BlueSky’s “user intents” is a good proposal, and it’s weird to see some people flaming them for it as though this is equivalent to them welcoming in AI scraping (rather than trying to add a consent signal to allow users to communicate preferences for the scraping that is already happening).
I think the weakness with this and Creative Commons’ similar proposal for “preference signals” is that they rely on scrapers to respect these signals out of some desire to be good actors. We’ve already seen some of these companies blow right past robots.txt or pirate material to scrape.
I do think that they are good technical foundations, and there is the potential for enforcement to be layered atop them.
Great piece on BlueSky and enshittification by Cory Doctorow. “I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.” I also really appreciate his point that it’s not the blockchain venture capital that leads to enshittification, it’s the venture capital.
Cory is a fellow POSSE-er (and major inspiration to me when I adopted the practice), and has opted not to use Bluesky. Personally, I’ve gone the route of using the platforms that interest me, even the enshittification-prone ones like Bluesky and Threads, but hedging my bets by plugging them into my POSSE system where they can just as easily be unplugged if need be.
“our lead shares our philosophy that technology should serve the user, not the reverse
this is why they focus on blockchains, a technology basically always used at the expense of its users”
i do think the degree to which bluesky is stressing that they do not use blockchains really underscores how toxic even a faint whiff of blockchain has become to any normal platform
Bluesky has released Ozone, a community moderation tool for the network. Although all Bluesky users get the default moderation out of the box, they can also subscribe to any of a number of user-created and run "labelers" (which you can see in this Bluesky list, or on this website).
Some of them label posts with content that could trigger various phobias, some label posts from Twitter, some label AI generated images, some hide spoilers, and some label... posts of beans. Others build an additional entire moderation layer on top of the defaults.
Honestly, I think it's a pretty cool approach to moderation.
