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Jack Dorsey explaining exactly why no single company should own a social media platform.
I didn’t “sell you out”. All public companies are for sale to highest bidder. Always.

2 użytkowników udostępniło to dalej

In the venture capital game, the sell out happens at the very start when you accept venture capital.

#vc #ventureCapital #SiliconValley #SurveillanceCapitalism #BigTech
@aral I’ve been trying to find a comment I saw last night that Jack made in the same thread about Bluesky never accepting VC, but I can’t find it.

I did find this, though, which is somewhat relevant to this discussion.
Jack: “The company would have never survived as a public company. Would you rather have had it owned by hedge funds and Wall Street activists? That was the only alternative.”

Erica Joy Astrella: “yes. they are at least transparently beholden to their lord and savior the dollar and aren't trying to win favor from bigots.

“i've often wondered if some part of you really wanted twitter to die and knew that selling to whatshisbutt would be the most effective way to kill it.”
But Jack Dorsey also still prefers that Elon Musk own Twitter instead of a bank.

Which is a wild thing to say knowing what we know now.
I’d rather a technologist/entrepreneur/someone that actually uses the platform buy it than a banker/pe trying to maximize profit. But ultimately that doesn’t matter. Whoever pays highest price gets it.
Ten wpis został zedytowany (11 miesiące temu)
Call me crazy, but if I was in Jack Dorsey’s position, I would have converted Twitter into a consumer-owned and worker-owned co-op.

Sell it to everyone who uses Twitter and works on it.

That model works for many successful companies.
The company would have never survived as a public company. Would you rather have had it owned by hedge funds and Wall Street activists? That was the only alternative.
I just asked Jack Dorsey why he doesn’t donate towards helping ActivityPub.

Will he reply? Because I really want to know 🙂
Jack Dorsey: I had company make the investment, am on board, and will continue to personally grant money to this and nostr and any open protocol initiatives I believe have positive impact.

Me: Why don’t you donate towards helping ActivityPub? That protocol has the most momentum right now.
Here’s how Jack Dorsey want to monetize Bluesky:

1. Subscriptions
2. Ads
3. Commerce/Transactions
Question: What is the eventual business model for this protocol and ecosystem? User donations like Fediverse/Mastodon? Please don’t say ads.

Jack Dorsey: Some clients may do subscription. Some may do ads. Some may do commerce or transactions. What people want to use will decide.
Jack Dorsey says he doesn’t believe a company should own a protocol platform and distribution.

Glad to hear he regrets Twitter.

Sooo… when will Bluesky connect to multiple nodes?
Question: Considering this, if you’d had an opportunity to run Twitter again as a private company would you have taken that route? Happy it led to this experiment with a decentralized alternative, that said.

Answer: No. I don’t believe a company should own the protocol platform and distribution.
At least Jack Dorsey doesn’t want to run Bluesky through a DAO.
Question: Fun. Maybe DAO?

Jack Dorsey: Hell no. This explicitly was built without a blockchain or token. By design.
Jack Dorsey says if AT protocol has a CEO, it fails.

I agree.

I guess Bluesky should decentralize soon.
Ultimately this protocol has no CEO. If it does, it fails. Jay and team are building something to enable everyone to own this. If the people don’t own it, it failed.
Jack Dorsey doesn’t want AT protocol to be capable of DMs.

That means they’re probably not coming to Bluesky either.
Question: Where's the goddamn mother fuckin dm button @jack.bsky.social ???

Jack Dorsey: Use Signal
Here’s what I don’t understand: why does Jack Dorsey pretend that ActivityPub doesn’t exist?
He has a consistent stance about this since years: https://twitter.com/meduzen/status/1204858614789427207
Me, quoting Jack Dorsey on Twitter and pointing that he’s trying to invent ActivityPub and Mastodon by saying in December 2019: “Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵”.
Ten wpis został zedytowany (11 miesiące temu)
@Chris Trottier just out of curiosity - is there any view of these public posts from bluesky outside the app, through the website ?
Based on his support of Nostr, #Mastodon and #ActivityPub should have nothing to do with him.

Nostr, and quite likely Blue Sky wants to make it impossible to ban or remove a users access for violating server or network policies. This is a recipe for rampant hate and bigotry, along with harassment and hate speech. Something twitter seemed designed to encourage from the very start.
Nostr also goes big on the principles of “free speech,” despite not mentioning the term in its documentation a single time. It's virtually impossible to boot a person off the platform completely unless all relays ban them. However, as Nostr’s documentation reads, “there will always be some Russian server willing to take your money in exchange for serving your posts.”
@Susan_Larson_TN
"In its latest update, Bluesky has added Thread Muting, so that you can mute notifications of conversations in which you have been mentioned. A few days ago, Bluesky was updated with content moderation for the first time. Users can now report a post as spam, hate content, copyright infringement, or illegal."

https://9to5mac.com/2023/04/21/bluesky-moderation-new-features/

Nostr is a totally different situation. In a P2P network there are no server mods and everyone is their own moderator.

