They also have Paul Frazee, who is the Beaker Browser dude and one of the Secure Scuttlebutt dudes. And also whyrusleeping, one of the IPFS dudes. So if they manage to enshittify it won’t be because they forgot to hire enough “Wizard Utopians” with decentralization experience.
Sure
Like, each user is individually kicked off the PDS in reaction to some bad thing they did? Or labeling is reactive in that it labels bad stuff already posted, and each user has to pick labelers to listen to themselves?
I’m not sure if Bluesky’s front-end defaults to using some particular labelers. I know there’s some moderation going on for you as soon as you log in, done by someone.
But yes, each user has to choose whose moderation decisions they want to use, and they can’t rely on everyone they can see also seeing exactly the same space they themselves are seeing. But I’m not sure it’s possible or even desirable to get rid of the requirement/ability to choose your mods. I should be able to be in a community that has mods I trust, and the community chatting to itself and determining that so-and-so is a great mod who we should all listen to, and then all listening to them, sounds like a good idea to me.
Being able to see and talk to people who aren’t in the same space I’m in might not be as good?
Smartphones are great. Apps are user-hostile malware. Online spaces are, in the majority, traps. If every time you drove downtown you ended up in a corporate police state designed to play you and your friends off each other and make you all miserable so you look at more advertisements for shampoo, you would conclude that getting in the car is bad for you.
No?
An anthropomorphic model of the software, wherein you can articulate things like “the software is making up packages”, or “the software mistakenly thinks these packages ought to exist”, is the right level of abstraction for usefully reasoning about software like this. Using that model, you can make predictions about what will happen when you run the software, and you can take actions that will lead to the outcomes you want occurring more often when you run the software.
If you try to explain what is going on without these concepts, you’re left saying something like “the wrong token is being sampled because the probability of the right one is too low because of several thousand neural network weights being slightly off of where they would have to be to make the right one come out consistently”. Which is true, but not useful.
The anthropomorphic approach suggests stuff like “yell at the software in all caps to only use python packages that really exist”, and that sort of approach has been found to be effective in practice.
Echo chambers aren’t that bad. I don’t surround myself with people and things I like because the ones I don’t like are going to hurt me, I do it because I don’t like them and my life is too short to waste with their nonsense.
You can kick bigots off a Bluesky PDS.
But letting everyone label accounts and posts and run feeds of moderation advice is a lot quicker at booting someone from the virtual space than waiting around for someone to come and decide that yes, so-and-so really has broken BigPDSHost policy and shall be deleted. It’s also a great way to find who you want to boot.
Just start sending your own terms back to them. They accepted the terms and provided the thing? Great!
How much of this is “the model can read ASCII art”, and how much of this is “the model knows exactly what word ought to go where [MASK] is because it is a guess-the-word-based computing paradigm”?
Server “owners” do not own anything from a data security standpoint.
How can you tell that this is true?
But now, or soon, you can have one person with half an idea, like “what if The Rock had to save Shanghai from mole zombies”, and they can grab a text generator to fill in most of the screenplay, and then dial in the number of synonyms for “exciting” used to describe the explosions, and come out with Day of the Living Moles, a 95 minute feature film, in a weekend. Without actually having to have had any traditional cinematography skills or breaking an artistic sweat.
There are categories of creative work that are throw-away; little sketches on napkins, improvised songs, quick sketches that an artist might think of are of no account to anyone. And the scope of what can be dashed off like that, with minimal time and effort, is growing because of more powerful tools.
Why should I watch Universal’s superhero blockbuster when I can watch my buddy Jimothy’s? What happens when the number of plausible films dramatically exceeds the time that movie critics have to watch them to sort out which are any good?
Popular? None.
But we don’t only have to build an environment that allows the doing of popular things. We also need to maintain a society in which unpopular or unusual things can be done. The doing of unpopular or unusual things is itself popular.
Gasslight Gateskeep Girlboss
Does the server operator avoid any responsibility for data protection by just having the actual physical copies of all the data they do have access to (user names, post contents, etc.) physically live over at Discord? If the company president’s PC is hacked and someone steals copies of all the personal information in support chats that were conducted over Discord, or the contents of private channels where people posted their home addresses for Secret Santa, or whatever, can the company get out of having any sort of data breach disclosure obligations because the data was really Discord’s data?
As long as what is going on here is basically comparable to what is going on when a company uses a third-party service as a peer to individuals, then yes, the company probably isn’t somehow responsible for what the service is doing. Government Twitter pages have been found to legally constitute public forums, but that was in the context of restricting the government from blocking people. The person whose page it is still don’t really run the place and probably isn’t responsible for the actions of the platform.
But if a company hires another company to build and operate a communication platform for it (more of a Mailchimp or Invision Community situation), then you probably have a data controller-data processor style relationship.
So, is Discord more like Spotify or is it more like Mailchimp?
AI can spell technology.
But if the developer makes a Discord “server” for their game community, they are telling Discord to set up a service. If the developer encourages people to join it and retains moderation rights, they’re taking that service they ordered from Discord and providing it to other people. If the developer failed to get some legally required in their jurisdiction contractual terms from Discord about what Discord can and can’t do with data on the people who use the service, the developer could get in trouble when they provide that service to people without the service following local laws.
How does one go about doing that? Because Google Voice doesn’t seem to cut it.
I could stop trying to use Discord and drive to Best Buy and buy a cell phone and pay for a month of service. Then I could add the number to the account. Then if I stop paying for the monthly service, there’s a good chance that Discord or whoever won’t believe I’m me at some future login and will demand I give them a code they sent to the phone number on file.
I’m sure that the Title IX people will be very excited to hear about the disparate impact of this decision.
I remember it as, Firefox was fast enough, but Chrome was shipping a weirdly quick JS engine and trying to convince people to put more stuff into JS because on Chrome that would be feasible. Nowdays if you go out without your turbo-JIT hand-optimized JS engine everyone laughs at you and it’s Chrome’s fault.