Update: After this article was published, Bluesky restored Kabas’ post and told 404 Media the following: “This was a case of our moderators applying the policy for non-consensual AI content strictly. After re-evaluating the newsworthy context, the moderation team is reinstating those posts.”
Bluesky deleted a viral, AI-generated protest video in which Donald Trump is sucking on Elon Musk’s toes because its moderators said it was “non-consensual explicit material.” The video was broadcast on televisions inside the office Housing and Urban Development earlier this week, and quickly went viral on Bluesky and Twitter.
Independent journalist Marisa Kabas obtained a video from a government employee and posted it on Bluesky, where it went viral. Tuesday night, Bluesky moderators deleted the video because they said it was “non-consensual explicit material.”
Other Bluesky users said that versions of the video they uploaded were also deleted, though it is still possible to find the video on the platform.
Technically speaking, the AI video of Trump sucking Musk’s toes, which had the words “LONG LIVE THE REAL KING” shown on top of it, is a nonconsensual AI-generated video, because Trump and Musk did not agree to it. But social media platform content moderation policies have always had carve outs that allow for the criticism of powerful people, especially the world’s richest man and the literal president of the United States.
For example, we once obtained Facebook’s internal rules about sexual content for content moderators, which included broad carveouts to allow for sexual content that criticized public figures and politicians. The First Amendment, which does not apply to social media companies but is relevant considering that Bluesky told Kabas she could not use the platform to “break the law,” has essentially unlimited protection for criticizing public figures in the way this video is doing.
Content moderation has been one of Bluesky’s growing pains over the last few months. The platform has millions of users but only a few dozen employees, meaning that perfect content moderation is impossible, and a lot of it necessarily needs to be automated. This is going to lead to mistakes. But the video Kabas posted was one of the most popular posts on the platform earlier this week and resulted in a national conversation about the protest. Deleting it—whether accidentally or because its moderation rules are so strict as to not allow for this type of reporting on a protest against the President of the United States—is a problem.
I fundamentally disagree that a federated system is the desired end goal.
One of the problems it seems to try to solve is eliminating the risk of a service going down. Just like a centralized service, a federated service lasts only as long as the maintainers want it to last, and I think the risk of important services disappearing is higher when you remove the profit motive to keep it going. Hobbyists’ pockets are only so deep, and they’ll eventually die or lose interest. Yeah, I guess another service will pop up, which perpetuates some portion of the platform, but it doesn’t really preserve the data.
So I see things like Mastodon (and Lemmy) as more complicated alternatives to services like Twitter or BlueSky, but with many of the same downsides. Will the data still be there in 20 years? 50? 100? Idk, probably not. Maybe if you put together a non-profit or something, but even then, I have my doubts.
So in that sense, I don’t really see a technical advantage that the Fediverse has that BlueSky doesn’t. If anything, I’d expect BlueSky to potentially stick around longer, assuming they can find a decent profit model, because money coming in tends to keep the servers running. Maybe they go bad like Reddit, maybe they get bought like Twitter, or maybe they stick it out longer (or maybe they open up to hobbyists). Whatever the case, I highly doubt Mastodon and friends will actually take over when they do disappear. It’ll likely remain a hobbyist project until the next hot thing comes out (Fedi v2?), and never really reach mainstream success.
Maybe I’m wrong. But given how the Reddit and Twitter exoduses have worked out, I don’t think so.
I want to see more projects looking into P2P, so that’s where my interest lies. That way data and platforms can truly live forever, provided new people constantly come around to provide more storage. Communities and posts wouldn’t live anywhere in particular (no single point of failure), but instead get distributed so there’s a very low chance that any given bit of data will be truly lost, kind of like how torrents tend to keep on keeping on as long as someone is seeding (but people would only need to seed a small subset of the total data). I think that’s a much more interesting idea than the Fediverse.
If you can explain the existence of wikipedia under your theory then I’ll listen to you, but like… wow. Profit motive, what a joke. That’s literally what causes enshittification.
They got the ease of use down, largely due to it being a centralized service. You can literally go there, click edit, and submit a change, and you can also make an account if you want credit. It was also largely the first of its kind, so it was easy for people to get passionate about it. I made a bunch of edits in the relative early days (2000s), because I thought it was really cool. I do the same for OpenStreetMaps today, because it has a good amount of info, but it still needs some data entry here and there (I use Organic Maps on mobile).
That said, projects like Wikipedia aren’t very common. It started around the time the dot-com bubble burst, so they had a fair amount of cash to kick things off with, and it got traction before the money ran out. They were able to reuse a lot of what they learned from another commercial project, and the community project ended up eating the original project’s lunch.
I’m not arguing that profit is required for something to succeed, I’m merely arguing that money really helps a project get off the ground, and if there are multiple competing projects, the one with better marketing and a smoother user experience will usually win.
I didn’t say profit guarantees projects live a long time or anything of that nature, I merely said users tend to flock to platforms that have a strong profit motive, probably because they have better marketing and funding for a better UX. First impressions matter a lot when it comes to a commercial product, so they tend to do a good job at that. That’s why BlueSky is more attractive than Mastodon, and why whatever comes next will also likely be more attractive than Mastodon.
It’s just really weird that you turn to profit motive as a benefit when we’re talking about systems that tend to enshittify, and that’s like, the main thing that makes them enshittify.
My argument is about how enshittification destroys platforms, and platforms that don’t do that will retain their growth. Bluesky has all the ingredients to enshittify, mastodon doesn’t.
Yes they need to work on their onboarding, but unlike bluesky, they can keep going at it till it sticks. Centralised platforms get a launch, and a lifecycle, and then they tend to go away.
Quite literally the opposite of what you said. If a platform is central, it can be switched off tomorrow. Nobody can do that to the fediverse as long as the internet exists. The idea that hobbyists are somehow less reliable than fucking corporations is also absurd. Have you met corporations?
This is literally a tortoise-and-the-hare situation.