often just some out-of-context screenshot with no reference link or actual sources.
A lot of the anti-AI content is not genuine critique. It’s often misinformation, but people who hate AI don’t question it or ask for sources because it aligns with their biases. The propaganda on social media has gotten so bad that anything other than heavily curated and vetted feeds is pretty much useless, and it’s filled with all sorts of memetic contagions with nasty hooks that are optimized for you algorithmically. I am at the point where I will disregard anything that is not followed up with a source. Period. It is all optimized to persuade, coerce, or piss you off. I am only writing about this because this I’m actually able to contribute genuine information about the topic.
That they said symbolic propositions written by AI agents (i.e., code) are non-disprovable because they were written by AI boggles my mind. It’s like saying that an article written in English by AI is not English because AI generated it. It might be a bad piece of text, but it’s syntactically, semantically, and grammatically English.
Basically, any string of data can be represented in a base-2 system, where it can be interpreted as bits (0s and 1s). Those bits can be used as the basis for symbolic reasoning. In formal propositional logic, a proposition is a sequence of symbols constructed according to strict syntax rules (atomic variables plus logical connectives). Under a given semantics, it is assigned exactly one truth value (true or false) in a two-valued logic system.
They are essentially saying that code written by AI is not binary, isn’t symbolically logical at all, and cannot be evaluated as true or false by implying it is nondisproveable. At the lowest level, compiled code consists of binary machine instructions that a processor executes. At higher levels, source code is written in symbolic syntax that humans and tools use to express logic and structure. You can also translate parts of code into formal logic expressions. For example, conditions and assertions in a program can be modeled as Boolean formulas. Tools like SAT/SMT solvers or symbolic execution engines check those formulas for satisfiability or correctness. It blows my mind how confidently people talk about things they do not understand.
Furthermore that they don’t realize the projection is wild to me.
@davidgerard wrote:
“But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.”
They are presenting a story—i.e., saying that the studies are not disprovable—and accusing computer scientists of using anecdotal evidence without actually providing evidence to support this, while expecting people to take it prima facie. You’re doing what you are accusing others of doing.
It comes down to this: they feel that people ought not to use AI, so they are tacitly committed to a future in which people do not use AI. For example, a major argument against AI is the damage it is doing to resources, which is driving up the prices of computer components, as well as the ecological harm it causes. They feel justified in lying and misinforming others if it achieves the outcome they want—people not using AI because it is bad for the environment. That is a very strong point, but most people don’t care about that, which is why they lie about things people would care about.
It’s corrupt. And what’s really scary is that people don’t recognize when they are part of corruption or a corrupt conspiracy to misinform. Well, they recognize it when they see the other side doing it, that is. No one is more dangerous than people who feel righteous in what they are doing.
It’s wild to me that the idea that if you cannot persuade someone, it is okay to bully, coerce, harass them, or spread misinformation to get what you want—because your side is right—has become so normalized on the Internet that people can’t see why it is problematic.
That people think it is okay to hurt others to get them to agree is the most disturbing part of all of this. People have become so hateful. That is a large reason why I don’t interact with people on social media, really consume things from social media, or respond on social media and am writing a blog post about it instead of engaging with who prompted it.
-
I saw this on Mastodon and almost had a stroke.
@davidgerard wrote:
“Most of the AI coding claims are conveniently nondisprovable. What studies there are show it not helping coding at all, or making it worse
But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.
These guys had one good experience with the bot, they got one-shotted, and now if you say “perhaps the bot is not all that” they act like you’re trying to take their cocaine away.”
First, the term is falsifiable, and proving propositions about algorithms (i.e., code) is part of what I do for a living. Mathematically human-written code and AI-written code can be tested, which means you can falsify propositions about them. You would test them the same way.
There is no intrinsic mathematical distinction between code written by a person and code produced by an AI system. In both cases, the result is a formal program made of logic and structure. In principle, the same testing techniques can be applied to each. If it were really nondisprovable, you could not test to see what is generated by a human and what is generated by AI. But you can test it. Studies have found that AI-generated code tends to exhibit a higher frequency of certain types of defects. So, reviewers and testers know what logic flaws and security weaknesses to look for. This would not be the case if it were nondisprovable.
You can study this from datasets where the source of the code is known. You can use open-source pull requests identified as AI-assisted versus those written without such tools. You then evaluate both groups using the same industry-standard analysis tools: static analyzers, complexity metrics, security scanners, and defect classification systems. These tools flag bugs, vulnerabilities, performance issues, and maintainability concerns. They do so in a consistent way across samples.
A widely cited analysis of 470 real pull requests reported that AI-generated contributions contained roughly 1.7 times as many issues on average as human-written ones. The difference included a higher number of critical and major defects. It also included more logic and security-related problems. Because these findings rely on standard measurement tools — counting defects, grading severity, and comparing issue rates — the results are grounded in observable data. Again, I am making a point here. It’s testable and therefore disproveable.
This is a good paper that goes into it:
In this paper, we present a large-scale comparison of code authored by human developers and three state-of-the-art LLMs, i.e., ChatGPT, DeepSeek-Coder, and Qwen-Coder, on multiple dimensions of software quality: code defects, security vulnerabilities, and structural complexity. Our evaluation spans over 500k code samples in two widely used languages, Python and Java, classifying defects via Orthogonal Defect Classification and security vulnerabilities using the Common Weakness Enumeration. We find that AI-generated code is generally simpler and more repetitive, yet more prone to unused constructs and hardcoded debugging, while human-written code exhibits greater structural complexity and a higher concentration of maintainability issues. Notably, AI-generated code also contains more high-risk security vulnerabilities. These findings highlight the distinct defect profiles of AI- and human-authored code and underscore the need for specialized quality assurance practices in AI-assisted programming.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21634
The big problem in discussions about AI in programming is the either-or thinking, when it’s not about using it everywhere or banning it entirely. Tools like AI have specific strengths and weaknesses. Saying ‘never’ or ‘always’ oversimplifies the issue and turns the narrative into propaganda that creates moral panic or shills AI. It’s a bit like saying you shouldn’t use a hammer just because it’s not good for brushing your teeth.
AI tends to produce code that’s simple, often a bit repetitive, and very verbose. It’s usually pretty easy to read and tweak. This helps with long-term maintenance. But AI doesn’t reason about code the way an experienced developer does. It makes mistakes that a human wouldn’t, potentially introducing security flaws. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use for where it works well, which is not everywhere.
AI works well for certain tasks, especially when the scope is narrow and the risk is low. Examples include generating boilerplate code, internal utilities, or prototypes. In these cases, the tradeoff is manageable. However, it’s not suitable for critical code like kernels, operating systems, compilers, or cryptographic libraries. A small mistake memory safety or privilege separation can lead to major failures. Problems with synchronization, pointer management, or access control can cause major problems, too.
Other areas where AI should not be used include memory allocation handling, scheduling, process isolation, or device drivers. A lot of that depends on implicit assumptions in the system’s architecture. Generative models don’t grasp these nuances. Instead of carefully considering the design, AI tends to replicate code patterns that seem statistically likely, doing so without understanding the purpose behind them.
Yes, I’m aware that Microsoft is using AI to write code everywhere I said it should not be used. That is the problem. However, political pundits, lobbyists, and anti-tech talking heads are discussing something they have no understanding of and aren’t specifying what the problem actually is. This means they can’t possibly lead grassroots initiatives into actual laws that specify where AI should not be used, which is why we have this weird astroturfing bullshit.
They’re taking advantage of the reaction to Microsoft using AI-generated code where it shouldn’t be used to argue that AI shouldn’t be used anywhere at all in any generative context. AI is useful for tasks like writing documentation, generating tests, suggesting code improvements, or brainstorming alternative approaches. These ideas should then be thoroughly vetted by human developers.
Something I’ve started to notice about a lot of the content on social media platforms is that most of the posts people are liking, sharing, and memetically mutating—and then spreading virally—usually don’t include any citations, sources, or receipts. It’s often just some out-of-context screenshot with no reference link or actual sources.
A lot of the anti-AI content is not genuine critique. It’s often misinformation, but people who hate AI don’t question it or ask for sources because it aligns with their biases. The propaganda on social media has gotten so bad that anything other than heavily curated and vetted feeds is pretty much useless, and it’s filled with all sorts of memetic contagions with nasty hooks that are optimized for you algorithmically. I am at the point where I will disregard anything that is not followed up with a source. Period. It is all optimized to persuade, coerce, or piss you off. I am only writing about this because this I’m actually able to contribute genuine information about the topic.
That they said symbolic propositions written by AI agents (i.e., code) are non-disprovable because they were written by AI boggles my mind. It’s like saying that an article written in English by AI is not English because AI generated it. It might be a bad piece of text, but it’s syntactically, semantically, and grammatically English.
Basically, any string of data can be represented in a base-2 system, where it can be interpreted as bits (0s and 1s). Those bits can be used as the basis for symbolic reasoning. In formal propositional logic, a proposition is a sequence of symbols constructed according to strict syntax rules (atomic variables plus logical connectives). Under a given semantics, it is assigned exactly one truth value (true or false) in a two-valued logic system.
They are essentially saying that code written by AI is not binary, isn’t symbolically logical at all, and cannot be evaluated as true or false by implying it is nondisproveable. At the lowest level, compiled code consists of binary machine instructions that a processor executes. At higher levels, source code is written in symbolic syntax that humans and tools use to express logic and structure. You can also translate parts of code into formal logic expressions. For example, conditions and assertions in a program can be modeled as Boolean formulas. Tools like SAT/SMT solvers or symbolic execution engines check those formulas for satisfiability or correctness. It blows my mind how confidently people talk about things they do not understand.
Furthermore that they don’t realize the projection is wild to me.
@davidgerard wrote:
“But SO MANY LOUD ANECDOTES! Trust me my friend, I am the most efficient coder in the land now. No, you can’t see it. No, I didn’t measure. But if you don’t believe me, you are clearly a fool.”
They are presenting a story—i.e., saying that the studies are not disprovable—and accusing computer scientists of using anecdotal evidence without actually providing evidence to support this, while expecting people to take it prima facie. You’re doing what you are accusing others of doing.
It comes down to this: they feel that people ought not to use AI, so they are tacitly committed to a future in which people do not use AI. For example, a major argument against AI is the damage it is doing to resources, which is driving up the prices of computer components, as well as the ecological harm it causes. They feel justified in lying and misinforming others if it achieves the outcome they want—people not using AI because it is bad for the environment. That is a very strong point, but most people don’t care about that, which is why they lie about things people would care about.
It’s corrupt. And what’s really scary is that people don’t recognize when they are part of corruption or a corrupt conspiracy to misinform. Well, they recognize it when they see the other side doing it, that is. No one is more dangerous than people who feel righteous in what they are doing.
It’s wild to me that the idea that if you cannot persuade someone, it is okay to bully, coerce, harass them, or spread misinformation to get what you want—because your side is right—has become so normalized on the Internet that people can’t see why it is problematic.
That people think it is okay to hurt others to get them to agree is the most disturbing part of all of this. People have become so hateful. That is a large reason why I don’t interact with people on social media, really consume things from social media, or respond on social media and am writing a blog post about it instead of engaging with who prompted it.
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Users Are Too Dependent on Centralized Techno-Fascist Corporate Structure to Ever Leave Discord
I’m watching people scatter into countless real-time chat alternatives to Discord after Discord started pulling the age-verification and age-gating card.
It’s very frustrating because people are entirely missing the point of a community and how social networks work. Real-time platforms and social media networks only work well when a large number of people share the same space at the same time. If everyone creates separate servers or competing apps, the result is fragmentation that makes it unviable.
One reason why Bluesky became so successful is the invitation and starter-pack move. It essentially allowed people to move collectively as cliques. Bluesky used invitations and starter packs to move groups of friends together. This kept communities intact. Moving as cliques preserves network structure, whereas random scattering does not. People aren’t do not seem to intend to move as cliques or subgraphs of networks off of Discord. And the whole reason people were on Discord was to host their communities, so an alternative becomes pointless if your community doesn’t remain intact.
Instead of an active, strongly connected, possibly distributed network, you get dozens of small pockets. I am referring to a potential distributed network rather than a single centralized platform, because Matrix is an example of a decentralized chat protocol. Not all alternatives have to be centralized like Discord. Technically, many older chat protocols, such as XMPP and IRC, are examples of federated real-time synchronous messaging. They allowed communication between users on different, independently operated servers. Federation means that multiple servers can interconnect so that users from separate networks can exchange messages with one another seamlessly.
Decentralized alternatives would not be a problem if people moved to the same distributed network as cohesive groups. However, what I am seeing is that people move in disconnected and stochastic ways to entirely separate distributed networks, so communities are not kept intact. For example, when people move to XMPP servers or Matrix servers, it bifurcates and disconnects social networks. Notice I said XMPP or Matrix, which logically means people are on Matrix but not XMPP, or they are on XMPP but not Matrix. That implies a person would need to be on both Matrix and XMPP to speak to their original community from Discord if it split down the middle. To synchronize conversations in chats, there would need to be a bridge. It’s a pretty complicated solution.
The likely outcome is that people will remain on the dominant platform because of its scale and structure. The deeper irony is that while people may want independence from corporate platforms, they often struggle to organize effectively without the centralized structure those platforms provide. They’ve become so dependent on corporate structures to support their communities that they have no clue how to organize their own social networks in a sustainable way.
I’ve always been an internet nerd, but most of my social life has been offline. I view my interactions with the social app layer of the internet as a game, so losing that domain of the Internet is not devastating to me.
I’ll give you an example. This is a WordPress site. You hear this insincere nostalgia from Millennials and Gen X for a simulacrum that never was, especially concerning forums. Check this out: when you go into the plugin installation section of WordPress, this is on the second row you see:
That means any WordPress site has the capability to host a forum. They’re nostalgic for a setup where you can use a simple install script on any hosting service to install WordPress. After that, you can then just add a plugin to turn it into a forum. Hell, they can do this on WordPress.com if they don’t want to self-host.
You can make a forum, but no one will use it because they’d rather use a centralized platform like Reddit. Users have become so dependent on corporations to structure and organize communities that they can’t do it themselves. It’s sort of like the cognitive debt that accrues when people outsource their thinking to AI.
The issue is not that forums are hard to host or create; rather, the issue is that people have become so dependent on centralized corporate structures that they can’t maintain or organize their own communities, which is why everyone ends up on Reddit or Discord. A reason I keep hearing for why people don’t want to leave Discord is that it’s hard to recreate the community structure that Discord’s features provide. They claim that they want independence from corporate platforms, but rely on the centralized structure those platforms provide to function socially.
People say they want decentralized freedom, but in practice they depend on centralized platforms to maintain social cohesion. Stochastically scattering to the digital winds of the noosphere destroys the very communities they’re trying to preserve.
-
Users Are Too Dependent on Centralized Techno-Fascist Corporate Structure to Ever Leave Discord
I’m watching people scatter into countless real-time chat alternatives to Discord after Discord started pulling the age-verification and age-gating card.
It’s very frustrating because people are entirely missing the point of a community and how social networks work. Real-time platforms and social media networks only work well when a large number of people share the same space at the same time. If everyone creates separate servers or competing apps, the result is fragmentation that makes it unviable.
One reason why Bluesky became so successful is the invitation and starter-pack move. It essentially allowed people to move collectively as cliques. Bluesky used invitations and starter packs to move groups of friends together. This kept communities intact. Moving as cliques preserves network structure, whereas random scattering does not. People aren’t do not seem to intend to move as cliques or subgraphs of networks off of Discord. And the whole reason people were on Discord was to host their communities, so an alternative becomes pointless if your community doesn’t remain intact.
Instead of an active, strongly connected, possibly distributed network, you get dozens of small pockets. I am referring to a potential distributed network rather than a single centralized platform, because Matrix is an example of a decentralized chat protocol. Not all alternatives have to be centralized like Discord. Technically, many older chat protocols, such as XMPP and IRC, are examples of federated real-time synchronous messaging. They allowed communication between users on different, independently operated servers. Federation means that multiple servers can interconnect so that users from separate networks can exchange messages with one another seamlessly.
Decentralized alternatives would not be a problem if people moved to the same distributed network as cohesive groups. However, what I am seeing is that people move in disconnected and stochastic ways to entirely separate distributed networks, so communities are not kept intact. For example, when people move to XMPP servers or Matrix servers, it bifurcates and disconnects social networks. Notice I said XMPP or Matrix, which logically means people are on Matrix but not XMPP, or they are on XMPP but not Matrix. That implies a person would need to be on both Matrix and XMPP to speak to their original community from Discord if it split down the middle. To synchronize conversations in chats, there would need to be a bridge. It’s a pretty complicated solution.
The likely outcome is that people will remain on the dominant platform because of its scale and structure. The deeper irony is that while people may want independence from corporate platforms, they often struggle to organize effectively without the centralized structure those platforms provide. They’ve become so dependent on corporate structures to support their communities that they have no clue how to organize their own social networks in a sustainable way.
I’ve always been an internet nerd, but most of my social life has been offline. I view my interactions with the social app layer of the internet as a game, so losing that domain of the Internet is not devastating to me.
I’ll give you an example. This is a WordPress site. You hear this insincere nostalgia from Millennials and Gen X for a simulacrum that never was, especially concerning forums. Check this out: when you go into the plugin installation section of WordPress, this is on the second row you see:
That means any WordPress site has the capability to host a forum. They’re nostalgic for a setup where you can use a simple install script on any hosting service to install WordPress. After that, you can then just add a plugin to turn it into a forum. Hell, they can do this on WordPress.com if they don’t want to self-host.
You can make a forum, but no one will use it because they’d rather use a centralized platform like Reddit. Users have become so dependent on corporations to structure and organize communities that they can’t do it themselves. It’s sort of like the cognitive debt that accrues when people outsource their thinking to AI.
The issue is not that forums are hard to host or create; rather, the issue is that people have become so dependent on centralized corporate structures that they can’t maintain or organize their own communities, which is why everyone ends up on Reddit or Discord. A reason I keep hearing for why people don’t want to leave Discord is that it’s hard to recreate the community structure that Discord’s features provide. They claim that they want independence from corporate platforms, but rely on the centralized structure those platforms provide to function socially.
People say they want decentralized freedom, but in practice they depend on centralized platforms to maintain social cohesion. Stochastically scattering to the digital winds of the noosphere destroys the very communities they’re trying to preserve.
-
Users Are Too Dependent on Centralized Techno-Fascist Corporate Structure to Ever Leave Discord
I’m watching people scatter into countless real-time chat alternatives to Discord after Discord started pulling the age-verification and age-gating card.
It’s very frustrating because people are entirely missing the point of a community and how social networks work. Real-time platforms and social media networks only work well when a large number of people share the same space at the same time. If everyone creates separate servers or competing apps, the result is fragmentation that makes it unviable.
One reason why Bluesky became so successful is the invitation and starter-pack move. It essentially allowed people to move collectively as cliques. Bluesky used invitations and starter packs to move groups of friends together. This kept communities intact. Moving as cliques preserves network structure, whereas random scattering does not. People aren’t do not seem to intend to move as cliques or subgraphs of networks off of Discord. And the whole reason people were on Discord was to host their communities, so an alternative becomes pointless if your community doesn’t remain intact.
Instead of an active, strongly connected, possibly distributed network, you get dozens of small pockets. I am referring to a potential distributed network rather than a single centralized platform, because Matrix is an example of a decentralized chat protocol. Not all alternatives have to be centralized like Discord. Technically, many older chat protocols, such as XMPP and IRC, are examples of federated real-time synchronous messaging. They allowed communication between users on different, independently operated servers. Federation means that multiple servers can interconnect so that users from separate networks can exchange messages with one another seamlessly.