@atomicpoet
@rysiek
> who is reviewing these reports? Who is responsible for these decisions?

Good questions. No idea yet. But the existence of these features makes me skeptical that...

@Susan_Larson_TN
> Blue Sky wants to make it impossible to ban or remove a users access for violating server or network policies

@atomicpoet
@strypey I hope you're right. But my reading of the ATproto docs — with "speech", "neutrality", and "protection from bans" mentioned front-and-center, while moderation does not even seem to be considered — makes me doubt it.

@Susan_Larson_TN @atomicpoet
We've already heard that they want to be able to label toxic accounts and give users the ability to filter them out on the client end. That speaks to them not actually moderating shit, and putting the burden entirely on the end user.

It also speaks to them wanting to allow bad actors to flourish there.

They're not going to do shit to protect anyone except their investors.
@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz@Susan_Larson_TN@mastodon.online@atomicpoet@mastodon.social
@kichae
> they want to be able to label toxic accounts and give users the ability to filter them out on the client end

Depending on the implementation, that sounds like a good feature. Some people in fediverse would love to be able to subscribe to a blocklist, so they're not relying entirely on their admins to screen out Bad Actors.

> putting the burden entirely on the end user

It also puts the *power* in the hands of the people using the network.

(1/2)

@atomicpoet @rysiek @Susan_Larson_TN
@strypey what I worry about is that on fedi, there are two layers of block:
- account block
- instance block / defederation

Admins/moderators block specific users, and if many are coming from specific instances, they get to block whole instances. Thus raising the cost — in very real terms (domain name, for example) — of allowing misbehaving users on an instance.

I don't see how that cost can be raised on BlueSky, even with "labels-based blocklists".

@kichae @atomicpoet @Susan_Larson_TN
@strypey what's stopping a harasser from setting up a new account and continuing their harassment? Once they do, they have to be *again* labeled by someone and added to the blocklist. And again. And again.

On fedi every fedi admin knows or learns fast there's a trade-off between open signups and potential for abuse, which might lead to defederations. So people tend to keep their house in order, or the house gets put in quarantine.

@kichae @atomicpoet @Susan_Larson_TN
@strypey on BlueSky, at least based on my reading of the protocol, all moderation will be per-account. No cost to having sockpuppet accounts, no cost to creating new accounts once old ones get labeled and added to blocklists.

Meanwhile, somebody has to maintain these blocklists. Somebody has to label these posts. This is real work, that now has to be done with a per-account resolution, instead of per-instance. That's the "burden on end user" mentioned by
@kichae.
@atomicpoet @Susan_Larson_TN
@strypey I'll add one more thing to this: fedi's model allows for somewhat effective moderation (no question it needs to improve!) while at the same time allowing for pseudonymity.

You can be pseudonymous on a reputable instance. Nobody will ask for your phone number, "real name", etc. because as long as you behave, there is no reason to. And if you misbehave, either you get booted off of the instance, or the instance gets defederated from.

@kichae @atomicpoet @Susan_Larson_TN
@strypey effectively, instances on fedi are "proxies" for trust and reputation. You trust an instance to behave and if you see misbehaving users, you expect the instance to deal with them. Users can remain pseudonymous though.

I suspect BlueSky will struggle with it greatly because there is no such proxy for trust and reputation. It seems attached to the user account. And since creating a sockpuppet account is faster than moderating it… yeah.

@kichae @atomicpoet @Susan_Larson_TN
Thanks for the clarification @Susan_Larson_TN.

@rysiek
> on BlueSky, at least based on my reading of the protocol, all moderation will be per-account. No cost to having sockpuppet accounts, no cost to creating new accounts once old ones get labeled and added to blocklists

Ah, I see. I agree the lack of server-level moderation is a problem. Is this an unavoidable downside of full account portability? Is there any way for a protocol to enable both?

@kichae @atomicpoet
@strypey I don't think so, no. But as I keep saying, I would love to be proven wrong.

Yes, I believe this is an unavoidable downside to having full account portability with no moderation power put in the network's nodes (PDS's in case of BlueSky).

Basically, choose two:
- full account portability
- real pseudonymity
- effective moderation

Let's call it "rysiek's triangle of moderation sadness".

@Susan_Larson_TN @kichae @atomicpoet
@rysiek
> Let's call it "rysiek's triangle of moderation sadness"

I knew there was one of those 'choose any 2' triangles there! I just couldn't think what the third side was. Thanks for this insight.

@Susan_Larson_TN @kichae @atomicpoet
@strypey as consider this very rough around the edges, though. It's more of a feeling than a well thought-through rule.