Decentralized alternatives would not be a problem if people moved to the same distributed network as cohesive groups. However, what I am seeing is that people move in disconnected and stochastic ways to entirely separate distributed networks, so communities are not kept intact. For example, when people move to XMPP servers or Matrix servers, it bifurcates and disconnects social networks. Notice I said XMPP or Matrix, which logically means people are on Matrix but not XMPP, or they are on XMPP but not Matrix. That implies a person would need to be on both Matrix and XMPP to speak to their original community from Discord if it split down the middle. To synchronize conversations in chats, there would need to be a bridge. It’s a pretty complicated solution.
The likely outcome is that people will remain on the dominant platform because of its scale and structure. The deeper irony is that while people may want independence from corporate platforms, they often struggle to organize effectively without the centralized structure those platforms provide. They’ve become so dependent on corporate structures to support their communities that they have no clue how to organize their own social networks in a sustainable way.
I’ve always been an internet nerd, but most of my social life has been offline. I view my interactions with the social app layer of the internet as a game, so losing that domain of the Internet is not devastating to me.
I’ll give you an example. This is a WordPress site. You hear this insincere nostalgia from Millennials and Gen X for a simulacrum that never was, especially concerning forums. Check this out: when you go into the plugin installation section of WordPress, this is on the second row you see:
That means any WordPress site has the capability to host a forum. They’re nostalgic for a setup where you can use a simple install script on any hosting service to install WordPress. After that, you can then just add a plugin to turn it into a forum. Hell, they can do this on WordPress.com if they don’t want to self-host.
You can make a forum, but no one will use it because they’d rather use a centralized platform like Reddit. Users have become so dependent on corporations to structure and organize communities that they can’t do it themselves. It’s sort of like the cognitive debt that accrues when people outsource their thinking to AI.
The issue is not that forums are hard to host or create; rather, the issue is that people have become so dependent on centralized corporate structures that they can’t maintain or organize their own communities, which is why everyone ends up on Reddit or Discord. A reason I keep hearing for why people don’t want to leave Discord is that it’s hard to recreate the community structure that Discord’s features provide. They claim that they want independence from corporate platforms, but rely on the centralized structure those platforms provide to function socially.
People say they want decentralized freedom, but in practice they depend on centralized platforms to maintain social cohesion. Stochastically scattering to the digital winds of the noosphere destroys the very communities they’re trying to preserve.
-
Users Are Too Dependent on Centralized Techno-Fascist Corporate Structure to Ever Leave Discord
I’m watching people scatter into countless real-time chat alternatives to Discord after Discord started pulling the age-verification and age-gating card.
It’s very frustrating because people are entirely missing the point of a community and how social networks work. Real-time platforms and social media networks only work well when a large number of people share the same space at the same time. If everyone creates separate servers or competing apps, the result is fragmentation that makes it unviable.
One reason why Bluesky became so successful is the invitation and starter-pack move. It essentially allowed people to move collectively as cliques. Bluesky used invitations and starter packs to move groups of friends together. This kept communities intact. Moving as cliques preserves network structure, whereas random scattering does not. People aren’t do not seem to intend to move as cliques or subgraphs of networks off of Discord. And the whole reason people were on Discord was to host their communities, so an alternative becomes pointless if your community doesn’t remain intact.
Instead of an active, strongly connected, possibly distributed network, you get dozens of small pockets. I am referring to a potential distributed network rather than a single centralized platform, because Matrix is an example of a decentralized chat protocol. Not all alternatives have to be centralized like Discord. Technically, many older chat protocols, such as XMPP and IRC, are examples of federated real-time synchronous messaging. They allowed communication between users on different, independently operated servers. Federation means that multiple servers can interconnect so that users from separate networks can exchange messages with one another seamlessly.
Decentralized alternatives would not be a problem if people moved to the same distributed network as cohesive groups. However, what I am seeing is that people move in disconnected and stochastic ways to entirely separate distributed networks, so communities are not kept intact. For example, when people move to XMPP servers or Matrix servers, it bifurcates and disconnects social networks. Notice I said XMPP or Matrix, which logically means people are on Matrix but not XMPP, or they are on XMPP but not Matrix. That implies a person would need to be on both Matrix and XMPP to speak to their original community from Discord if it split down the middle. To synchronize conversations in chats, there would need to be a bridge. It’s a pretty complicated solution.
The likely outcome is that people will remain on the dominant platform because of its scale and structure. The deeper irony is that while people may want independence from corporate platforms, they often struggle to organize effectively without the centralized structure those platforms provide. They’ve become so dependent on corporate structures to support their communities that they have no clue how to organize their own social networks in a sustainable way.
I’ve always been an internet nerd, but most of my social life has been offline. I view my interactions with the social app layer of the internet as a game, so losing that domain of the Internet is not devastating to me.
I’ll give you an example. This is a WordPress site. You hear this insincere nostalgia from Millennials and Gen X for a simulacrum that never was, especially concerning forums. Check this out: when you go into the plugin installation section of WordPress, this is on the second row you see:
That means any WordPress site has the capability to host a forum. They’re nostalgic for a setup where you can use a simple install script on any hosting service to install WordPress. After that, you can then just add a plugin to turn it into a forum. Hell, they can do this on WordPress.com if they don’t want to self-host.
You can make a forum, but no one will use it because they’d rather use a centralized platform like Reddit. Users have become so dependent on corporations to structure and organize communities that they can’t do it themselves. It’s sort of like the cognitive debt that accrues when people outsource their thinking to AI.
The issue is not that forums are hard to host or create; rather, the issue is that people have become so dependent on centralized corporate structures that they can’t maintain or organize their own communities, which is why everyone ends up on Reddit or Discord. A reason I keep hearing for why people don’t want to leave Discord is that it’s hard to recreate the community structure that Discord’s features provide. They claim that they want independence from corporate platforms, but rely on the centralized structure those platforms provide to function socially.
People say they want decentralized freedom, but in practice they depend on centralized platforms to maintain social cohesion. Stochastically scattering to the digital winds of the noosphere destroys the very communities they’re trying to preserve.
-
@cloudskater wrote:
Some instances are run by bad people. Hell, a few projects like Lemmy and Matrix are DEVELOPED by assholes, but the FLOSS and federated nature of these platforms allows us to bypass/fork them and create healthy spaces outside their reach.
Nope, that is actually what is killing the fediverse. I just explained here:
The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.
Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.
That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.
https://neon-blue-demon-wyrm.x10.network/archives/16932
FYI, I’m not doing culture wars or political debates. I’m just saying this idea of “forking away” from them is literally breaking the fediverse’s distributed network and creating all kinds of issues with semantic interoperability. Yes, federation is still happening at the delivery level, but the semantic issues are out of fucking control. You are a federation by the very sheer skin of your teeth.
The reason why developers are leaving the fediverse is because you folks don’t take criticism. You respond to criticism with — I’m being so serious right now — political manifestos and harassing developers. ActivityPub developers and authors oversold you folks on the capabilities of ActivityStreams. They flat-out lied to y’all.
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@cloudskater wrote:
Some instances are run by bad people. Hell, a few projects like Lemmy and Matrix are DEVELOPED by assholes, but the FLOSS and federated nature of these platforms allows us to bypass/fork them and create healthy spaces outside their reach.
Nope, that is actually what is killing the fediverse. I just explained here:
The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.
Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.
That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.
https://neon-blue-demon-wyrm.x10.network/archives/16932
FYI, I’m not doing culture wars or political debates. I’m just saying this idea of “forking away” from them is literally breaking the fediverse’s distributed network and creating all kinds of issues with semantic interoperability. Yes, federation is still happening at the delivery level, but the semantic issues are out of fucking control. You are a federation by the very sheer skin of your teeth.
The reason why developers are leaving the fediverse is because you folks don’t take criticism. You respond to criticism with — I’m being so serious right now — political manifestos and harassing developers. ActivityPub developers and authors oversold you folks on the capabilities of ActivityStreams. They flat-out lied to y’all.
-
@cloudskater wrote:
Some instances are run by bad people. Hell, a few projects like Lemmy and Matrix are DEVELOPED by assholes, but the FLOSS and federated nature of these platforms allows us to bypass/fork them and create healthy spaces outside their reach.
Nope, that is actually what is killing the fediverse. I just explained here:
The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.
Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.
That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.
https://neon-blue-demon-wyrm.x10.network/archives/16932
FYI, I’m not doing culture wars or political debates. I’m just saying this idea of “forking away” from them is literally breaking the fediverse’s distributed network and creating all kinds of issues with semantic interoperability. Yes, federation is still happening at the delivery level, but the semantic issues are out of fucking control. You are a federation by the very sheer skin of your teeth.
The reason why developers are leaving the fediverse is because you folks don’t take criticism. You respond to criticism with — I’m being so serious right now — political manifestos and harassing developers. ActivityPub developers and authors oversold you folks on the capabilities of ActivityStreams. They flat-out lied to y’all.
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@cloudskater wrote:
Some instances are run by bad people. Hell, a few projects like Lemmy and Matrix are DEVELOPED by assholes, but the FLOSS and federated nature of these platforms allows us to bypass/fork them and create healthy spaces outside their reach.
Nope, that is actually what is killing the fediverse. I just explained here:
The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.
Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.
That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.
https://neon-blue-demon-wyrm.x10.network/archives/16932
FYI, I’m not doing culture wars or political debates. I’m just saying this idea of “forking away” from them is literally breaking the fediverse’s distributed network and creating all kinds of issues with semantic interoperability. Yes, federation is still happening at the delivery level, but the semantic issues are out of fucking control. You are a federation by the very sheer skin of your teeth.
The reason why developers are leaving the fediverse is because you folks don’t take criticism. You respond to criticism with — I’m being so serious right now — political manifestos and harassing developers. ActivityPub developers and authors oversold you folks on the capabilities of ActivityStreams. They flat-out lied to y’all.
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ActivityPub Server’s Custom Reply‑Control Extensions Undermine Federation
It seems like Activitbypub developers are extending ActivityPub with optional metadata to fix a lot of its issues, but that is still problematic. Trying to add moderation tools and user control to threads seems to be the ongoing battle. I am fascinated by dumpster fires, so I’ve started looking at the ActivityPub protocol in detail. I tend to become fascinated with things that are going down in flames.
As a brief recap of the problem:
So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances.
An ActivityPub server that has reply control is GoToSocial. ActivityPub, as defined by the W3C specification, standardizes how servers federate activities. It defines actors, inboxes, outboxes, and activity types (Create, Follow, Like, Announce, etc.) expressed using ActivityStreams 2.0. It also specifies delivery mechanics (including how a Create activity reaches another server’s inbox) and how collections behave.
The specification does not include interaction policy semantics such as “only followers may reply” or “replies require manual approval.” There is no field in the normative vocabulary requiring conforming servers to enforce reply permissions. That category of rule is outside the protocol’s defined contract.
GoToSocial implements reply controls through what it calls interaction policies. These appear as additional properties on ActivityStreams objects using a custom JSON-LD namespace controlled by the GoToSocial project.
JSON-LD permits additional namespaced terms. This means the document remains structurally valid ActivityStreams and federates normally. The meaning of those custom fields, however, comes from GoToSocial’s own documentation and implementation. Other servers can ignore them without violating ActivityPub because they are not part of the interoperable core vocabulary.
Enforcement occurs locally. When a remote server sends a reply—a Create activity whose object references another via inReplyTo—ActivityPub governs delivery, not acceptance criteria. Whether the receiving server checks a reply policy, rejects the activity, queues it, or displays it is determined in the server’s inbox-processing code. The decision to accept, display, or require approval happens after successful protocol-level delivery. This behavior belongs to the application layer.
These are server-side features layered on top of ActivityPub’s transport and data model that are not actually part of ActivityPub. The protocol ensures standardized delivery of activities; however, the server implementation defines additional constraints and user-facing behavior. Two GoToSocial instances may both recognize and act on the same extension fields. However, a different implementation, such as Mastodon, has no obligation under the specification to interpret or enforce GoToSocial’s interactionPolicy properties. These fields function as extension metadata rather than protocol requirements.
The semantics of GoToSocial are not part of the specification’s defined vocabulary and processing rules for ActivityPub. They no longer operate purely at the protocol layer; it has become an application-layer contract implemented by specific servers.
Let’s use the AT Protocol as an example. Bluesky’s direct messages (DMs) are not currently part of the AT Protocol (ATProto). The AT Protocol has nothing that specifies anything for DMs, so DMs are not part of the AT Protocol. The AT Protocol was designed to handle public social interactions, but it does not define private or encrypted messaging. Bluesky implemented DMs at the application level, outside of the core protocol. DMs are centralized and stored on Bluesky’s servers. What is happening with servers like GoToSocial is sort of like that. The difference is that the AT Protocol was designed for different app views; ActivityPub was not.
The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.
Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.
That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.
-
ActivityPub Server’s Custom Reply‑Control Extensions Undermine Federation
It seems like Activitbypub developers are extending ActivityPub with optional metadata to fix a lot of its issues, but that is still problematic. Trying to add moderation tools and user control to threads seems to be the ongoing battle. I am fascinated by dumpster fires, so I’ve started looking at the ActivityPub protocol in detail. I tend to become fascinated with things that are going down in flames.
As a brief recap of the problem:
So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances.
An ActivityPub server that has reply control is GoToSocial. ActivityPub, as defined by the W3C specification, standardizes how servers federate activities. It defines actors, inboxes, outboxes, and activity types (Create, Follow, Like, Announce, etc.) expressed using ActivityStreams 2.0. It also specifies delivery mechanics (including how a Create activity reaches another server’s inbox) and how collections behave.
The specification does not include interaction policy semantics such as “only followers may reply” or “replies require manual approval.” There is no field in the normative vocabulary requiring conforming servers to enforce reply permissions. That category of rule is outside the protocol’s defined contract.
GoToSocial implements reply controls through what it calls interaction policies. These appear as additional properties on ActivityStreams objects using a custom JSON-LD namespace controlled by the GoToSocial project.
JSON-LD permits additional namespaced terms. This means the document remains structurally valid ActivityStreams and federates normally. The meaning of those custom fields, however, comes from GoToSocial’s own documentation and implementation. Other servers can ignore them without violating ActivityPub because they are not part of the interoperable core vocabulary.
Enforcement occurs locally. When a remote server sends a reply—a Create activity whose object references another via inReplyTo—ActivityPub governs delivery, not acceptance criteria. Whether the receiving server checks a reply policy, rejects the activity, queues it, or displays it is determined in the server’s inbox-processing code. The decision to accept, display, or require approval happens after successful protocol-level delivery. This behavior belongs to the application layer.
These are server-side features layered on top of ActivityPub’s transport and data model that are not actually part of ActivityPub. The protocol ensures standardized delivery of activities; however, the server implementation defines additional constraints and user-facing behavior. Two GoToSocial instances may both recognize and act on the same extension fields. However, a different implementation, such as Mastodon, has no obligation under the specification to interpret or enforce GoToSocial’s interactionPolicy properties. These fields function as extension metadata rather than protocol requirements.
The semantics of GoToSocial are not part of the specification’s defined vocabulary and processing rules for ActivityPub. They no longer operate purely at the protocol layer; it has become an application-layer contract implemented by specific servers.
Let’s use the AT Protocol as an example. Bluesky’s direct messages (DMs) are not currently part of the AT Protocol (ATProto). The AT Protocol has nothing that specifies anything for DMs, so DMs are not part of the AT Protocol. The AT Protocol was designed to handle public social interactions, but it does not define private or encrypted messaging. Bluesky implemented DMs at the application level, outside of the core protocol. DMs are centralized and stored on Bluesky’s servers. What is happening with servers like GoToSocial is sort of like that. The difference is that the AT Protocol was designed for different app views; ActivityPub was not.
The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.
Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.
That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.
-
ActivityPub Server’s Custom Reply‑Control Extensions Undermine Federation
It seems like Activitbypub developers are extending ActivityPub with optional metadata to fix a lot of its issues, but that is still problematic. Trying to add moderation tools and user control to threads seems to be the ongoing battle. I am fascinated by dumpster fires, so I’ve started looking at the ActivityPub protocol in detail. I tend to become fascinated with things that are going down in flames.
As a brief recap of the problem:
So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances.
An ActivityPub server that has reply control is GoToSocial. ActivityPub, as defined by the W3C specification, standardizes how servers federate activities. It defines actors, inboxes, outboxes, and activity types (Create, Follow, Like, Announce, etc.) expressed using ActivityStreams 2.0. It also specifies delivery mechanics (including how a Create activity reaches another server’s inbox) and how collections behave.
The specification does not include interaction policy semantics such as “only followers may reply” or “replies require manual approval.” There is no field in the normative vocabulary requiring conforming servers to enforce reply permissions. That category of rule is outside the protocol’s defined contract.
GoToSocial implements reply controls through what it calls interaction policies. These appear as additional properties on ActivityStreams objects using a custom JSON-LD namespace controlled by the GoToSocial project.
JSON-LD permits additional namespaced terms. This means the document remains structurally valid ActivityStreams and federates normally. The meaning of those custom fields, however, comes from GoToSocial’s own documentation and implementation. Other servers can ignore them without violating ActivityPub because they are not part of the interoperable core vocabulary.
Enforcement occurs locally. When a remote server sends a reply—a Create activity whose object references another via inReplyTo—ActivityPub governs delivery, not acceptance criteria. Whether the receiving server checks a reply policy, rejects the activity, queues it, or displays it is determined in the server’s inbox-processing code. The decision to accept, display, or require approval happens after successful protocol-level delivery. This behavior belongs to the application layer.
These are server-side features layered on top of ActivityPub’s transport and data model that are not actually part of ActivityPub. The protocol ensures standardized delivery of activities; however, the server implementation defines additional constraints and user-facing behavior. Two GoToSocial instances may both recognize and act on the same extension fields. However, a different implementation, such as Mastodon, has no obligation under the specification to interpret or enforce GoToSocial’s interactionPolicy properties. These fields function as extension metadata rather than protocol requirements.
The semantics of GoToSocial are not part of the specification’s defined vocabulary and processing rules for ActivityPub. They no longer operate purely at the protocol layer; it has become an application-layer contract implemented by specific servers.
Let’s use the AT Protocol as an example. Bluesky’s direct messages (DMs) are not currently part of the AT Protocol (ATProto). The AT Protocol has nothing that specifies anything for DMs, so DMs are not part of the AT Protocol. The AT Protocol was designed to handle public social interactions, but it does not define private or encrypted messaging. Bluesky implemented DMs at the application level, outside of the core protocol. DMs are centralized and stored on Bluesky’s servers. What is happening with servers like GoToSocial is sort of like that. The difference is that the AT Protocol was designed for different app views; ActivityPub was not.
The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.
Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.
That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.
-
ActivityPub Server’s Custom Reply‑Control Extensions Undermine Federation
It seems like Activitbypub developers are extending ActivityPub with optional metadata to fix a lot of its issues, but that is still problematic. Trying to add moderation tools and user control to threads seems to be the ongoing battle. I am fascinated by dumpster fires, so I’ve started looking at the ActivityPub protocol in detail. I tend to become fascinated with things that are going down in flames.
As a brief recap of the problem:
So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances.
An ActivityPub server that has reply control is GoToSocial. ActivityPub, as defined by the W3C specification, standardizes how servers federate activities. It defines actors, inboxes, outboxes, and activity types (Create, Follow, Like, Announce, etc.) expressed using ActivityStreams 2.0. It also specifies delivery mechanics (including how a Create activity reaches another server’s inbox) and how collections behave.
The specification does not include interaction policy semantics such as “only followers may reply” or “replies require manual approval.” There is no field in the normative vocabulary requiring conforming servers to enforce reply permissions. That category of rule is outside the protocol’s defined contract.
GoToSocial implements reply controls through what it calls interaction policies. These appear as additional properties on ActivityStreams objects using a custom JSON-LD namespace controlled by the GoToSocial project.
JSON-LD permits additional namespaced terms. This means the document remains structurally valid ActivityStreams and federates normally. The meaning of those custom fields, however, comes from GoToSocial’s own documentation and implementation. Other servers can ignore them without violating ActivityPub because they are not part of the interoperable core vocabulary.
Enforcement occurs locally. When a remote server sends a reply—a Create activity whose object references another via inReplyTo—ActivityPub governs delivery, not acceptance criteria. Whether the receiving server checks a reply policy, rejects the activity, queues it, or displays it is determined in the server’s inbox-processing code. The decision to accept, display, or require approval happens after successful protocol-level delivery. This behavior belongs to the application layer.
These are server-side features layered on top of ActivityPub’s transport and data model that are not actually part of ActivityPub. The protocol ensures standardized delivery of activities; however, the server implementation defines additional constraints and user-facing behavior. Two GoToSocial instances may both recognize and act on the same extension fields. However, a different implementation, such as Mastodon, has no obligation under the specification to interpret or enforce GoToSocial’s interactionPolicy properties. These fields function as extension metadata rather than protocol requirements.
The semantics of GoToSocial are not part of the specification’s defined vocabulary and processing rules for ActivityPub. They no longer operate purely at the protocol layer; it has become an application-layer contract implemented by specific servers.
Let’s use the AT Protocol as an example. Bluesky’s direct messages (DMs) are not currently part of the AT Protocol (ATProto). The AT Protocol has nothing that specifies anything for DMs, so DMs are not part of the AT Protocol. The AT Protocol was designed to handle public social interactions, but it does not define private or encrypted messaging. Bluesky implemented DMs at the application level, outside of the core protocol. DMs are centralized and stored on Bluesky’s servers. What is happening with servers like GoToSocial is sort of like that. The difference is that the AT Protocol was designed for different app views; ActivityPub was not.
The issue is the divergence in semantic interpretation that emerges at the interpretation layer. ActivityPub standardizes message delivery and defines common activity types. However, it leaves extension semantics and application-layer policy decisions to individual implementations. Servers may introduce custom JSON-LD namespaces and enforce local behaviors, such as reply restrictions, while remaining protocol-compliant. But, the noise created by divergences are problematic, because it creates unexpected, unintended, and unpredictable behavior.
Divergence appears when implementations rely on non-normative metadata and assume reciprocal handling to preserve a consistent user experience. Behavioral alignment then varies. Syntactic exchange succeeds, but behavioral consistency is not guaranteed. Though instances continue to federate at the transport level, policy semantics and processing logic differ across deployments. Those differences produce inconsistent experiences and results between implementations.
That leads to fragmentation, specifically semantic or behavioral fragmentation and an inconsistent user experiences. ActivityPub ensures syntactic interoperability, but semantic interoperability (everyone interprets and enforces rules the same way) varies. This creates a system that is federated at the transport level yet fragmented in behavior and expectations across implementations. It is funny how the thing that the fediverse touted has made the entire thing very brittle. ActivityPub technically federates correctly, but semantically falls apart once servers start adding their own behavioral rules.
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FEP-171b: Conversation Containers Won’t Work
So, I took a look at this:
This document specifies a model for managing conversations in ActivityPub network. It is based on the implementation of Conversation Containers in Streams.
In this model conversations are represented as collections controlled by a single actor. Such conversations take place within a specific audience and may be moderated.
FEP-171b: Conversation Containers
https://fediverse.codeberg.page/fep/fep/171b/
TL;DR: It won’t work.
The proposal introduces authoritative conversation control to ActivityPub by modeling threads as owner-managed OrderedCollection containers. The conversation owner curates replies and redistributes approved activities via Add. Participants are expected to reject unapproved content. The abstraction is internally coherent. The friction appears when this model is placed inside ActivityPub’s federated design.
Here is the problem. ActivityPub does not define enforcement semantics. Servers operate autonomously and apply local policy. A specification can say that implementations “SHOULD reject” unapproved replies. Yet nothing in the protocol requires that outcome. A server that declines to participate can still accept Create(Note) activities directly. It can reconstruct threads from inReplyTo and ignore the container model. In that environment, thread authority exists only where it is voluntarily recognized.
The delivery path changes as well. Under typical federation, actors deliver activities directly to recipients’ inboxes. Here, replies flow to the conversation owner first. Only approved entries are redistributed. Each thread effectively runs through a single coordinating node. Availability now depends on the owner’s server. If it is offline or slow to redistribute, the conversation stalls. Different redistribution behavior across instances can also produce divergent views of the same thread. This is a structural shift in how information propagates.
Ordering and consistency are less defined than the container model implies. ActivityPub does not specify global ordering or conflict resolution rules. An OrderedCollection provides sequencing, but not append-only guarantees or convergence constraints. Order might reflect author timestamps, owner receipt time, or redistribution time. The owner can reorder, omit, or later insert activities. Other servers may cache earlier states. Without cryptographic sequencing or a log structure that constrains mutation, synchronization relies on local policy rather than shared verification.
Moderation authority also changes. The conversation owner decides which activities become part of the visible thread. That may reduce unwanted replies in cooperative environments. It also concentrates control over inclusion and historical presentation. Because the container remains mutable, integrity depends on trust in the owner. It also depends on how other servers interpret updates.
The harassment issue is not actually solved. A non-adopting instance can continue storing and rendering replies it receives directly. Some servers will display only curated entries. Others will not. Over time, different thread views can coexist without converging.
Compatibility with existing implementations raises practical concerns. Most current systems build conversation views from inReplyTo chains and local storage. Introducing container-centric validation, authenticated Add wrapping, and modified inbox handling would require substantial changes. Partial adoption would produce mixed behavior across the network.
The proposal acknowledges risks such as forged or poisoned embedded updates. It also suggests validation steps. Even with those measures, the container remains mutable shared state interpreted by independent systems. ActivityPub standardizes vocabulary and delivery, but not global state enforcement. This design can improve reply gating among cooperating servers. It does not, by itself, establish authoritative thread state across a federation built on autonomous peers.
The issue with the fediverse is that they want their cake and they want to eat it, too. They like to emphasize that they are truly decentralized and use that as a way to sweep any critiques against them in relation to the AT protocol away. But being truly decentralized is the issue.
The core issue is the federated and decentralized nature of ActivityPub. The problem is that the protocol is built around autonomous servers that don’t have to obey a central authority. Each server applies its own rules and policies. Even if a specification says servers “should” reject unapproved replies, they can still accept and display them. The authority is voluntary and not enforceable. The major limitation is that state is not globally enforced. There is no mechanism to ensure that all servers see the same thread order or content. A container can sequence posts. Other servers can reorder, omit, or cache different versions. Without cryptographic or append-only logs that every node verifies, synchronization relies entirely on local trust rather than any shared enforcement.
Partial adoption makes it even more of a clusterfuck. Some servers might implement the new authoritative-thread model, while others won’t. So threads will diverge across the network, and harassment or unwanted content can still appear on servers that do not participate. The decentralized and federated design fundamentally limits any attempt to impose global authority.
No, I am not joining in on the thread, because ActivityPub devs are especially nasty. That is why no one wants to fucking work with them. That is why it’s so fucking underdeveloped.
I was going to put this into this post, but I realized it would get too long:
https://neon-blue-demon-wyrm.x10.network/archives/16790
This is a really bad situation. I have been working with the AT protocol for roughly a year, so I haven’t been keeping track of what’s been going on here. Basically, the only way to fix it is to pretty much change the expected behavior so much it is no longer recognizable. Yikes!
-
FEP-171b: Conversation Containers Won’t Work
So, I took a look at this:
This document specifies a model for managing conversations in ActivityPub network. It is based on the implementation of Conversation Containers in Streams.
In this model conversations are represented as collections controlled by a single actor. Such conversations take place within a specific audience and may be moderated.
FEP-171b: Conversation Containers
https://fediverse.codeberg.page/fep/fep/171b/
TL;DR: It won’t work.
The proposal introduces authoritative conversation control to ActivityPub by modeling threads as owner-managed OrderedCollection containers. The conversation owner curates replies and redistributes approved activities via Add. Participants are expected to reject unapproved content. The abstraction is internally coherent. The friction appears when this model is placed inside ActivityPub’s federated design.
Here is the problem. ActivityPub does not define enforcement semantics. Servers operate autonomously and apply local policy. A specification can say that implementations “SHOULD reject” unapproved replies. Yet nothing in the protocol requires that outcome. A server that declines to participate can still accept Create(Note) activities directly. It can reconstruct threads from inReplyTo and ignore the container model. In that environment, thread authority exists only where it is voluntarily recognized.
The delivery path changes as well. Under typical federation, actors deliver activities directly to recipients’ inboxes. Here, replies flow to the conversation owner first. Only approved entries are redistributed. Each thread effectively runs through a single coordinating node. Availability now depends on the owner’s server. If it is offline or slow to redistribute, the conversation stalls. Different redistribution behavior across instances can also produce divergent views of the same thread. This is a structural shift in how information propagates.
Ordering and consistency are less defined than the container model implies. ActivityPub does not specify global ordering or conflict resolution rules. An OrderedCollection provides sequencing, but not append-only guarantees or convergence constraints. Order might reflect author timestamps, owner receipt time, or redistribution time. The owner can reorder, omit, or later insert activities. Other servers may cache earlier states. Without cryptographic sequencing or a log structure that constrains mutation, synchronization relies on local policy rather than shared verification.
Moderation authority also changes. The conversation owner decides which activities become part of the visible thread. That may reduce unwanted replies in cooperative environments. It also concentrates control over inclusion and historical presentation. Because the container remains mutable, integrity depends on trust in the owner. It also depends on how other servers interpret updates.
The harassment issue is not actually solved. A non-adopting instance can continue storing and rendering replies it receives directly. Some servers will display only curated entries. Others will not. Over time, different thread views can coexist without converging.
Compatibility with existing implementations raises practical concerns. Most current systems build conversation views from inReplyTo chains and local storage. Introducing container-centric validation, authenticated Add wrapping, and modified inbox handling would require substantial changes. Partial adoption would produce mixed behavior across the network.
The proposal acknowledges risks such as forged or poisoned embedded updates. It also suggests validation steps. Even with those measures, the container remains mutable shared state interpreted by independent systems. ActivityPub standardizes vocabulary and delivery, but not global state enforcement. This design can improve reply gating among cooperating servers. It does not, by itself, establish authoritative thread state across a federation built on autonomous peers.
The issue with the fediverse is that they want their cake and they want to eat it, too. They like to emphasize that they are truly decentralized and use that as a way to sweep any critiques against them in relation to the AT protocol away. But being truly decentralized is the issue.
The core issue is the federated and decentralized nature of ActivityPub. The problem is that the protocol is built around autonomous servers that don’t have to obey a central authority. Each server applies its own rules and policies. Even if a specification says servers “should” reject unapproved replies, they can still accept and display them. The authority is voluntary and not enforceable. The major limitation is that state is not globally enforced. There is no mechanism to ensure that all servers see the same thread order or content. A container can sequence posts. Other servers can reorder, omit, or cache different versions. Without cryptographic or append-only logs that every node verifies, synchronization relies entirely on local trust rather than any shared enforcement.
Partial adoption makes it even more of a clusterfuck. Some servers might implement the new authoritative-thread model, while others won’t. So threads will diverge across the network, and harassment or unwanted content can still appear on servers that do not participate. The decentralized and federated design fundamentally limits any attempt to impose global authority.
No, I am not joining in on the thread, because ActivityPub devs are especially nasty. That is why no one wants to fucking work with them. That is why it’s so fucking underdeveloped.
I was going to put this into this post, but I realized it would get too long:
https://neon-blue-demon-wyrm.x10.network/archives/16790
This is a really bad situation. I have been working with the AT protocol for roughly a year, so I haven’t been keeping track of what’s been going on here. Basically, the only way to fix it is to pretty much change the expected behavior so much it is no longer recognizable. Yikes!
-
FEP-171b: Conversation Containers Won’t Work
So, I took a look at this:
This document specifies a model for managing conversations in ActivityPub network. It is based on the implementation of Conversation Containers in Streams.
In this model conversations are represented as collections controlled by a single actor. Such conversations take place within a specific audience and may be moderated.
FEP-171b: Conversation Containers
https://fediverse.codeberg.page/fep/fep/171b/
TL;DR: It won’t work.
The proposal introduces authoritative conversation control to ActivityPub by modeling threads as owner-managed OrderedCollection containers. The conversation owner curates replies and redistributes approved activities via Add. Participants are expected to reject unapproved content. The abstraction is internally coherent. The friction appears when this model is placed inside ActivityPub’s federated design.
Here is the problem. ActivityPub does not define enforcement semantics. Servers operate autonomously and apply local policy. A specification can say that implementations “SHOULD reject” unapproved replies. Yet nothing in the protocol requires that outcome. A server that declines to participate can still accept Create(Note) activities directly. It can reconstruct threads from inReplyTo and ignore the container model. In that environment, thread authority exists only where it is voluntarily recognized.
The delivery path changes as well. Under typical federation, actors deliver activities directly to recipients’ inboxes. Here, replies flow to the conversation owner first. Only approved entries are redistributed. Each thread effectively runs through a single coordinating node. Availability now depends on the owner’s server. If it is offline or slow to redistribute, the conversation stalls. Different redistribution behavior across instances can also produce divergent views of the same thread. This is a structural shift in how information propagates.
Ordering and consistency are less defined than the container model implies. ActivityPub does not specify global ordering or conflict resolution rules. An OrderedCollection provides sequencing, but not append-only guarantees or convergence constraints. Order might reflect author timestamps, owner receipt time, or redistribution time. The owner can reorder, omit, or later insert activities. Other servers may cache earlier states. Without cryptographic sequencing or a log structure that constrains mutation, synchronization relies on local policy rather than shared verification.
Moderation authority also changes. The conversation owner decides which activities become part of the visible thread. That may reduce unwanted replies in cooperative environments. It also concentrates control over inclusion and historical presentation. Because the container remains mutable, integrity depends on trust in the owner. It also depends on how other servers interpret updates.
The harassment issue is not actually solved. A non-adopting instance can continue storing and rendering replies it receives directly. Some servers will display only curated entries. Others will not. Over time, different thread views can coexist without converging.
Compatibility with existing implementations raises practical concerns. Most current systems build conversation views from inReplyTo chains and local storage. Introducing container-centric validation, authenticated Add wrapping, and modified inbox handling would require substantial changes. Partial adoption would produce mixed behavior across the network.
The proposal acknowledges risks such as forged or poisoned embedded updates. It also suggests validation steps. Even with those measures, the container remains mutable shared state interpreted by independent systems. ActivityPub standardizes vocabulary and delivery, but not global state enforcement. This design can improve reply gating among cooperating servers. It does not, by itself, establish authoritative thread state across a federation built on autonomous peers.
The issue with the fediverse is that they want their cake and they want to eat it, too. They like to emphasize that they are truly decentralized and use that as a way to sweep any critiques against them in relation to the AT protocol away. But being truly decentralized is the issue.
The core issue is the federated and decentralized nature of ActivityPub. The problem is that the protocol is built around autonomous servers that don’t have to obey a central authority. Each server applies its own rules and policies. Even if a specification says servers “should” reject unapproved replies, they can still accept and display them. The authority is voluntary and not enforceable. The major limitation is that state is not globally enforced. There is no mechanism to ensure that all servers see the same thread order or content. A container can sequence posts. Other servers can reorder, omit, or cache different versions. Without cryptographic or append-only logs that every node verifies, synchronization relies entirely on local trust rather than any shared enforcement.
Partial adoption makes it even more of a clusterfuck. Some servers might implement the new authoritative-thread model, while others won’t. So threads will diverge across the network, and harassment or unwanted content can still appear on servers that do not participate. The decentralized and federated design fundamentally limits any attempt to impose global authority.
No, I am not joining in on the thread, because ActivityPub devs are especially nasty. That is why no one wants to fucking work with them. That is why it’s so fucking underdeveloped.
I was going to put this into this post, but I realized it would get too long:
https://neon-blue-demon-wyrm.x10.network/archives/16790
This is a really bad situation. I have been working with the AT protocol for roughly a year, so I haven’t been keeping track of what’s been going on here. Basically, the only way to fix it is to pretty much change the expected behavior so much it is no longer recognizable. Yikes!
-
So, I’m a developer. I am following along with and reading this thread:
https://oisaur.com/@renchap/116056634129526611
All I can think while reading this is: Well, that’s unfortunate.
So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances. They were hedging and hiding behind cultural norms this whole time instead of working to fix it, because they were too busy waging political culture wars instead of doing their damn jobs.
That realization sunk my hopes. It basically means that the social media ecosystem with the most moderation tools is Bluesky and the ATmosphere, albeit Bluesky isn’t fully using all of them and is using the moderation tools in ways that selectively moderate according to their enigmatic interests. That does not make me feel good. Honestly, that makes me feel fucking awful about the future of the Internet.
ActivityStreams/ActivityPub was formalized around 2018, and platforms like Mastodon (which implement the ActivityPub protocol) have had years to work on federation and moderation tooling. Instead, many of those years were spent debating culture and writing manifestos. The most disturbing thing about all of this is that it had so much potential. But yeah, I think the Fediverse is going to be relegated to a legacy platform like Usenet or IRC. It’s not fixable, and the folks over at the Fediverse have alienated so many developers that no one really wants to work on fixing it.
The co-authors of ActivityPub are working on other social media projects that have nothing to do with the fediverse. Meanwhile, Mastodon’s founder, Eugen Rochko, stepped down as CEO in November 2025 as part of Mastodon’s transition to a nonprofit governance structure. The restructuring was intended to formalize governance and reduce reliance on a single individual. Rochko transferred control of Mastodon’s core assets and trademark to the nonprofit organization and remains involved in a strategic and advisory capacity. Day-to-day operations are now overseen by an executive director under a board-governed structure. I believe how badly Eugen fucked Mastodon is a large reason why he stepped down, albeit they are all doing the virtue signaling thing.
For the most part, I have pretty much pulled away from microblogging platforms as a whole. I was never a heavy user of anything but forums, and I was part of the occult niche. Since that is pretty much gone, there really isn’t a reason for me to be on social media, which is why I mostly blog. It really sucks because I wanted to believe in ActivityPub and the fediverse.
It pretty much comes down to the fact that the ActivityPub protocol is flawed at the protocol level when it comes to protecting people from harassment. While Bluesky’s app view is choosing to apply its tools selectively to address this, it is more capable of protecting people. Honestly, that really sucks, because that spells the death of this protocol. ActivityPub’s decentralized design doesn’t provide built-in, enforceable protections against harassment. This makes moderation and harassment mitigation practically impossible.
Renaud Chaput so much as admits it here:
“So we need to consider if we want to switch to a “thread context”-based approval model, there the author of the root of the thread controls all the tree of replies. Which would be a big change for Mastodon (and similar implementations), but might be more aligned with what user want, and solve other issues as well (replies federation).
But that would be a huge undertaking, with lot of problems related to backward compatibility (for example)”What I noticed was this phrase by Renaud Chaput:
“First step for us is probably staying alive and continuing having a team that is focused on building a better product, which is our focus right now. We are very well aware of this topic (as I keep repeating each time you mention me 😉 ).”
They are saying the quiet part out loud: We are having issues staying relevant.
ActivityPub is built on the ActivityStreams 2.0 vocabulary. Three core components define it: Actor, Object, and Activity. It provides a Client-to-Server (C2S) API that lets an Actor submit Activities to an outbox. It also provides a Server-to-Server (S2S) federation protocol. This protocol delivers those Activities to other servers’ inboxes.
Replies are created by setting the inReplyTo property on an Object. Servers may expose a replies Collection. However, that collection is optional and not globally authoritative. The specification describes how Activities are serialized and delivered. It does not introduce a canonical container for conversations. It does not define a required global index or binding enforcement rules for moderation. A Block Activity is defined as a type of Activity. However, remote servers are not obligated to remove or hide content beyond their own policies. Each server maintains its own inboxes, outboxes, collections, and storage model. It interprets incoming Activities according to local implementation choices.
This facilitates interoperability at the transport and vocabulary level. It does not do so at the level of governance. Servers do not have to construct identical conversation graphs from inReplyTo chains. Nothing in the protocol allows an Actor to assert authoritative control over all descendant replies. This is the main problem. Federation operates peer to peer among autonomous servers. Moderation decisions, including defederation, filtering, and suspensions, remain local. The specification does not define a global control layer.
The AT Protocol approaches the problem differently. Users are identified through Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). They publish signed records stored in repositories. These repositories are usually hosted on a Personal Data Server (PDS). They are append-only and cryptographically verifiable. Records follow schemas defined in Lexicon. Lexicon describes types, fields, and RPC interfaces in machine-readable form. Updates propagate through relays. These relays aggregate repository changes into a network-wide event stream, often called the firehose. Higher-level services, including AppViews, subscribe to this stream. They may also query indexes derived from it. The AT Protocol defines message delivery, identity, storage, and synchronization.
Within the AT Protocol, moderation operates across the same repository data. Labeling and visibility controls are expressed as structured records. Clients or AppViews can apply them deterministically if they choose to consume them. Content exists as signed records keyed by DIDs. It is distributed through relays. Moderation services therefore work against a consistent dataset rather than isolated server copies. Identity portability follows from this structure. Users can move between hosting providers without losing their DID, repository history, or social graph.
ActivityPub standardizes how Activities move between servers and how they are described. It leaves indexing, thread authority, and enforcement to individual implementations. The AT Protocol defines repository structure, identity binding, record schemas, and synchronization across the network. ActivityPub centers on federated message exchange with local policy control. No participant has protocol-level authority over the shape or visibility of a conversation once it federates. The AT Protocol centers on a shared record system with portable identity and network-wide data propagation. Moderation and visibility decisions can attach to the same canonical records seen across the network.
In ActivityPub’s model, moderation is local. If someone replies to you in a harassing way, your server can hide it, block it, or defederate from the offending server. Other servers may still store, display, and propagate those replies according to their own policies. There is no protocol-level mechanism that lets you assert binding control over how replies to your post are indexed or rendered elsewhere. Harassment mitigation is fragmented. Harassment can persist in parallel contexts even after you act against it locally.
In the AT Protocol model, content exists as signed records in repositories keyed to portable identities. It is distributed through a shared data propagation layer. Because of this, moderation services can operate against a consistent dataset. Labels, visibility controls, or account-level actions can attach to the same canonical records that other services consume. While it does not eliminate harassment, it makes it technically possible for moderation decisions to propagate more coherently across applications that choose to honor them.
So the difference for harassment is this: in ActivityPub, protection is inherently piecemeal and server-scoped. In the AT Protocol, protection can be structurally network-aware. Identity, storage, and moderation signals live in the same shared data model.
Basically, the fediverse has no means to keep vulnerable, marginalized people safe. The AT Protocol does, albeit the Bluesky app view chooses not to use it. The point is that it has the potential. The last time I tried to explain all of this, I was harassed by a person who operates multiple servers and accounts on here:
@FediThing @FediTips @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] and @[email protected]
The protocol is fundamentally flawed, and they do not know how to fix it. These people are incapable of good-faith conversations, so I am avoiding tagging them or attaching this response.to the thread, because their response is basically to stall, hedge, and gas light.
I’m not a fan of Bluesky — not at all. I really wanted to love ActivityPub, but I think Eugene pretty much killed it within the last three years. They had a very narrow, myopic culture and vision in mind, where they completely ignored all criticisms. Now, there is really no way to fix this mess, which is why they stick to gaslighting their users and literally harassing any developer who criticizes them. Social media has normalized lying to its users, so am I surprised?
Edit:
What a surprise. An anti-black reaction that pulls the it is okay to ignore you because you are an angry black person. Yes, black people are angry, and that you do not understand why is the problem.
I’m not going to go back and forth with a racist, nor am I going to quote them because of my stance on spreading misinformation and vitriol. A person who was implicated in the anti-Black behavior of the fediverse tried to discredit me as a Black person by claiming that I am not on Blacksky, have not worked on Blacksky, and am not happy or positive enough to be included in the Black folks who have been harmed by anti-Blackness.
Yes, they said that with a straight face. Blacksky exists because Black people were angry at being mistreated by the fediverse. Ergo, since I am not happy about being mistreated, I can’t be part of that demographic of Black folks. They are tacitly expecting trustworthy Black people to respond to abuse by being happy. What kind of Jim Crow shit is this? Therefore, it is acceptable to dismiss my experiences as a Black person because I don’t conform to the stereotype of what a Black person in America is.
In other words, they are saying I am a hostile angry black person, and we can disregard what I have to say because I am an angry Black person in Donald Trump’s America.
What kills me is that these folks have no insight into their own racism. This is all the attention they get, because I believe racists should be isolated among other things. They truly believe they are the good guys and that the savior complex is an imperialistic colonial archetype flies over their heads I don’t think white racists can ever change, so I will not be addressing them. That’s all I will say about that.
Edit again:
Welp, after seeing the first edit, the hit racist dog deleted the top level of the thread about me. That is what is called a consciousness of guilt, because if they had genuine good intentions and truly believed what they said was right, they would have said it with their whole chest and would not have deleted the top thread reply. Also, the little group of Fediverse racists explicitly rushed to report me. Report me to who—myself? It’s my instance. I have not explicitly violated any rules of this person’s home instance, but they feel entitled to try and have me removed from the Fediverse because I did not respond to their triangulation, brigading, and harassment by being nice. I did not take the mistreatment with a smile and a nod. Racist white people can fuck all the way off.
-
So, I’m a developer. I am following along with and reading this thread:
https://oisaur.com/@renchap/116056634129526611
All I can think while reading this is: Well, that’s unfortunate.
So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances. They were hedging and hiding behind cultural norms this whole time instead of working to fix it, because they were too busy waging political culture wars instead of doing their damn jobs.
That realization sunk my hopes. It basically means that the social media ecosystem with the most moderation tools is Bluesky and the ATmosphere, albeit Bluesky isn’t fully using all of them and is using the moderation tools in ways that selectively moderate according to their enigmatic interests. That does not make me feel good. Honestly, that makes me feel fucking awful about the future of the Internet.
ActivityStreams/ActivityPub was formalized around 2018, and platforms like Mastodon (which implement the ActivityPub protocol) have had years to work on federation and moderation tooling. Instead, many of those years were spent debating culture and writing manifestos. The most disturbing thing about all of this is that it had so much potential. But yeah, I think the Fediverse is going to be relegated to a legacy platform like Usenet or IRC. It’s not fixable, and the folks over at the Fediverse have alienated so many developers that no one really wants to work on fixing it.
The co-authors of ActivityPub are working on other social media projects that have nothing to do with the fediverse. Meanwhile, Mastodon’s founder, Eugen Rochko, stepped down as CEO in November 2025 as part of Mastodon’s transition to a nonprofit governance structure. The restructuring was intended to formalize governance and reduce reliance on a single individual. Rochko transferred control of Mastodon’s core assets and trademark to the nonprofit organization and remains involved in a strategic and advisory capacity. Day-to-day operations are now overseen by an executive director under a board-governed structure. I believe how badly Eugen fucked Mastodon is a large reason why he stepped down, albeit they are all doing the virtue signaling thing.
For the most part, I have pretty much pulled away from microblogging platforms as a whole. I was never a heavy user of anything but forums, and I was part of the occult niche. Since that is pretty much gone, there really isn’t a reason for me to be on social media, which is why I mostly blog. It really sucks because I wanted to believe in ActivityPub and the fediverse.
It pretty much comes down to the fact that the ActivityPub protocol is flawed at the protocol level when it comes to protecting people from harassment. While Bluesky’s app view is choosing to apply its tools selectively to address this, it is more capable of protecting people. Honestly, that really sucks, because that spells the death of this protocol. ActivityPub’s decentralized design doesn’t provide built-in, enforceable protections against harassment. This makes moderation and harassment mitigation practically impossible.
Renaud Chaput so much as admits it here:
“So we need to consider if we want to switch to a “thread context”-based approval model, there the author of the root of the thread controls all the tree of replies. Which would be a big change for Mastodon (and similar implementations), but might be more aligned with what user want, and solve other issues as well (replies federation).
But that would be a huge undertaking, with lot of problems related to backward compatibility (for example)”What I noticed was this phrase by Renaud Chaput:
“First step for us is probably staying alive and continuing having a team that is focused on building a better product, which is our focus right now. We are very well aware of this topic (as I keep repeating each time you mention me 😉 ).”
They are saying the quiet part out loud: We are having issues staying relevant.
ActivityPub is built on the ActivityStreams 2.0 vocabulary. Three core components define it: Actor, Object, and Activity. It provides a Client-to-Server (C2S) API that lets an Actor submit Activities to an outbox. It also provides a Server-to-Server (S2S) federation protocol. This protocol delivers those Activities to other servers’ inboxes.
Replies are created by setting the inReplyTo property on an Object. Servers may expose a replies Collection. However, that collection is optional and not globally authoritative. The specification describes how Activities are serialized and delivered. It does not introduce a canonical container for conversations. It does not define a required global index or binding enforcement rules for moderation. A Block Activity is defined as a type of Activity. However, remote servers are not obligated to remove or hide content beyond their own policies. Each server maintains its own inboxes, outboxes, collections, and storage model. It interprets incoming Activities according to local implementation choices.
This facilitates interoperability at the transport and vocabulary level. It does not do so at the level of governance. Servers do not have to construct identical conversation graphs from inReplyTo chains. Nothing in the protocol allows an Actor to assert authoritative control over all descendant replies. This is the main problem. Federation operates peer to peer among autonomous servers. Moderation decisions, including defederation, filtering, and suspensions, remain local. The specification does not define a global control layer.
The AT Protocol approaches the problem differently. Users are identified through Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). They publish signed records stored in repositories. These repositories are usually hosted on a Personal Data Server (PDS). They are append-only and cryptographically verifiable. Records follow schemas defined in Lexicon. Lexicon describes types, fields, and RPC interfaces in machine-readable form. Updates propagate through relays. These relays aggregate repository changes into a network-wide event stream, often called the firehose. Higher-level services, including AppViews, subscribe to this stream. They may also query indexes derived from it. The AT Protocol defines message delivery, identity, storage, and synchronization.
Within the AT Protocol, moderation operates across the same repository data. Labeling and visibility controls are expressed as structured records. Clients or AppViews can apply them deterministically if they choose to consume them. Content exists as signed records keyed by DIDs. It is distributed through relays. Moderation services therefore work against a consistent dataset rather than isolated server copies. Identity portability follows from this structure. Users can move between hosting providers without losing their DID, repository history, or social graph.
ActivityPub standardizes how Activities move between servers and how they are described. It leaves indexing, thread authority, and enforcement to individual implementations. The AT Protocol defines repository structure, identity binding, record schemas, and synchronization across the network. ActivityPub centers on federated message exchange with local policy control. No participant has protocol-level authority over the shape or visibility of a conversation once it federates. The AT Protocol centers on a shared record system with portable identity and network-wide data propagation. Moderation and visibility decisions can attach to the same canonical records seen across the network.
In ActivityPub’s model, moderation is local. If someone replies to you in a harassing way, your server can hide it, block it, or defederate from the offending server. Other servers may still store, display, and propagate those replies according to their own policies. There is no protocol-level mechanism that lets you assert binding control over how replies to your post are indexed or rendered elsewhere. Harassment mitigation is fragmented. Harassment can persist in parallel contexts even after you act against it locally.
In the AT Protocol model, content exists as signed records in repositories keyed to portable identities. It is distributed through a shared data propagation layer. Because of this, moderation services can operate against a consistent dataset. Labels, visibility controls, or account-level actions can attach to the same canonical records that other services consume. While it does not eliminate harassment, it makes it technically possible for moderation decisions to propagate more coherently across applications that choose to honor them.
So the difference for harassment is this: in ActivityPub, protection is inherently piecemeal and server-scoped. In the AT Protocol, protection can be structurally network-aware. Identity, storage, and moderation signals live in the same shared data model.
Basically, the fediverse has no means to keep vulnerable, marginalized people safe. The AT Protocol does, albeit the Bluesky app view chooses not to use it. The point is that it has the potential. The last time I tried to explain all of this, I was harassed by a person who operates multiple servers and accounts on here:
@FediThing @FediTips @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] and @[email protected]
The protocol is fundamentally flawed, and they do not know how to fix it. These people are incapable of good-faith conversations, so I am avoiding tagging them or attaching this response.to the thread, because their response is basically to stall, hedge, and gas light.
I’m not a fan of Bluesky — not at all. I really wanted to love ActivityPub, but I think Eugene pretty much killed it within the last three years. They had a very narrow, myopic culture and vision in mind, where they completely ignored all criticisms. Now, there is really no way to fix this mess, which is why they stick to gaslighting their users and literally harassing any developer who criticizes them. Social media has normalized lying to its users, so am I surprised?
Edit:
What a surprise. An anti-black reaction that pulls the it is okay to ignore you because you are an angry black person. Yes, black people are angry, and that you do not understand why is the problem.
I’m not going to go back and forth with a racist, nor am I going to quote them because of my stance on spreading misinformation and vitriol. A person who was implicated in the anti-Black behavior of the fediverse tried to discredit me as a Black person by claiming that I am not on Blacksky, have not worked on Blacksky, and am not happy or positive enough to be included in the Black folks who have been harmed by anti-Blackness.
Yes, they said that with a straight face. Blacksky exists because Black people were angry at being mistreated by the fediverse. Ergo, since I am not happy about being mistreated, I can’t be part of that demographic of Black folks. They are tacitly expecting trustworthy Black people to respond to abuse by being happy. What kind of Jim Crow shit is this? Therefore, it is acceptable to dismiss my experiences as a Black person because I don’t conform to the stereotype of what a Black person in America is.
In other words, they are saying I am a hostile angry black person, and we can disregard what I have to say because I am an angry Black person in Donald Trump’s America.
What kills me is that these folks have no insight into their own racism. This is all the attention they get, because I believe racists should be isolated among other things. They truly believe they are the good guys and that the savior complex is an imperialistic colonial archetype flies over their heads I don’t think white racists can ever change, so I will not be addressing them. That’s all I will say about that.
Edit again:
Welp, after seeing the first edit, the hit racist dog deleted the top level of the thread about me. That is what is called a consciousness of guilt, because if they had genuine good intentions and truly believed what they said was right, they would have said it with their whole chest and would not have deleted the top thread reply. Also, the little group of Fediverse racists explicitly rushed to report me. Report me to who—myself? It’s my instance. I have not explicitly violated any rules of this person’s home instance, but they feel entitled to try and have me removed from the Fediverse because I did not respond to their triangulation, brigading, and harassment by being nice. I did not take the mistreatment with a smile and a nod. Racist white people can fuck all the way off.
-
So, I’m a developer. I am following along with and reading this thread:
https://oisaur.com/@renchap/116056634129526611
All I can think while reading this is: Well, that’s unfortunate.
So, one of the very popular features on Bluesky—also popular on Twitter—is the ability to select who can reply to a post. A major issue in the Fediverse is the inability to decide who can reply, and once you block someone, their harassing reply is still there. I honestly thought it was simply a case of them choosing not to add or address it for cultural reasons. What is clear from that thread is that they were always aware that the ActivityPub protocol and most Fediverse implementations don’t provide a universal way to control reply visibility or enforce blocks across instances. They were hedging and hiding behind cultural norms this whole time instead of working to fix it, because they were too busy waging political culture wars instead of doing their damn jobs.
That realization sunk my hopes. It basically means that the social media ecosystem with the most moderation tools is Bluesky and the ATmosphere, albeit Bluesky isn’t fully using all of them and is using the moderation tools in ways that selectively moderate according to their enigmatic interests. That does not make me feel good. Honestly, that makes me feel fucking awful about the future of the Internet.
ActivityStreams/ActivityPub was formalized around 2018, and platforms like Mastodon (which implement the ActivityPub protocol) have had years to work on federation and moderation tooling. Instead, many of those years were spent debating culture and writing manifestos. The most disturbing thing about all of this is that it had so much potential. But yeah, I think the Fediverse is going to be relegated to a legacy platform like Usenet or IRC. It’s not fixable, and the folks over at the Fediverse have alienated so many developers that no one really wants to work on fixing it.
The co-authors of ActivityPub are working on other social media projects that have nothing to do with the fediverse. Meanwhile, Mastodon’s founder, Eugen Rochko, stepped down as CEO in November 2025 as part of Mastodon’s transition to a nonprofit governance structure. The restructuring was intended to formalize governance and reduce reliance on a single individual. Rochko transferred control of Mastodon’s core assets and trademark to the nonprofit organization and remains involved in a strategic and advisory capacity. Day-to-day operations are now overseen by an executive director under a board-governed structure. I believe how badly Eugen fucked Mastodon is a large reason why he stepped down, albeit they are all doing the virtue signaling thing.
For the most part, I have pretty much pulled away from microblogging platforms as a whole. I was never a heavy user of anything but forums, and I was part of the occult niche. Since that is pretty much gone, there really isn’t a reason for me to be on social media, which is why I mostly blog. It really sucks because I wanted to believe in ActivityPub and the fediverse.
It pretty much comes down to the fact that the ActivityPub protocol is flawed at the protocol level when it comes to protecting people from harassment. While Bluesky’s app view is choosing to apply its tools selectively to address this, it is more capable of protecting people. Honestly, that really sucks, because that spells the death of this protocol. ActivityPub’s decentralized design doesn’t provide built-in, enforceable protections against harassment. This makes moderation and harassment mitigation practically impossible.
Renaud Chaput so much as admits it here:
“So we need to consider if we want to switch to a “thread context”-based approval model, there the author of the root of the thread controls all the tree of replies. Which would be a big change for Mastodon (and similar implementations), but might be more aligned with what user want, and solve other issues as well (replies federation).
But that would be a huge undertaking, with lot of problems related to backward compatibility (for example)”What I noticed was this phrase by Renaud Chaput:
“First step for us is probably staying alive and continuing having a team that is focused on building a better product, which is our focus right now. We are very well aware of this topic (as I keep repeating each time you mention me 😉 ).”
They are saying the quiet part out loud: We are having issues staying relevant.
ActivityPub is built on the ActivityStreams 2.0 vocabulary. Three core components define it: Actor, Object, and Activity. It provides a Client-to-Server (C2S) API that lets an Actor submit Activities to an outbox. It also provides a Server-to-Server (S2S) federation protocol. This protocol delivers those Activities to other servers’ inboxes.
Replies are created by setting the inReplyTo property on an Object. Servers may expose a replies Collection. However, that collection is optional and not globally authoritative. The specification describes how Activities are serialized and delivered. It does not introduce a canonical container for conversations. It does not define a required global index or binding enforcement rules for moderation. A Block Activity is defined as a type of Activity. However, remote servers are not obligated to remove or hide content beyond their own policies. Each server maintains its own inboxes, outboxes, collections, and storage model. It interprets incoming Activities according to local implementation choices.
This facilitates interoperability at the transport and vocabulary level. It does not do so at the level of governance. Servers do not have to construct identical conversation graphs from inReplyTo chains. Nothing in the protocol allows an Actor to assert authoritative control over all descendant replies. This is the main problem. Federation operates peer to peer among autonomous servers. Moderation decisions, including defederation, filtering, and suspensions, remain local. The specification does not define a global control layer.
The AT Protocol approaches the problem differently. Users are identified through Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). They publish signed records stored in repositories. These repositories are usually hosted on a Personal Data Server (PDS). They are append-only and cryptographically verifiable. Records follow schemas defined in Lexicon. Lexicon describes types, fields, and RPC interfaces in machine-readable form. Updates propagate through relays. These relays aggregate repository changes into a network-wide event stream, often called the firehose. Higher-level services, including AppViews, subscribe to this stream. They may also query indexes derived from it. The AT Protocol defines message delivery, identity, storage, and synchronization.
Within the AT Protocol, moderation operates across the same repository data. Labeling and visibility controls are expressed as structured records. Clients or AppViews can apply them deterministically if they choose to consume them. Content exists as signed records keyed by DIDs. It is distributed through relays. Moderation services therefore work against a consistent dataset rather than isolated server copies. Identity portability follows from this structure. Users can move between hosting providers without losing their DID, repository history, or social graph.
ActivityPub standardizes how Activities move between servers and how they are described. It leaves indexing, thread authority, and enforcement to individual implementations. The AT Protocol defines repository structure, identity binding, record schemas, and synchronization across the network. ActivityPub centers on federated message exchange with local policy control. No participant has protocol-level authority over the shape or visibility of a conversation once it federates. The AT Protocol centers on a shared record system with portable identity and network-wide data propagation. Moderation and visibility decisions can attach to the same canonical records seen across the network.
In ActivityPub’s model, moderation is local. If someone replies to you in a harassing way, your server can hide it, block it, or defederate from the offending server. Other servers may still store, display, and propagate those replies according to their own policies. There is no protocol-level mechanism that lets you assert binding control over how replies to your post are indexed or rendered elsewhere. Harassment mitigation is fragmented. Harassment can persist in parallel contexts even after you act against it locally.
In the AT Protocol model, content exists as signed records in repositories keyed to portable identities. It is distributed through a shared data propagation layer. Because of this, moderation services can operate against a consistent dataset. Labels, visibility controls, or account-level actions can attach to the same canonical records that other services consume. While it does not eliminate harassment, it makes it technically possible for moderation decisions to propagate more coherently across applications that choose to honor them.
So the difference for harassment is this: in ActivityPub, protection is inherently piecemeal and server-scoped. In the AT Protocol, protection can be structurally network-aware. Identity, storage, and moderation signals live in the same shared data model.
Basically, the fediverse has no means to keep vulnerable, marginalized people safe. The AT Protocol does, albeit the Bluesky app view chooses not to use it. The point is that it has the potential. The last time I tried to explain all of this, I was harassed by a person who operates multiple servers and accounts on here:
@FediThing @FediTips @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] and @[email protected]
The protocol is fundamentally flawed, and they do not know how to fix it. These people are incapable of good-faith conversations, so I am avoiding tagging them or attaching this response.to the thread, because their response is basically to stall, hedge, and gas light.
I’m not a fan of Bluesky — not at all. I really wanted to love ActivityPub, but I think Eugene pretty much killed it within the last three years. They had a very narrow, myopic culture and vision in mind, where they completely ignored all criticisms. Now, there is really no way to fix this mess, which is why they stick to gaslighting their users and literally harassing any developer who criticizes them. Social media has normalized lying to its users, so am I surprised?
Edit:
What a surprise. An anti-black reaction that pulls the it is okay to ignore you because you are an angry black person. Yes, black people are angry, and that you do not understand why is the problem.
I’m not going to go back and forth with a racist, nor am I going to quote them because of my stance on spreading misinformation and vitriol. A person who was implicated in the anti-Black behavior of the fediverse tried to discredit me as a Black person by claiming that I am not on Blacksky, have not worked on Blacksky, and am not happy or positive enough to be included in the Black folks who have been harmed by anti-Blackness.
Yes, they said that with a straight face. Blacksky exists because Black people were angry at being mistreated by the fediverse. Ergo, since I am not happy about being mistreated, I can’t be part of that demographic of Black folks. They are tacitly expecting trustworthy Black people to respond to abuse by being happy. What kind of Jim Crow shit is this? Therefore, it is acceptable to dismiss my experiences as a Black person because I don’t conform to the stereotype of what a Black person in America is.
In other words, they are saying I am a hostile angry black person, and we can disregard what I have to say because I am an angry Black person in Donald Trump’s America.
What kills me is that these folks have no insight into their own racism. This is all the attention they get, because I believe racists should be isolated among other things. They truly believe they are the good guys and that the savior complex is an imperialistic colonial archetype flies over their heads I don’t think white racists can ever change, so I will not be addressing them. That’s all I will say about that.
Edit again:
Welp, after seeing the first edit, the hit racist dog deleted the top level of the thread about me. That is what is called a consciousness of guilt, because if they had genuine good intentions and truly believed what they said was right, they would have said it with their whole chest and would not have deleted the top thread reply. Also, the little group of Fediverse racists explicitly rushed to report me. Report me to who—myself? It’s my instance. I have not explicitly violated any rules of this person’s home instance, but they feel entitled to try and have me removed from the Fediverse because I did not respond to their triangulation, brigading, and harassment by being nice. I did not take the mistreatment with a smile and a nod. Racist white people can fuck all the way off.
-
So, I had an experience with an influencer account on the fediverse: @FediTips
People believe they are being informed when they are being influenced. That account is litterally publishing what are technically definitionally manifestos.
That emphasized why I don’t argue online. There is an interesting property about facts: factual ontological propositions about something will converge. That is a fancy way of saying that if something is factual, it would be corroborated. Accuracy is not the only important thing; precision is, too. The more corroborative aspects that converge on that claim, the more precise it is. That is why in science, replication and a lot of measurements are so important.
When we talk about online conversations, this is important because if I say something is a fact, and there is a source I got it from, I should cite where I got it. If I or other sources are citing that or a different source saying something, it at least makes the statement more precise, albeit not necessarily more accurate. Accuracy means is a close, approximate representation whereas precision is something is consistent. If you hit the bulls eye once but never again, that is accurate but imprecise. If you never hit the bulls eye but always hit the same spot, that is precise. You can be inaccurate yet precise.
That means if something makes a claim, a source exists, and you can check that claim by visiting the source. If there are multiple sources making the same claim, it is a precise claim.The issue I have with arguments online, for example, endless arguments on Mastodon about Bluesky, is that the sources backing whatever facts I would present are accessible. So, if someone makes a statement about the AT protocol and you say that is wrong, you can look at the documentation, point this out, and say it is wrong because x, y, and z.
That brings me to the fuckery of today:
@FediTips said to me today:
No, you cannot run your own server on AT. Bluesky have made it virtually impossible to set up independent infrastructure. You can store data, but the connections to others run through Bluesky corporation’s infrastructure which they control.
I shit on Bluesky all day, every day, so I’m not a Bluesky stan. But all you have to do is think about why this doesn’t make sense. They are essentially saying that you cannot have a server running a Bluesky PDS that isn’t owned by Bluesky. One, that is not how servers work. A protocol is a way for devices to talk to one another and network.
A network protocol is a formal specification that defines how systems interoperate. It establishes message schemas, authentication mechanisms, transport methods, state transitions, and other rules governing communication between nodes. If multiple servers implement the same protocol specification correctly, they can exchange data and participate in the same network. At the protocol layer, interoperability is determined by adherence to the specification, not by who owns or operates a given server.
Protocol compliance does not inherently guarantee open or permissionless participation. In the architecture of protocols, operators impose constraints through licensing terms, cryptographic trust roots, certificate authorities, service discovery mechanisms, federation allowlists, or other gatekeeping controls. Protocols enable independent servers to communicate; however, it does not logically follow that any compliant server must be accepted into the broader network without additional policy or governance constraints. This is the point they are making.
However, they are conflating who owns the server with what can be allowed in the network. But what they argue for the AT protocol always applies to the ActivityPub protocol. They specifically said, “No, you cannot run your own server on AT. Bluesky has made it virtually impossible to set up independent infrastructure.”
No, you can absolutely run your own independent server that communicates over the AT protocol. Either they understand this and are arguing in bad faith, which I think is very likely, or they are completely disinterested in facts. They merely want to spread and enforce a cultural and political norm. Maybe it’s both.
For example, I am using the ActivityPub protocol to post this, and it is sent to your folks’ inboxes via ActivityStreams through the WordPress ActivityPub plugin. Anyone can set up their own servers on their own hosts. I know for a fact that some feeds are being run off Raspberry Pis in people’s closets. In fact, some people have both fediverse instances and AT protocol PDSs running off the same Raspberry Pis in their closets. By this person’s reasoning, that would imply that Bluesky owns their ISPs, the closets, and the Raspberry Pis.
Yes, the practical network experience heavily depends on Bluesky-operated infrastructure. And yes, it is true that this is different from something like Mastodon on ActivityPub, where federation between independently operated servers is widely distributed and actually decentralized. I’m not contesting that the infrastructure is heavily dependent on and operated by Bluesky.
That’s not the claim @FediTips made. The claim they made is that everyone else’s computers—a cloud is just someone else’s computer, mind you—that use the AT protocol are owned by Bluesky. This statement is so absurd to me that I am not sure if this was a semantic error and not what they meant, or if it is exactly what they meant. If it is the former, it is still bad, because they were disinterested in fact-checking, which is my point. If they bothered to fact-check, they would have caught the inaccuracy or the semantic error.
Secondly, let’s say you know nothing at all about servers, protocols, etc.—you can just look it up.
https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/marketplace/catalog/bluesky-social-pds
I was not aware that DigitalOcean was owned by Bluesky. That’s because they are not owned by Bluesky. DigitalOcean is to an AT protocol PDS what a Mastodon host is to Mastodon. If this person had simply done a five-minute search, they would realize that Bluesky does not own the independent servers for the Bluesky apps, albeit it controls the protocol architecture. Personally, I think @FediTips did it in bad faith, because multiple developers have corrected these Mastodon influencer accounts over and over again. At this point, it is propaganda.
I don’t care about this argument in particular. Rather, it’s an example of why I don’t argue with people online. They don’t check what they say or look up what the other person said because they are disinterested in facts. They are interested in the normative claim and cultural norms they are trying to spread and enforce. It’s basically a form of evangelizing and proselytizing.
Again, I don’t really care for this particular argument, which is why I never directly addressed it with them. What I am saying is that they were disinterested in easily accessible facts, so arguing with them to persuade them is a waste of my time.
People on social media care about culture first and facts second. I am not going after the people on Mastodon specifically. Redditors are infamous for this shit. If you ask me, Reddit and Discord are ground zero cases for this dumbass culture of reply guys.
I wrote my own Bayesian classifier and Markov algorithm a long time ago that curate only what I want to see in activity streams, so I don’t see whatever fuckery many of these idiots on social media are doing. I have my own Bayesian and Markov curation algorithm for activity streams and my own algorithm for feeds on Bluesky.
You can see the documentation for how Activity Streams, which is what ActivityPub uses, works here:
Activity Streams 2.0
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core
I curate the ActivityStream of my inbox points to see posts based on relevance rather than chronological order. Most of the time, their nonsense is filtered out. I just had time to kill.
-
So, I had an experience with an influencer account on the fediverse: @FediTips
People believe they are being informed when they are being influenced. That account is litterally publishing what are technically definitionally manifestos.
That emphasized why I don’t argue online. There is an interesting property about facts: factual ontological propositions about something will converge. That is a fancy way of saying that if something is factual, it would be corroborated. Accuracy is not the only important thing; precision is, too. The more corroborative aspects that converge on that claim, the more precise it is. That is why in science, replication and a lot of measurements are so important.
When we talk about online conversations, this is important because if I say something is a fact, and there is a source I got it from, I should cite where I got it. If I or other sources are citing that or a different source saying something, it at least makes the statement more precise, albeit not necessarily more accurate. Accuracy means is a close, approximate representation whereas precision is something is consistent. If you hit the bulls eye once but never again, that is accurate but imprecise. If you never hit the bulls eye but always hit the same spot, that is precise. You can be inaccurate yet precise.
That means if something makes a claim, a source exists, and you can check that claim by visiting the source. If there are multiple sources making the same claim, it is a precise claim.The issue I have with arguments online, for example, endless arguments on Mastodon about Bluesky, is that the sources backing whatever facts I would present are accessible. So, if someone makes a statement about the AT protocol and you say that is wrong, you can look at the documentation, point this out, and say it is wrong because x, y, and z.
That brings me to the fuckery of today:
@FediTips said to me today:
No, you cannot run your own server on AT. Bluesky have made it virtually impossible to set up independent infrastructure. You can store data, but the connections to others run through Bluesky corporation’s infrastructure which they control.
I shit on Bluesky all day, every day, so I’m not a Bluesky stan. But all you have to do is think about why this doesn’t make sense. They are essentially saying that you cannot have a server running a Bluesky PDS that isn’t owned by Bluesky. One, that is not how servers work. A protocol is a way for devices to talk to one another and network.
A network protocol is a formal specification that defines how systems interoperate. It establishes message schemas, authentication mechanisms, transport methods, state transitions, and other rules governing communication between nodes. If multiple servers implement the same protocol specification correctly, they can exchange data and participate in the same network. At the protocol layer, interoperability is determined by adherence to the specification, not by who owns or operates a given server.
Protocol compliance does not inherently guarantee open or permissionless participation. In the architecture of protocols, operators impose constraints through licensing terms, cryptographic trust roots, certificate authorities, service discovery mechanisms, federation allowlists, or other gatekeeping controls. Protocols enable independent servers to communicate; however, it does not logically follow that any compliant server must be accepted into the broader network without additional policy or governance constraints. This is the point they are making.
However, they are conflating who owns the server with what can be allowed in the network. But what they argue for the AT protocol always applies to the ActivityPub protocol. They specifically said, “No, you cannot run your own server on AT. Bluesky has made it virtually impossible to set up independent infrastructure.”
No, you can absolutely run your own independent server that communicates over the AT protocol. Either they understand this and are arguing in bad faith, which I think is very likely, or they are completely disinterested in facts. They merely want to spread and enforce a cultural and political norm. Maybe it’s both.
For example, I am using the ActivityPub protocol to post this, and it is sent to your folks’ inboxes via ActivityStreams through the WordPress ActivityPub plugin. Anyone can set up their own servers on their own hosts. I know for a fact that some feeds are being run off Raspberry Pis in people’s closets. In fact, some people have both fediverse instances and AT protocol PDSs running off the same Raspberry Pis in their closets. By this person’s reasoning, that would imply that Bluesky owns their ISPs, the closets, and the Raspberry Pis.
Yes, the practical network experience heavily depends on Bluesky-operated infrastructure. And yes, it is true that this is different from something like Mastodon on ActivityPub, where federation between independently operated servers is widely distributed and actually decentralized. I’m not contesting that the infrastructure is heavily dependent on and operated by Bluesky.
That’s not the claim @FediTips made. The claim they made is that everyone else’s computers—a cloud is just someone else’s computer, mind you—that use the AT protocol are owned by Bluesky. This statement is so absurd to me that I am not sure if this was a semantic error and not what they meant, or if it is exactly what they meant. If it is the former, it is still bad, because they were disinterested in fact-checking, which is my point. If they bothered to fact-check, they would have caught the inaccuracy or the semantic error.
Secondly, let’s say you know nothing at all about servers, protocols, etc.—you can just look it up.
https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/marketplace/catalog/bluesky-social-pds
I was not aware that DigitalOcean was owned by Bluesky. That’s because they are not owned by Bluesky. DigitalOcean is to an AT protocol PDS what a Mastodon host is to Mastodon. If this person had simply done a five-minute search, they would realize that Bluesky does not own the independent servers for the Bluesky apps, albeit it controls the protocol architecture. Personally, I think @FediTips did it in bad faith, because multiple developers have corrected these Mastodon influencer accounts over and over again. At this point, it is propaganda.
I don’t care about this argument in particular. Rather, it’s an example of why I don’t argue with people online. They don’t check what they say or look up what the other person said because they are disinterested in facts. They are interested in the normative claim and cultural norms they are trying to spread and enforce. It’s basically a form of evangelizing and proselytizing.
Again, I don’t really care for this particular argument, which is why I never directly addressed it with them. What I am saying is that they were disinterested in easily accessible facts, so arguing with them to persuade them is a waste of my time.
People on social media care about culture first and facts second. I am not going after the people on Mastodon specifically. Redditors are infamous for this shit. If you ask me, Reddit and Discord are ground zero cases for this dumbass culture of reply guys.
I wrote my own Bayesian classifier and Markov algorithm a long time ago that curate only what I want to see in activity streams, so I don’t see whatever fuckery many of these idiots on social media are doing. I have my own Bayesian and Markov curation algorithm for activity streams and my own algorithm for feeds on Bluesky.
You can see the documentation for how Activity Streams, which is what ActivityPub uses, works here:
Activity Streams 2.0
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core
I curate the ActivityStream of my inbox points to see posts based on relevance rather than chronological order. Most of the time, their nonsense is filtered out. I just had time to kill.
-
So, I had an experience with an influencer account on the fediverse: @FediTips
People believe they are being informed when they are being influenced. That account is litterally publishing what are technically definitionally manifestos.
That emphasized why I don’t argue online. There is an interesting property about facts: factual ontological propositions about something will converge. That is a fancy way of saying that if something is factual, it would be corroborated. Accuracy is not the only important thing; precision is, too. The more corroborative aspects that converge on that claim, the more precise it is. That is why in science, replication and a lot of measurements are so important.
When we talk about online conversations, this is important because if I say something is a fact, and there is a source I got it from, I should cite where I got it. If I or other sources are citing that or a different source saying something, it at least makes the statement more precise, albeit not necessarily more accurate. Accuracy means is a close, approximate representation whereas precision is something is consistent. If you hit the bulls eye once but never again, that is accurate but imprecise. If you never hit the bulls eye but always hit the same spot, that is precise. You can be inaccurate yet precise.
That means if something makes a claim, a source exists, and you can check that claim by visiting the source. If there are multiple sources making the same claim, it is a precise claim.The issue I have with arguments online, for example, endless arguments on Mastodon about Bluesky, is that the sources backing whatever facts I would present are accessible. So, if someone makes a statement about the AT protocol and you say that is wrong, you can look at the documentation, point this out, and say it is wrong because x, y, and z.
That brings me to the fuckery of today:
@FediTips said to me today:
No, you cannot run your own server on AT. Bluesky have made it virtually impossible to set up independent infrastructure. You can store data, but the connections to others run through Bluesky corporation’s infrastructure which they control.
I shit on Bluesky all day, every day, so I’m not a Bluesky stan. But all you have to do is think about why this doesn’t make sense. They are essentially saying that you cannot have a server running a Bluesky PDS that isn’t owned by Bluesky. One, that is not how servers work. A protocol is a way for devices to talk to one another and network.
A network protocol is a formal specification that defines how systems interoperate. It establishes message schemas, authentication mechanisms, transport methods, state transitions, and other rules governing communication between nodes. If multiple servers implement the same protocol specification correctly, they can exchange data and participate in the same network. At the protocol layer, interoperability is determined by adherence to the specification, not by who owns or operates a given server.
Protocol compliance does not inherently guarantee open or permissionless participation. In the architecture of protocols, operators impose constraints through licensing terms, cryptographic trust roots, certificate authorities, service discovery mechanisms, federation allowlists, or other gatekeeping controls. Protocols enable independent servers to communicate; however, it does not logically follow that any compliant server must be accepted into the broader network without additional policy or governance constraints. This is the point they are making.
However, they are conflating who owns the server with what can be allowed in the network. But what they argue for the AT protocol always applies to the ActivityPub protocol. They specifically said, “No, you cannot run your own server on AT. Bluesky has made it virtually impossible to set up independent infrastructure.”
No, you can absolutely run your own independent server that communicates over the AT protocol. Either they understand this and are arguing in bad faith, which I think is very likely, or they are completely disinterested in facts. They merely want to spread and enforce a cultural and political norm. Maybe it’s both.
For example, I am using the ActivityPub protocol to post this, and it is sent to your folks’ inboxes via ActivityStreams through the WordPress ActivityPub plugin. Anyone can set up their own servers on their own hosts. I know for a fact that some feeds are being run off Raspberry Pis in people’s closets. In fact, some people have both fediverse instances and AT protocol PDSs running off the same Raspberry Pis in their closets. By this person’s reasoning, that would imply that Bluesky owns their ISPs, the closets, and the Raspberry Pis.
Yes, the practical network experience heavily depends on Bluesky-operated infrastructure. And yes, it is true that this is different from something like Mastodon on ActivityPub, where federation between independently operated servers is widely distributed and actually decentralized. I’m not contesting that the infrastructure is heavily dependent on and operated by Bluesky.
That’s not the claim @FediTips made. The claim they made is that everyone else’s computers—a cloud is just someone else’s computer, mind you—that use the AT protocol are owned by Bluesky. This statement is so absurd to me that I am not sure if this was a semantic error and not what they meant, or if it is exactly what they meant. If it is the former, it is still bad, because they were disinterested in fact-checking, which is my point. If they bothered to fact-check, they would have caught the inaccuracy or the semantic error.
Secondly, let’s say you know nothing at all about servers, protocols, etc.—you can just look it up.
https://atproto.com/guides/self-hosting
https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/marketplace/catalog/bluesky-social-pds
I was not aware that DigitalOcean was owned by Bluesky. That’s because they are not owned by Bluesky. DigitalOcean is to an AT protocol PDS what a Mastodon host is to Mastodon. If this person had simply done a five-minute search, they would realize that Bluesky does not own the independent servers for the Bluesky apps, albeit it controls the protocol architecture. Personally, I think @FediTips did it in bad faith, because multiple developers have corrected these Mastodon influencer accounts over and over again. At this point, it is propaganda.
I don’t care about this argument in particular. Rather, it’s an example of why I don’t argue with people online. They don’t check what they say or look up what the other person said because they are disinterested in facts. They are interested in the normative claim and cultural norms they are trying to spread and enforce. It’s basically a form of evangelizing and proselytizing.
Again, I don’t really care for this particular argument, which is why I never directly addressed it with them. What I am saying is that they were disinterested in easily accessible facts, so arguing with them to persuade them is a waste of my time.
People on social media care about culture first and facts second. I am not going after the people on Mastodon specifically. Redditors are infamous for this shit. If you ask me, Reddit and Discord are ground zero cases for this dumbass culture of reply guys.
I wrote my own Bayesian classifier and Markov algorithm a long time ago that curate only what I want to see in activity streams, so I don’t see whatever fuckery many of these idiots on social media are doing. I have my own Bayesian and Markov curation algorithm for activity streams and my own algorithm for feeds on Bluesky.
You can see the documentation for how Activity Streams, which is what ActivityPub uses, works here:
Activity Streams 2.0
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core
I curate the ActivityStream of my inbox points to see posts based on relevance rather than chronological order. Most of the time, their nonsense is filtered out. I just had time to kill.
-
So, I am a Computational Biologist. Keep that in mind. I’m an actual scientist who works with ecological concepts, specifically the microbiome. One of the most insufferable reactions to the cyberpunk era we inhabit is the emergence of anti-science ideas from the left in response to techno-fascism. The strange part is that many people on the left do not even recognize them as anti-science, because they assume the left is aligned with science and the right opposed to it; ergo, if the left says it, it must be scientific. It is insane: washing your hands is technology. Medicine is technology.
I think, because the Internet has hijacked people’s brains, many conflate technology with electronics or machines. Anthropologically, technology consists of material objects, techniques, and organized practices through which humans intentionally intervene in their environments. Technology is culture, and human culture is technology. When someone learns a skill or a discipline from someone else, that is an extension of technology.
Technology encompasses craft traditions (blacksmithing), agriculture, and institutionalized processes of teaching and learning. Agriculture is one of the oldest forms of technology. Yes, farmers are tech workers. I write code, but I also spent a large amount of time on a farm, and I can tell you that many tech workers who pride themselves on writing code would not know what to do with farm equipment.
So, from that broad perspective, we can sum technology up in one word: education. A basic heuristic for determining if something is cultural or not is: can it be taught and learned? These words? I was taught English, and I am using an invented language to transmit knowledge to you; ergo, I am using technology to transmit cultural knowledge to you. Reading a book is thus using a piece of human technology. So, being anti-tech connotes being anti-education.
What got me thinking about this is a toot I read on Mastodon:
The truth is that society needs to develop ethically and ecologically more than it does technologically. That’s not to say that we should shun technology, but our development along other lines lags far behind our technological capacity.
Sounds valid, right? That is the distinct smell of bull shit.This is a clear example of what is called a platitude. Platitudes are memetically hijacking people’s brains. Memetics actually hijack your brain—they change it. It’s similar to how a retrovirus can alter the genome of its host. So, trying to have conversations with these people is pointless, which is why I avoid the chronically online Internet scene and arguing with them.
It made me want to scream. As I mentioned earlier, technology is basically a set of things you learn from other humans—typically within a culture—that helps you do or make something. You know what else is learned within human society? A normative set of cultural values about how we ought to behave. So, both technology and culture emerge from the same thing simultaneously and mutually. You cannot have humans intervening in things to achieve ecological development, because that is technology, and you cannot educate humans on ethics without an invented language. It is literally an anti-education argument.
Ethics and technology arise together from the same human conditions and social processes. It makes little sense to claim that technology is “outpacing” ethics. The two do not develop independently. We form ethical norms in response to new capacities and circumstances. There would be no cultural norms about how to use the Internet if the Internet did not exist. And, there would be no ethical debates about AI if AI did not exist. Ethical reflection emerges alongside technological change because both are products of human culture.
As new problems create new technologies that create new problems, societies respond by negotiating norms, rules, and expectations appropriate to those contexts. The same pattern appears in politics. Politics concerns who gets what, when, and how—it is the negotiation of power, rights, and resources. Without resources or competing claims, there would be nothing to negotiate. Ethics and politics are not trailing behind technology because they are co-emergent responses to the same underlying realities.
-
Stepping Back From Social Media To Read a Book
I’m taking a break. After spending like two years in the worst parts of the Internet modeling the memetic spread of conspiracy-driven behavioral patterns and developing social media software as a side hustle, I think I’m going to take a step back and… I don’t know… maybe read a book? lol.
I’m a Computational Biologist who pretty much studies the memetics of conspiracy theories and how they act as another vector/epidemiological layer. I’ve also been working on various contracts for social media development stuff. Working on the shit I’ve been working on for years forces you to see the worst parts of people that they split off. It makes you hate everyone — and I mean everyone.
-
Stepping Back From Social Media To Read a Book
I’m taking a break. After spending like two years in the worst parts of the Internet modeling the memetic spread of conspiracy-driven behavioral patterns and developing social media software as a side hustle, I think I’m going to take a step back and… I don’t know… maybe read a book? lol.
I’m a Computational Biologist who pretty much studies the memetics of conspiracy theories and how they act as another vector/epidemiological layer. I’ve also been working on various contracts for social media development stuff. Working on the shit I’ve been working on for years forces you to see the worst parts of people that they split off. It makes you hate everyone — and I mean everyone.
-
Stepping Back From Social Media To Read a Book
I’m taking a break. After spending like two years in the worst parts of the Internet modeling the memetic spread of conspiracy-driven behavioral patterns and developing social media software as a side hustle, I think I’m going to take a step back and… I don’t know… maybe read a book? lol.
I’m a Computational Biologist who pretty much studies the memetics of conspiracy theories and how they act as another vector/epidemiological layer. I’ve also been working on various contracts for social media development stuff. Working on the shit I’ve been working on for years forces you to see the worst parts of people that they split off. It makes you hate everyone — and I mean everyone.
-
Stepping Back From Social Media To Read a Book
I’m taking a break. After spending like two years in the worst parts of the Internet modeling the memetic spread of conspiracy-driven behavioral patterns and developing social media software as a side hustle, I think I’m going to take a step back and… I don’t know… maybe read a book? lol.
I’m a Computational Biologist who pretty much studies the memetics of conspiracy theories and how they act as another vector/epidemiological layer. I’ve also been working on various contracts for social media development stuff. Working on the shit I’ve been working on for years forces you to see the worst parts of people that they split off. It makes you hate everyone — and I mean everyone.
-
Your BlueSky Feed Is Porn You Didn’t Ask For Because Your Friends Are Gooners With a Severe Porn Addiction
A common complaint I see people make on Bluesky is: why am I being served so much porn or things I am not interested in? They will incorrectly believe that the algorithm is broken. It’s not broken. You didn’t know the people you knew as well as you thought you did. Porn addiction is a thing, and porn addiction is especially common with weebs. You’re seeing deranged shit because people you follow have porn addictions and are into deranged shit. So, though you may not be consuming porn, people in your network are. That activity kicks into your feeds.
The issue I have with that is that it essentially normalizes being sex pests in a space on the Internet. That sets the expectation that it is good—attractive, even—to act like that elsewhere. That expectation alienates relationships. Bluesky creates a cultural space that offers an unrealistic, bizarre representation of social relationships, which isolates and alienates the users who stay on there consuming erotica and porn like they do.
So, user repos in Bluesky have a property for likes. Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol stores likes as first-class structured records in each user’s AT Protocol repository. In the AT Protocol lexicon, a like is an app.bsky.feed.like record type. Unlike a simple boolean flag on a post, it is its own record with a creation timestamp and a subject field that holds a strong reference to the liked record.
That strong reference is composed of an AT-URI and a CID. The AT-URI identifies the exact record in the network by DID, collection, and record key. The CID is a cryptographic content identifier that uniquely identifies the exact content of that liked record.
These like records exist under the app.bsky.feed.like namespace in the user’s repo. Bluesky’s repo model is built so that these repos are hosted on a user’s Personal Data Server and are publicly readable through the AT Protocol APIs. Because of that, the like record and its fields can be fetched, indexed, and used by any client or service that can query the protocol.
The protocol exposes operations like getLikes. This returns all of the like records tied to a particular subject’s AT-URI and CID. It also exposes getActorLikes. This returns all of the subject references a given actor has liked. Those API calls return structured like objects with timestamps and subject references directly from the public repository data.
Various feeds hosted by different PDSs use the likes property to construct the feeds that you see. Since the likes of people you follow are included in your social graph, along with your own likes, you’re going to get served the porn they are consuming. Because likes are public and anyone can write an algorithm to see everyone’s likes, you can clearly see just how much porn people are consuming.
Honestly, what started to turn my stomach about the people on Bluesky is how they behave across different contexts. If you look through the records of the posts they interact with, you’ll see them engaging with political posts in the replies like a normal person. Then, when you look through their AT Protocol records, you see hours and hours of them interacting with every kind of porn imaginable. I am not exaggerating. Hours of likes for porn posts within 1–10 minutes of each other. Am I sex-negative? A prude? No, this site is filled with furry, gay bara porn, lol. You can have a drink without being an alcoholic. The problem with these people is like people who can’t have one drink without drinking the whole fucking day; they can’t consume porn in healthy ways.
I think people assume that their feed is customized for them and based on their likes. No—feeds are generalized based on what everyone likes and then served to your subgraph. It’s not just about who you follow; it’s about who they follow. So if you follow someone who follows a lot of people with porn addictions, you will see porn. Bluesky isn’t weighting the algorithm to do this. Basically, it’s the people in your social network with furry, hentai, or trans porn addictions who are driving it.
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Your BlueSky Feed Is Porn You Didn’t Ask For Because Your Friends Are Gooners With a Severe Porn Addiction
A common complaint I see people make on Bluesky is: why am I being served so much porn or things I am not interested in? They will incorrectly believe that the algorithm is broken. It’s not broken. You didn’t know the people you knew as well as you thought you did. Porn addiction is a thing, and porn addiction is especially common with weebs. You’re seeing deranged shit because people you follow have porn addictions and are into deranged shit. So, though you may not be consuming porn, people in your network are. That activity kicks into your feeds.
The issue I have with that is that it essentially normalizes being sex pests in a space on the Internet. That sets the expectation that it is good—attractive, even—to act like that elsewhere. That expectation alienates relationships. Bluesky creates a cultural space that offers an unrealistic, bizarre representation of social relationships, which isolates and alienates the users who stay on there consuming erotica and porn like they do.
So, user repos in Bluesky have a property for likes. Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol stores likes as first-class structured records in each user’s AT Protocol repository. In the AT Protocol lexicon, a like is an app.bsky.feed.like record type. Unlike a simple boolean flag on a post, it is its own record with a creation timestamp and a subject field that holds a strong reference to the liked record.
That strong reference is composed of an AT-URI and a CID. The AT-URI identifies the exact record in the network by DID, collection, and record key. The CID is a cryptographic content identifier that uniquely identifies the exact content of that liked record.
These like records exist under the app.bsky.feed.like namespace in the user’s repo. Bluesky’s repo model is built so that these repos are hosted on a user’s Personal Data Server and are publicly readable through the AT Protocol APIs. Because of that, the like record and its fields can be fetched, indexed, and used by any client or service that can query the protocol.
The protocol exposes operations like getLikes. This returns all of the like records tied to a particular subject’s AT-URI and CID. It also exposes getActorLikes. This returns all of the subject references a given actor has liked. Those API calls return structured like objects with timestamps and subject references directly from the public repository data.
Various feeds hosted by different PDSs use the likes property to construct the feeds that you see. Since the likes of people you follow are included in your social graph, along with your own likes, you’re going to get served the porn they are consuming. Because likes are public and anyone can write an algorithm to see everyone’s likes, you can clearly see just how much porn people are consuming.
Honestly, what started to turn my stomach about the people on Bluesky is how they behave across different contexts. If you look through the records of the posts they interact with, you’ll see them engaging with political posts in the replies like a normal person. Then, when you look through their AT Protocol records, you see hours and hours of them interacting with every kind of porn imaginable. I am not exaggerating. Hours of likes for porn posts within 1–10 minutes of each other. Am I sex-negative? A prude? No, this site is filled with furry, gay bara porn, lol. You can have a drink without being an alcoholic. The problem with these people is like people who can’t have one drink without drinking the whole fucking day; they can’t consume porn in healthy ways.
I think people assume that their feed is customized for them and based on their likes. No—feeds are generalized based on what everyone likes and then served to your subgraph. It’s not just about who you follow; it’s about who they follow. So if you follow someone who follows a lot of people with porn addictions, you will see porn. Bluesky isn’t weighting the algorithm to do this. Basically, it’s the people in your social network with furry, hentai, or trans porn addictions who are driving it.
-
Your BlueSky Feed Is Porn You Didn’t Ask For Because Your Friends Are Gooners With a Severe Porn Addiction
A common complaint I see people make on Bluesky is: why am I being served so much porn or things I am not interested in? They will incorrectly believe that the algorithm is broken. It’s not broken. You didn’t know the people you knew as well as you thought you did. Porn addiction is a thing, and porn addiction is especially common with weebs. You’re seeing deranged shit because people you follow have porn addictions and are into deranged shit. So, though you may not be consuming porn, people in your network are. That activity kicks into your feeds.
The issue I have with that is that it essentially normalizes being sex pests in a space on the Internet. That sets the expectation that it is good—attractive, even—to act like that elsewhere. That expectation alienates relationships. Bluesky creates a cultural space that offers an unrealistic, bizarre representation of social relationships, which isolates and alienates the users who stay on there consuming erotica and porn like they do.
So, user repos in Bluesky have a property for likes. Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol stores likes as first-class structured records in each user’s AT Protocol repository. In the AT Protocol lexicon, a like is an app.bsky.feed.like record type. Unlike a simple boolean flag on a post, it is its own record with a creation timestamp and a subject field that holds a strong reference to the liked record.
That strong reference is composed of an AT-URI and a CID. The AT-URI identifies the exact record in the network by DID, collection, and record key. The CID is a cryptographic content identifier that uniquely identifies the exact content of that liked record.
These like records exist under the app.bsky.feed.like namespace in the user’s repo. Bluesky’s repo model is built so that these repos are hosted on a user’s Personal Data Server and are publicly readable through the AT Protocol APIs. Because of that, the like record and its fields can be fetched, indexed, and used by any client or service that can query the protocol.
The protocol exposes operations like getLikes. This returns all of the like records tied to a particular subject’s AT-URI and CID. It also exposes getActorLikes. This returns all of the subject references a given actor has liked. Those API calls return structured like objects with timestamps and subject references directly from the public repository data.
Various feeds hosted by different PDSs use the likes property to construct the feeds that you see. Since the likes of people you follow are included in your social graph, along with your own likes, you’re going to get served the porn they are consuming. Because likes are public and anyone can write an algorithm to see everyone’s likes, you can clearly see just how much porn people are consuming.
Honestly, what started to turn my stomach about the people on Bluesky is how they behave across different contexts. If you look through the records of the posts they interact with, you’ll see them engaging with political posts in the replies like a normal person. Then, when you look through their AT Protocol records, you see hours and hours of them interacting with every kind of porn imaginable. I am not exaggerating. Hours of likes for porn posts within 1–10 minutes of each other. Am I sex-negative? A prude? No, this site is filled with furry, gay bara porn, lol. You can have a drink without being an alcoholic. The problem with these people is like people who can’t have one drink without drinking the whole fucking day; they can’t consume porn in healthy ways.
I think people assume that their feed is customized for them and based on their likes. No—feeds are generalized based on what everyone likes and then served to your subgraph. It’s not just about who you follow; it’s about who they follow. So if you follow someone who follows a lot of people with porn addictions, you will see porn. Bluesky isn’t weighting the algorithm to do this. Basically, it’s the people in your social network with furry, hentai, or trans porn addictions who are driving it.
-
Your BlueSky Feed Is Porn You Didn’t Ask For Because Your Friends Are Gooners With a Severe Porn Addiction
A common complaint I see people make on Bluesky is: why am I being served so much porn or things I am not interested in? They will incorrectly believe that the algorithm is broken. It’s not broken. You didn’t know the people you knew as well as you thought you did. Porn addiction is a thing, and porn addiction is especially common with weebs. You’re seeing deranged shit because people you follow have porn addictions and are into deranged shit. So, though you may not be consuming porn, people in your network are. That activity kicks into your feeds.
The issue I have with that is that it essentially normalizes being sex pests in a space on the Internet. That sets the expectation that it is good—attractive, even—to act like that elsewhere. That expectation alienates relationships. Bluesky creates a cultural space that offers an unrealistic, bizarre representation of social relationships, which isolates and alienates the users who stay on there consuming erotica and porn like they do.
So, user repos in Bluesky have a property for likes. Bluesky’s underlying AT Protocol stores likes as first-class structured records in each user’s AT Protocol repository. In the AT Protocol lexicon, a like is an app.bsky.feed.like record type. Unlike a simple boolean flag on a post, it is its own record with a creation timestamp and a subject field that holds a strong reference to the liked record.
That strong reference is composed of an AT-URI and a CID. The AT-URI identifies the exact record in the network by DID, collection, and record key. The CID is a cryptographic content identifier that uniquely identifies the exact content of that liked record.
These like records exist under the app.bsky.feed.like namespace in the user’s repo. Bluesky’s repo model is built so that these repos are hosted on a user’s Personal Data Server and are publicly readable through the AT Protocol APIs. Because of that, the like record and its fields can be fetched, indexed, and used by any client or service that can query the protocol.
The protocol exposes operations like getLikes. This returns all of the like records tied to a particular subject’s AT-URI and CID. It also exposes getActorLikes. This returns all of the subject references a given actor has liked. Those API calls return structured like objects with timestamps and subject references directly from the public repository data.
Various feeds hosted by different PDSs use the likes property to construct the feeds that you see. Since the likes of people you follow are included in your social graph, along with your own likes, you’re going to get served the porn they are consuming. Because likes are public and anyone can write an algorithm to see everyone’s likes, you can clearly see just how much porn people are consuming.
Honestly, what started to turn my stomach about the people on Bluesky is how they behave across different contexts. If you look through the records of the posts they interact with, you’ll see them engaging with political posts in the replies like a normal person. Then, when you look through their AT Protocol records, you see hours and hours of them interacting with every kind of porn imaginable. I am not exaggerating. Hours of likes for porn posts within 1–10 minutes of each other. Am I sex-negative? A prude? No, this site is filled with furry, gay bara porn, lol. You can have a drink without being an alcoholic. The problem with these people is like people who can’t have one drink without drinking the whole fucking day; they can’t consume porn in healthy ways.
I think people assume that their feed is customized for them and based on their likes. No—feeds are generalized based on what everyone likes and then served to your subgraph. It’s not just about who you follow; it’s about who they follow. So if you follow someone who follows a lot of people with porn addictions, you will see porn. Bluesky isn’t weighting the algorithm to do this. Basically, it’s the people in your social network with furry, hentai, or trans porn addictions who are driving it.
-
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.
This can be modeled by representing each item as a node in a weighted graph, where edges are weighted by dissimilarity rather than similarity. Highly similar items are connected by low-weight edges, while less similar items are connected by higher-weight edges. Distances in the graph, computed using standard shortest-path algorithms, then correspond to degrees of similarity. Closely related items are separated by short path lengths, while increasingly dissimilar items require longer paths through the graph. It turns out that attempts to generalize metric spaces for noetic domains—to model noetic/psychic spaces—are actually pretty useful for social media algorithms, lol.
-
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.
-
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.
This can be modeled by representing each item as a node in a weighted graph, where edges are weighted by dissimilarity rather than similarity. Highly similar items are connected by low-weight edges, while less similar items are connected by higher-weight edges. Distances in the graph, computed using standard shortest-path algorithms, then correspond to degrees of similarity. Closely related items are separated by short path lengths, while increasingly dissimilar items require longer paths through the graph. It turns out that attempts to generalize metric spaces for noetic domains—to model noetic/psychic spaces—are actually pretty useful for social media algorithms, lol.
-
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.
This can be modeled by representing each item as a node in a weighted graph, where edges are weighted by dissimilarity rather than similarity. Highly similar items are connected by low-weight edges, while less similar items are connected by higher-weight edges. Distances in the graph, computed using standard shortest-path algorithms, then correspond to degrees of similarity. Closely related items are separated by short path lengths, while increasingly dissimilar items require longer paths through the graph. It turns out that attempts to generalize metric spaces for noetic domains—to model noetic/psychic spaces—are actually pretty useful for social media algorithms, lol.
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The Virulent Infection of BlueSky by Extremely Online, Brain-Rotten Zombies from X Continues
So, it appears a new migration from Twitter to Bluesky is underway. It appears to be some of the most virulent former 4chan users possible. Yep, I got off Bluesky just in time, lol. I’ve been keeping tabs on a particularly virulent and toxic subgraph on Twitter for years. It pretty much stayed off Bluesky because they couldn’t act like abusive dumpster fires there. Welp, looks like they’re becoming more active on Bluesky. It’s not looking good over there.
That they are on the move says something. It’s sort of like how the US is suddenly a place that is hospitable to measles. It was all but eradicated here.
My husband likes to say that you can tell where not to be by where I am looking from somewhere else. I like fires. So if I am observing your platform or community from a distance, you probably don’t want to be there.
Edit:
I had originally posted the above on a now-defunct federated blog. It got blasted to Mastodon. Someone replied and asked what I think is causing this. I debated actually answering, then decided that I’ve had enough of the dumpster fire that is social media. I decided not to wade through social media tech discourse into what will mostly likely be an Internet argument with a complete stranger. I am a techie dragon, and I engage with things to learn how they work so I can tinker with them. I only engaged with tech discourse to get my hands on how the tech works. There’s nothing in it for me to be part of larger conversations. Arguing with random strangers on social media is not an epistemically useful format. I do think I should answer, though. Just on my blog.
I treat social media like I do an addictive substance. I do not believe in abstinence, but I do believe in harm-reduction paradigms, so when I see everyone overdosing on social media, I pull back and shut down a lot of accounts. The Fediverse instance where the first part of this blog post was posted has been taken down, moved to this blog, and this section appended to it.
I often use the word weeb pejoratively. Here, I am using it categorically. There really isn’t an “official” name outside of otaku or weeb culture. I am at the fringes and intersections of it as a furry. My husband is a millennial weeb. With that being said—
The migration is in large part because Bluesky is capturing the otaku/weeb niche of X. X hosted networks that were ecosystems of “anime fans.” These included anime and manga artists, doujin and hentai artists, VTuber fans, NSFW illustrators, fandom shitposters, niche fetish communities, and other chronically and extremely online content creators and influencers. That culture relied heavily on timelines, informal networks, and discovery through reposts, replies, and algorithmic amplification.
Elon Musk pretty much destabilized X’s ecosystems and social networks from multiple directions at once. Algorithm changes made reach inconsistent. Moderation created anxiety and uncertainty about what would get suppressed or unintentionally “viral”. Bots, engagement farming, and blue-check reply spam actively poisoned fandom conversations.
Bluesky is the memetic and cultural progeny of early imageboard cultures. I conducted a phylogenetic analysis of the memetics, which you can check out here:
Bluesky is a competitor of X for otaku and fandom communities. Bluesky has a lot of the aspects of old Twitter dynamics around which fandom culture evolved. Recently, Bluesky introduced something big in those communities: going live. Since X is no longer habitable for weebs, they are moving to Bluesky.
For example, the AT protocol already has PinkSea:
And, of course, there is WAFRN:
I cope and deal with issues via personal, private sublimation and not so much exhibitionism of my art or consumption of art. So, while I do make comic books and do a shit ton of weeby art, it’s for the purpose of sublimation, so I’m not too interested in being a part of a community. That’s a large reason I am not active in those spaces. I’m quite cynical, in general, so I am suspicious of any community — and I mean any community, at all. Honestly, I am mildly contemptuous of mass participation or any sense of belonging. So, my art stays private, because it is created for me – and just me.
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The Virulent Infection of BlueSky by Extremely Online, Brain-Rotten Zombies from X Continues
So, it appears a new migration from Twitter to Bluesky is underway. It appears to be some of the most virulent former 4chan users possible. Yep, I got off Bluesky just in time, lol. I’ve been keeping tabs on a particularly virulent and toxic subgraph on Twitter for years. It pretty much stayed off Bluesky because they couldn’t act like abusive dumpster fires there. Welp, looks like they’re becoming more active on Bluesky. It’s not looking good over there.
That they are on the move says something. It’s sort of like how the US is suddenly a place that is hospitable to measles. It was all but eradicated here.
My husband likes to say that you can tell where not to be by where I am looking from somewhere else. I like fires. So if I am observing your platform or community from a distance, you probably don’t want to be there.
Edit:
I had originally posted the above on a now-defunct federated blog. It got blasted to Mastodon. Someone replied and asked what I think is causing this. I debated actually answering, then decided that I’ve had enough of the dumpster fire that is social media. I decided not to wade through social media tech discourse into what will mostly likely be an Internet argument with a complete stranger. I am a techie dragon, and I engage with things to learn how they work so I can tinker with them. I only engaged with tech discourse to get my hands on how the tech works. There’s nothing in it for me to be part of larger conversations. Arguing with random strangers on social media is not an epistemically useful format. I do think I should answer, though. Just on my blog.
I treat social media like I do an addictive substance. I do not believe in abstinence, but I do believe in harm-reduction paradigms, so when I see everyone overdosing on social media, I pull back and shut down a lot of accounts. The Fediverse instance where the first part of this blog post was posted has been taken down, moved to this blog, and this section appended to it.
I often use the word weeb pejoratively. Here, I am using it categorically. There really isn’t an “official” name outside of otaku or weeb culture. I am at the fringes and intersections of it as a furry. My husband is a millennial weeb. With that being said—
The migration is in large part because Bluesky is capturing the otaku/weeb niche of X. X hosted networks that were ecosystems of “anime fans.” These included anime and manga artists, doujin and hentai artists, VTuber fans, NSFW illustrators, fandom shitposters, niche fetish communities, and other chronically and extremely online content creators and influencers. That culture relied heavily on timelines, informal networks, and discovery through reposts, replies, and algorithmic amplification.
Elon Musk pretty much destabilized X’s ecosystems and social networks from multiple directions at once. Algorithm changes made reach inconsistent. Moderation created anxiety and uncertainty about what would get suppressed or unintentionally “viral”. Bots, engagement farming, and blue-check reply spam actively poisoned fandom conversations.
Bluesky is the memetic and cultural progeny of early imageboard cultures. I conducted a phylogenetic analysis of the memetics, which you can check out here:
Bluesky is a competitor of X for otaku and fandom communities. Bluesky has a lot of the aspects of old Twitter dynamics around which fandom culture evolved. Recently, Bluesky introduced something big in those communities: going live. Since X is no longer habitable for weebs, they are moving to Bluesky.
For example, the AT protocol already has PinkSea:
And, of course, there is WAFRN:
I cope and deal with issues via personal, private sublimation and not so much exhibitionism of my art or consumption of art. So, while I do make comic books and do a shit ton of weeby art, it’s for the purpose of sublimation, so I’m not too interested in being a part of a community. That’s a large reason I am not active in those spaces. I’m quite cynical, in general, so I am suspicious of any community — and I mean any community, at all. Honestly, I am mildly contemptuous of mass participation or any sense of belonging. So, my art stays private, because it is created for me – and just me.
-
The Virulent Infection of BlueSky by Extremely Online, Brain-Rotten Zombies from X Continues
So, it appears a new migration from Twitter to Bluesky is underway. It appears to be some of the most virulent former 4chan users possible. Yep, I got off Bluesky just in time, lol. I’ve been keeping tabs on a particularly virulent and toxic subgraph on Twitter for years. It pretty much stayed off Bluesky because they couldn’t act like abusive dumpster fires there. Welp, looks like they’re becoming more active on Bluesky. It’s not looking good over there.
That they are on the move says something. It’s sort of like how the US is suddenly a place that is hospitable to measles. It was all but eradicated here.
My husband likes to say that you can tell where not to be by where I am looking from somewhere else. I like fires. So if I am observing your platform or community from a distance, you probably don’t want to be there.
Edit:
I had originally posted the above on a now-defunct federated blog. It got blasted to Mastodon. Someone replied and asked what I think is causing this. I debated actually answering, then decided that I’ve had enough of the dumpster fire that is social media. I decided not to wade through social media tech discourse into what will mostly likely be an Internet argument with a complete stranger. I am a techie dragon, and I engage with things to learn how they work so I can tinker with them. I only engaged with tech discourse to get my hands on how the tech works. There’s nothing in it for me to be part of larger conversations. Arguing with random strangers on social media is not an epistemically useful format. I do think I should answer, though. Just on my blog.
I treat social media like I do an addictive substance. I do not believe in abstinence, but I do believe in harm-reduction paradigms, so when I see everyone overdosing on social media, I pull back and shut down a lot of accounts. The Fediverse instance where the first part of this blog post was posted has been taken down, moved to this blog, and this section appended to it.
I often use the word weeb pejoratively. Here, I am using it categorically. There really isn’t an “official” name outside of otaku or weeb culture. I am at the fringes and intersections of it as a furry. My husband is a millennial weeb. With that being said—
The migration is in large part because Bluesky is capturing the otaku/weeb niche of X. X hosted networks that were ecosystems of “anime fans.” These included anime and manga artists, doujin and hentai artists, VTuber fans, NSFW illustrators, fandom shitposters, niche fetish communities, and other chronically and extremely online content creators and influencers. That culture relied heavily on timelines, informal networks, and discovery through reposts, replies, and algorithmic amplification.
Elon Musk pretty much destabilized X’s ecosystems and social networks from multiple directions at once. Algorithm changes made reach inconsistent. Moderation created anxiety and uncertainty about what would get suppressed or unintentionally “viral”. Bots, engagement farming, and blue-check reply spam actively poisoned fandom conversations.
Bluesky is the memetic and cultural progeny of early imageboard cultures. I conducted a phylogenetic analysis of the memetics, which you can check out here:
Bluesky is a competitor of X for otaku and fandom communities. Bluesky has a lot of the aspects of old Twitter dynamics around which fandom culture evolved. Recently, Bluesky introduced something big in those communities: going live. Since X is no longer habitable for weebs, they are moving to Bluesky.
For example, the AT protocol already has PinkSea:
And, of course, there is WAFRN:
I cope and deal with issues via personal, private sublimation and not so much exhibitionism of my art or consumption of art. So, while I do make comic books and do a shit ton of weeby art, it’s for the purpose of sublimation, so I’m not too interested in being a part of a community. That’s a large reason I am not active in those spaces. I’m quite cynical, in general, so I am suspicious of any community — and I mean any community, at all. Honestly, I am mildly contemptuous of mass participation or any sense of belonging. So, my art stays private, because it is created for me – and just me.
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BlueSky Is A Platform For Attention Whores With No Standards
I’m convinced that Bluesky is the platform for attention-whores who perform and humiliate themselves for validation and affirmation. It’s really sad. I don’t feel bad when bad things happen to them as a consequence because they were already warned, yet they prioritize fitting into a culture and refuse to deal with their feelings of inadequacy. The reason they stay is that the bar is low for meaningful engagement, allowing them to indulge in their obsessions and compulsions while being rewarded for self-destructive behavior. It truly is quite pathetic.
I initially joined Bluesky for the sexual content because people on Mastodon have little interest in sex and much more elaborate norms around sexuality. Contrary to what people think of me, I don’t actually use social media in the conventional way most people do. I view it on an abstract, non-algorithmically served layer via my network analysis tools, and I interact with YouTube in a very constrained way. So, I wasn’t aware of how bad things were until I started using Bluesky conventionally. The men on Bluesky are just plain repulsive to me. Desperation, neediness, lack of independence, and obsessively posting about a single topic (like sex, religion, or politics), instead of developing a genuine hobby that demonstrates skill, progress, and mastery, are major turn-offs. I find a lack of standards absolutely disgusting.
For example, if someone abhorrent gives you a compliment, you don’t accept it. If an abhorrent person follows you, you block them. Yet what I see are men posting sexual content and seeking attention and validation from anyone, regardless of who it’s coming from. If I look through someone’s activity and see nothing but low-effort posts interacting with nothing but sexual content or obsessive engagement with that type of content, I lose interest immediately.
A reason why my husband has held my attention for over a decade is that there is always something new with him. He is always randomly looking into developing a new skill. One day, he started randomly speaking Mandarin to me, which I did not know he knew how to speak. He had told me he had been learning Mandarin. Yes, my husband is neurodivergent and his interests are cars, but that doesn’t displace all other things. Another reason why my husband holds my attention is that he can keep a conversation going and match anyone’s changes. It’s not one ritualistic or compulsive thing every single fucking day.
A very real consequence of the lack of standards in gay sexual spaces, especially given that many misogynistic, homophobic far-right men suppress their homosexual attractions, is that many of the fetishes in gay sexual spaces are reminiscent of manosphere content. Because of what I do for a living, I have access to audience segmentation metrics and social embeddings of how content is served. Manosphere content clusters with homoerotic content that men consume. At some point, obsession became so normalized that people stopped realizing it was problematic.
Unless gay men set boundaries and tell manosphere bros, “we’re not having that,” you’ll see what I see on Bluesky. I’m actually very sexual myself, and I frequently go to bathhouses—those that have very explicit rules—sex parties, and orgies.
The funny thing is that I have had plenty of really deep philosophical conversations sitting in the hot tub of a bathhouse with naked gay men. Because of health codes and all that, you can’t do sexual things in the pool or the hot tub, so those areas were places for genuine play and conversation, while spots like the saunas were the fuck spots. I recall a particularly interesting conversation I had with an older gay man who had been going to that bathhouse since the ’80s. He explained to me the social context of the HIV epidemic and how, basically, no one knew it was sexually transmitted, so everyone was still barebacking at that exact same bathhouse we were in.
The issue here is people who fuck and sexually perform for awful people who want to murder them because they have absolutely no fucking standards and are so emotionally needy that they forgo all forms of self-preservation. I’m a computer scientist, so I have access to a lot of data tools. I can tell you for a fact that there is a strong correlation between men who want to murder gay men and trans people and the ones liking, engaging in parasocial dynamics with, and commenting in their replies. You’re willing to take sexual attention from people who want to kill you, and that blows my mind.
In their minds, Bluesky is better if it is not a Nazi strip bar but a Nazi BDSM-furry-kink club? What the ever-loving fuck?! Honestly, I watch a lot of feminist content that rips manosphere content apart, so much so that I can instantly recognize coded things. The “fuck no!” moment for me is when I saw manosphere-coded things being fetishized in the ego networks of large gay adult content creators and OnlyFans creators in social network embeddings. It’s not like it is insidious. If I see it, everyone else sees it; they are just ignoring it because they are prioritizing sexual validation and their obsessions.
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BlueSky Is A Platform For Attention Whores With No Standards
I’m convinced that Bluesky is the platform for attention-whores who perform and humiliate themselves for validation and affirmation. It’s really sad. I don’t feel bad when bad things happen to them as a consequence because they were already warned, yet they prioritize fitting into a culture and refuse to deal with their feelings of inadequacy. The reason they stay is that the bar is low for meaningful engagement, allowing them to indulge in their obsessions and compulsions while being rewarded for self-destructive behavior. It truly is quite pathetic.
I initially joined Bluesky for the sexual content because people on Mastodon have little interest in sex and much more elaborate norms around sexuality. Contrary to what people think of me, I don’t actually use social media in the conventional way most people do. I view it on an abstract, non-algorithmically served layer via my network analysis tools, and I interact with YouTube in a very constrained way. So, I wasn’t aware of how bad things were until I started using Bluesky conventionally. The men on Bluesky are just plain repulsive to me. Desperation, neediness, lack of independence, and obsessively posting about a single topic (like sex, religion, or politics), instead of developing a genuine hobby that demonstrates skill, progress, and mastery, are major turn-offs. I find a lack of standards absolutely disgusting.
For example, if someone abhorrent gives you a compliment, you don’t accept it. If an abhorrent person follows you, you block them. Yet what I see are men posting sexual content and seeking attention and validation from anyone, regardless of who it’s coming from. If I look through someone’s activity and see nothing but low-effort posts interacting with nothing but sexual content or obsessive engagement with that type of content, I lose interest immediately.
A reason why my husband has held my attention for over a decade is that there is always something new with him. He is always randomly looking into developing a new skill. One day, he started randomly speaking Mandarin to me, which I did not know he knew how to speak. He had told me he had been learning Mandarin. Yes, my husband is neurodivergent and his interests are cars, but that doesn’t displace all other things. Another reason why my husband holds my attention is that he can keep a conversation going and match anyone’s changes. It’s not one ritualistic or compulsive thing every single fucking day.
A very real consequence of the lack of standards in gay sexual spaces, especially given that many misogynistic, homophobic far-right men suppress their homosexual attractions, is that many of the fetishes in gay sexual spaces are reminiscent of manosphere content. Because of what I do for a living, I have access to audience segmentation metrics and social embeddings of how content is served. Manosphere content clusters with homoerotic content that men consume. At some point, obsession became so normalized that people stopped realizing it was problematic.
Unless gay men set boundaries and tell manosphere bros, “we’re not having that,” you’ll see what I see on Bluesky. I’m actually very sexual myself, and I frequently go to bathhouses—those that have very explicit rules—sex parties, and orgies.
The funny thing is that I have had plenty of really deep philosophical conversations sitting in the hot tub of a bathhouse with naked gay men. Because of health codes and all that, you can’t do sexual things in the pool or the hot tub, so those areas were places for genuine play and conversation, while spots like the saunas were the fuck spots. I recall a particularly interesting conversation I had with an older gay man who had been going to that bathhouse since the ’80s. He explained to me the social context of the HIV epidemic and how, basically, no one knew it was sexually transmitted, so everyone was still barebacking at that exact same bathhouse we were in.
The issue here is people who fuck and sexually perform for awful people who want to murder them because they have absolutely no fucking standards and are so emotionally needy that they forgo all forms of self-preservation. I’m a computer scientist, so I have access to a lot of data tools. I can tell you for a fact that there is a strong correlation between men who want to murder gay men and trans people and the ones liking, engaging in parasocial dynamics with, and commenting in their replies. You’re willing to take sexual attention from people who want to kill you, and that blows my mind.
In their minds, Bluesky is better if it is not a Nazi strip bar but a Nazi BDSM-furry-kink club? What the ever-loving fuck?! Honestly, I watch a lot of feminist content that rips manosphere content apart, so much so that I can instantly recognize coded things. The “fuck no!” moment for me is when I saw manosphere-coded things being fetishized in the ego networks of large gay adult content creators and OnlyFans creators in social network embeddings. It’s not like it is insidious. If I see it, everyone else sees it; they are just ignoring it because they are prioritizing sexual validation and their obsessions.
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Bluesky is An Ontological Space for Sadomasochism, Trolling, & Schadenfreude
So, during the initial exodus from Twitter after it became X following Elon Musk’s purchase, many people left but kept their accounts, purposefully to bully, surveil, antagonize, and troll others. People—including me—moved to Bluesky, Mastodon, or both, and used their Twitter accounts purely for harassment and similar behavior. Essentially, X became the place you went to act like a dumpster fire. Because most people within occult niches are highly toxic, I tend to not only block them but also block anyone they follow for reasons I’m about to explain.
I really only use that account to criticize occulture, post nudes, or share YouTube videos. Since I’m aware of fed posting, I avoid commenting on political topics or anarchist discourse on the Clearnet. Keep that in mind. If you scroll through my profile, you’ll see me poking fun at chaotes, posting nudes, gushing about or complaining about my husband, sharing dating horror story YouTube videos, or pet grooming videos. If you look at my likes, you’ll only see gay porn, mathematics papers, engineering papers, etc. There’s no mention of anything political, especially genocides.
There was a person I’d never interacted with who was part of a starter pack for occultists. I blocked them. Then I woke up this morning to find I was added to this list:
Chomsky Honks
Genocide apologist posting cringe from a Starbucks as it burns down around themSo, with all that in mind, these occultists I’ve never interacted with added me to a list. I am neither invested in Bluesky nor strongly connected to their network, primarily because I block almost everyone on it and don’t ever look at any feeds whatsoever, including the Home, followers, or Discover feeds. Therefore, the posts I do interact with are from pockets of people way outside my network. It’s kind of like driving to the bathhouse in Atlanta from a small town in Bubbafuck, Georgia, because everyone in your small town is garbage. Same idea, ontologically.
Honestly, I don’t care, because I’ve mostly moved back to Mastodon and blog more.
What they’ve done is implicitly a form of defamation, because they feel slighted and justified in defaming someone they don’t know, simply because a stranger they’ve never spoken to blocked them. I tend to do a basic block on anyone who blocks me, because if you’ve decided you don’t want to see me, there’s probably no good-faith reason for us to engage in the future. It’s likely there’s some malicious intent later on. As you can see with this, I was correct.
So, in order for them to know I blocked them, they had to continuously check who had blocked them, and they believe people who block them should be punished through bullying. Since the description of the list doesn’t fit me, they retaliated out of malice. The idea behind these cliques is pretty simple: they feel threatened by anyone who rejects their normative statements because it means they are being rejected, and they view any form of dissent as an existential threat. As a result, they believe people who reject them, set boundaries, or dissent from the consensus of their culture need to be punished, and the AT protocol provides convenient tools for brigading. Ironically, these people are anti-fascist yet have a very Christian-like evangelical way of viewing the world. The lack of insight is pretty funny.
I’m the child of cult leaders and members with Cluster B personalities, so I’m not clutching my pearls, especially since I’m already set up elsewhere outside of Bluesky. They do not have the means to impose significant consequences on me, so I find it amusing. I genuinely find it funny how they eat each other. I’m not calling anyone to action—I’m just enjoying the fire.
This person wasn’t aware of who I was. We never interacted, and being added to a list that defames me happened directly after I blocked them without any prior interaction. I saw their account from the firehose and wasn’t algorithmically presented with it, meaning we’re not even in the same clique. Now, if they had said something like “spams hashtags, trolls, makes alts,” that would make sense.
When you look at it for what it is, they wanted to defame, disparage, and brigade—punitive actions because they interpreted a boundary as hostile. This is projection, as they are weaponizing a mechanism to enforce boundaries. Do I care? No. I’m just pointing out how it turned its predecessor, X, into what it is now. It became a place for people to harass others, not a space for genuine, good-faith discussions, connections, or even debates. That is not my interpretation.
Well, to anyone who knows, you might ask: Did they block you because you have a particular reputation? No. I am a Web 1.0 mage, so the networks I’m known in have roots and associations in the old forums. The occulture people who have fixated on me for years go all the way back to Wizard Forums, the psionics forums, the unsolved mystery forums, etc., from the early 2000s. If you’re a circa 2016 social media influencer mage, you probably wouldn’t know me—primarily because the moment I see you, I’ll block you. There’s also a moderation block list just for me and my alts.
This behavior is typical of the culture on Bluesky, so much so that it’s a common complaint people now have—many no longer view block lists as legitimate moderation tools. People are being advised to be skeptical of lists with a large number of people.
Oh, I’m not playing the victim here. I don’t care, because I could easily get back at them. I’m infamously vindictive and petty. More importantly, it supports my point and vindicates me. I’m not signaling victimhood; rather, I’m pointing out a culture, albeit one I participate in. Tying this back to my initial point: part of what signaled the death of Twitter as a serious forum and its transformation into X was the bullying. A while ago, I did a phylogenetic memetic analysis that basically showed how the culture on Bluesky is highly derivative of image boards. But don’t you bully and troll people? Yes, yes, I do – on Bluesky, and the lack of moderation and culture enable it. That’s my point.
Bluesky is an accelerationist and reactionary platform that gives you the tools to surveil and harass people. The developers of Bluesky and the AT Protocol have explicitly said they are technological accelerationists and libertarians. I’m not virtue signaling here; rather, I am saying Bluesky is a reactionary platform, so its culture should be understood as performative, hostile, and adversarial—not cooperative or collaborative. Just like Twitter. You can’t do what I do on Bluesky on the fediverse, because the culture won’t allow it.
You saw this type of behavior on Tumblr, where the population carrying the memetics of that culture migrated to Twitter and now Bluesky. Essentially, Bluesky became a place where malice, bullying, and hostile behavior became so normalized that I’m not even upset about lists being weaponized like this. For example, I’m not posting this on Bluesky, and I, myself, have bullied people on Bluesky. But I behave myself on Mastodon. I am using myself as an example. The trolling is happening on Bluesky. The thoughtful posts are happening on Mastodon. The blog this will be posted on is federated, so this is being posted to the fediverse.
That’s what happened to Twitter. It started normalizing hostile, toxic behavior, so that people left the platform and only returned to Twitter for schadenfreude. I have my own WordPress fediverse instance. I am just on Bluesky for the schadenfreude.
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Bluesky is An Ontological Space for Sadomasochism, Trolling, & Schadenfreude
So, during the initial exodus from Twitter after it became X following Elon Musk’s purchase, many people left but kept their accounts, purposefully to bully, surveil, antagonize, and troll others. People—including me—moved to Bluesky, Mastodon, or both, and used their Twitter accounts purely for harassment and similar behavior. Essentially, X became the place you went to act like a dumpster fire. Because most people within occult niches are highly toxic, I tend to not only block them but also block anyone they follow for reasons I’m about to explain.
I really only use that account to criticize occulture, post nudes, or share YouTube videos. Since I’m aware of fed posting, I avoid commenting on political topics or anarchist discourse on the Clearnet. Keep that in mind. If you scroll through my profile, you’ll see me poking fun at chaotes, posting nudes, gushing about or complaining about my husband, sharing dating horror story YouTube videos, or pet grooming videos. If you look at my likes, you’ll only see gay porn, mathematics papers, engineering papers, etc. There’s no mention of anything political, especially genocides.
There was a person I’d never interacted with who was part of a starter pack for occultists. I blocked them. Then I woke up this morning to find I was added to this list:
Chomsky Honks
Genocide apologist posting cringe from a Starbucks as it burns down around themSo, with all that in mind, these occultists I’ve never interacted with added me to a list. I am neither invested in Bluesky nor strongly connected to their network, primarily because I block almost everyone on it and don’t ever look at any feeds whatsoever, including the Home, followers, or Discover feeds. Therefore, the posts I do interact with are from pockets of people way outside my network. It’s kind of like driving to the bathhouse in Atlanta from a small town in Bubbafuck, Georgia, because everyone in your small town is garbage. Same idea, ontologically.
Honestly, I don’t care, because I’ve mostly moved back to Mastodon and blog more.
What they’ve done is implicitly a form of defamation, because they feel slighted and justified in defaming someone they don’t know, simply because a stranger they’ve never spoken to blocked them. I tend to do a basic block on anyone who blocks me, because if you’ve decided you don’t want to see me, there’s probably no good-faith reason for us to engage in the future. It’s likely there’s some malicious intent later on. As you can see with this, I was correct.
So, in order for them to know I blocked them, they had to continuously check who had blocked them, and they believe people who block them should be punished through bullying. Since the description of the list doesn’t fit me, they retaliated out of malice. The idea behind these cliques is pretty simple: they feel threatened by anyone who rejects their normative statements because it means they are being rejected, and they view any form of dissent as an existential threat. As a result, they believe people who reject them, set boundaries, or dissent from the consensus of their culture need to be punished, and the AT protocol provides convenient tools for brigading. Ironically, these people are anti-fascist yet have a very Christian-like evangelical way of viewing the world. The lack of insight is pretty funny.
I’m the child of cult leaders and members with Cluster B personalities, so I’m not clutching my pearls, especially since I’m already set up elsewhere outside of Bluesky. They do not have the means to impose significant consequences on me, so I find it amusing. I genuinely find it funny how they eat each other. I’m not calling anyone to action—I’m just enjoying the fire.
This person wasn’t aware of who I was. We never interacted, and being added to a list that defames me happened directly after I blocked them without any prior interaction. I saw their account from the firehose and wasn’t algorithmically presented with it, meaning we’re not even in the same clique. Now, if they had said something like “spams hashtags, trolls, makes alts,” that would make sense.
When you look at it for what it is, they wanted to defame, disparage, and brigade—punitive actions because they interpreted a boundary as hostile. This is projection, as they are weaponizing a mechanism to enforce boundaries. Do I care? No. I’m just pointing out how it turned its predecessor, X, into what it is now. It became a place for people to harass others, not a space for genuine, good-faith discussions, connections, or even debates. That is not my interpretation.
Well, to anyone who knows, you might ask: Did they block you because you have a particular reputation? No. I am a Web 1.0 mage, so the networks I’m known in have roots and associations in the old forums. The occulture people who have fixated on me for years go all the way back to Wizard Forums, the psionics forums, the unsolved mystery forums, etc., from the early 2000s. If you’re a circa 2016 social media influencer mage, you probably wouldn’t know me—primarily because the moment I see you, I’ll block you. There’s also a moderation block list just for me and my alts.
This behavior is typical of the culture on Bluesky, so much so that it’s a common complaint people now have—many no longer view block lists as legitimate moderation tools. People are being advised to be skeptical of lists with a large number of people.
Oh, I’m not playing the victim here. I don’t care, because I could easily get back at them. I’m infamously vindictive and petty. More importantly, it supports my point and vindicates me. I’m not signaling victimhood; rather, I’m pointing out a culture, albeit one I participate in. Tying this back to my initial point: part of what signaled the death of Twitter as a serious forum and its transformation into X was the bullying. A while ago, I did a phylogenetic memetic analysis that basically showed how the culture on Bluesky is highly derivative of image boards. But don’t you bully and troll people? Yes, yes, I do – on Bluesky, and the lack of moderation and culture enable it. That’s my point.
Bluesky is an accelerationist and reactionary platform that gives you the tools to surveil and harass people. The developers of Bluesky and the AT Protocol have explicitly said they are technological accelerationists and libertarians. I’m not virtue signaling here; rather, I am saying Bluesky is a reactionary platform, so its culture should be understood as performative, hostile, and adversarial—not cooperative or collaborative. Just like Twitter. You can’t do what I do on Bluesky on the fediverse, because the culture won’t allow it.
You saw this type of behavior on Tumblr, where the population carrying the memetics of that culture migrated to Twitter and now Bluesky. Essentially, Bluesky became a place where malice, bullying, and hostile behavior became so normalized that I’m not even upset about lists being weaponized like this. For example, I’m not posting this on Bluesky, and I, myself, have bullied people on Bluesky. But I behave myself on Mastodon. I am using myself as an example. The trolling is happening on Bluesky. The thoughtful posts are happening on Mastodon. The blog this will be posted on is federated, so this is being posted to the fediverse.
That’s what happened to Twitter. It started normalizing hostile, toxic behavior, so that people left the platform and only returned to Twitter for schadenfreude. I have my own WordPress fediverse instance. I am just on Bluesky for the schadenfreude.
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Ritualistically Sacrificing People’s Images Upon the Social Media Altar of Hate
It’s honestly kind of disturbing how obsessed people get with random social influencers, whether they’re famous or infamous, and how it’s almost become normal to turn any social media profile into a hate altar. The scariest part is how the line between memes and cult imagery has practically disappeared. Memes started out as just funny, ironic things, but now they’re something way bigger. They’re symbols. There’s actual research on how memes have moved beyond comedy, morphing into tools that shape beliefs and ideologies—just like how cults use imagery to brainwash and control their followers.
Influencers and politicians alike are no longer just figures we joke about—they’re symbols, figures we can either elevate or tear down. We don’t just laugh at them anymore; we turn them into these icons that can launch entire social movements, reshape ideologies, or fuel some ridiculous narrative. It’s not just about making fun of someone anymore. Sometimes, these memes border on something way darker—like worship or destruction—depending on which side of the fandom you fall on.
And it’s terrifying how this kind of obsession has been normalized. People dive into echo chambers where they only engage with content that confirms their biases, and anything remotely opposing is shot down with this obsessive, almost toxic rejection. Extreme views aren’t just tolerated—they’re amplified. It’s not just some online debate over a politician anymore; it’s about people relentlessly tearing apart someone’s reputation or blindly idolizing them to the point where they can’t do any wrong. Research on online behavior shows how this kind of content, all sensationalized and emotionally charged, is addictive—and it distorts how people see the world. Honestly, it’s like living in a digital, distorted version of reality, where everything is turned into outrage-bait just for clicks, likes, and shares. We live in a simulacrum.
What’s worse is the pathology of obsessions is now endemic to societies. It’s one thing to follow someone or engage with their content, but when it starts to consume every part of your online life—every post, every comment, every thought—something’s gone seriously wrong. They invest all this emotional energy into someone they’ve never met, creating a weird parasocial delusion. And in the digital age, it’s gotten out of hand. Some people stalk influencers, track every tiny detail of their personal lives, or even harass them online. It starts as harmless admiration, but when taken too far, it crosses a line into a full-blown obsession that hurts not just the influencer’s image but the mental health of the person obsessed too.
When you think about it, this obsession becomes like some twisted ritual where the target’s image is sacrificed. It’s not just harassment anymore—it’s dehumanization. People twist and distort a public figure’s image so much that it stops being who they are and becomes something else entirely—an idea, a symbol. It’s the same thing cults do to people: the image gets manipulated, and the followers consume it until the person themselves doesn’t exist anymore, just the idea of them. And online, it’s the same story. Figures get turned into icons that are either worshipped or torn apart, their real selves completely lost in the process. It’s like their image is being ritually sacrificed by the collective judgment of the masses—and there’s no space for nuance.
And it’s not just celebrities or politicians who are at risk. Anyone who gets thrust into the public eye through virality can become a target. All it takes is one Tik Tok. The obsessive need to either tear down or elevate a random figure based on personal biases is getting more and more cult-like. It’s become this bizarre, ritualistic form of image destruction where random people or public figures are “sacrificed” at the altar of online outrage. Their whole identity is reshaped to fit whatever narrative the internet wants to push—usually with little regard for fairness or truth. Algorithms play into this, rewarding the most extreme, polarizing content.
How the hell did we get here? How did we go from memes being these lighthearted jokes to this whole twisted, digital ritual where people’s identities get sacrificed for the sake of outrage, obsession, or devotion? Social media has created this bizarre world where the lines between fandom, obsession, and cult-like worship are totally blurred. We don’t just admire or criticize people anymore; we’re engaging with them in ways that are unhealthy, toxic, and Machiavellian. The person stops being a person. They become a symbol. And not just any symbol, but one to either tear down or idolize.
At this point, it’s not even about laughing at a meme, liking a post, or following someone on social media. It’s about ritually altering someone’s image until they’re either a god or a devil, depending on how the viewer sees them. And that’s the truly messed-up part. The online world has become a place where memes can turn into cult icons, and obsessive fixations are normal.
Fediverse Reactions
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