There are many more dimensions/sides possible that might be relevant here. For example: global consistency. Or is that included in "full account portability"? 🤔

It also hand-waves away the fact that "effective moderation" is somewhat hard to define. Effective for whom?

But I do think the general direction is roughly correct here.

@Susan_Larson_TN @kichae @atomicpoet
@rysiek
> "effective moderation" is somewhat hard to define

True, but you know it when you see it, and particularly when you see it lacking ;)

@Susan_Larson_TN @kichae @atomicpoet
@rysiek
> I believe this is an unavoidable downside to having full account portability with no moderation power put in the network's nodes

How does the Zot/Zap/Streams network resolve this with Nomadic Identity?

@Susan_Larson_TN @kichae @atomicpoet

#Zap #Zot #Streams #NomadicIdentity #moderation
@Strypey @Chris Trottier @Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @Christopher @Susan Larson ♀️🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🌈 If Zot/Zap had become more widespread then the problem in moderation would have been similar: https://zotlabs.org/page/zot/specs+zot6+nomadic+identity .
But... #nomadic #identity, after all, does not have to be built into the protocol to be practically usable. If we base it on domain ownership and the server handles account creation on the user's domain ( #BringYourOwnDomain ) then we pretty much have it done (still a matter of migrating posts but that's already a small problem then).
And such a thing is supported by e.g. the #takahe project, compatible with mastodon api.
@miklo
> If we base it on domain ownership

This would be fine if every person got one domain name that they don't have to pay for. But as things stand, tying identity ownership to domain ownership forces people to pay protection money to a third party every year, or they lose their identity, and their posting history becomes invisible. This is a minor nuisance for the middle classes, but a major barrier to working class people.

@atomicpoet @rysiek @kichae @Susan_Larson_TN
@Strypey @Chris Trottier @Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦 @Christopher @Susan Larson ♀️🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️🌈
The $4 (regular renewal price) per year for a low-cost domain (e.g. .uk) is an unaffordable amount for working class people ?
Note that one domain is often enough for an entire family, a group of friends, an organisation....
@miklo never underestimate how poor most of the world is.

> Currently, 1 billion people worldwide live on less than one dollar a day, the threshold defined by the international community as constituting extreme poverty.
https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/surviving-pennies-we-must-help-worlds-most-deprived

@strypey @atomicpoet @kichae @Susan_Larson_TN
@miklo
> The $4 (regular renewal price) per year for a low-cost domain

... at which registrars? I've been paying much more than that for my domains.

But the price is not really the point. Imagine having to pay each year to renew other forms of ID, like birth certificate, passport, or driver's license. Would anyone accept this?

@atomicpoet @rysiek @kichae @Susan_Larson_TN
@miklo
> one domain is often enough for an entire family, a group of friends, an organisation

Not if you're using them as unique identifiers for portable accounts. For that, you need one per person.

@atomicpoet @rysiek @kichae @Susan_Larson_TN
basing account identity on domain identity one-to-one (as in: one domain name is one account) also breaks "real pseudonymity", as owning a domain name usually requires some form of ID and traceable money transfer.

@miklo @atomicpoet @kichae @Susan_Larson_TN
@counterinduration I would say it indeed "breaks" full account portability — and I don't think that's moot (or a bad thing).

Full account portability ignores what identities are being hosted; the "reach" layer is where "blocking" happens. You could still move your accounts around anywhere you want, even if some people don't see it.

That's different from Zot, AFAIU, as Zot instance admins can block specific identities from using their instances.

@strypey @Susan_Larson_TN @kichae @atomicpoet
@counterinduration imagine a protocol (ATproto might be that, reading the spec) where an instance/node/"personal data server" admins have no say and no tools to stop specific identities from being hosted on their nodes.

Kinda like IPFS, but for identities:
https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/issues/2152

Anyway, "full account portability" probably needs a better term, and the whole thing is just a gut feeling type thing that I need to think through better. 😄

@strypey @Susan_Larson_TN @kichae @atomicpoet
@rysiek
> imagine a protocol (ATproto might be that, reading the spec) where an instance/node/"personal data server" admins have no say and no tools to stop specific identities from being hosted on their nodes

Nostr relay admins can ban identities, but that doesn't help if spinning up new identities is effortless, as you pointed out earlier.

(1/2)

@counterinduration @Susan_Larson_TN @kichae @atomicpoet
@rysiek
Idle thought; is there some way MAC addresses could be boiled into account creation? Such that you could see that accounts were coming from the same device, without being able to extract the MAC address or any other data about the device?

(2/2

@counterinduration @Susan_Larson_TN @kichae @atomicpoet
also, this is the wrong place to look for solutions in. A person having 50 well-behaving accounts accounts should be allowed to continue having 50 well-behaving accounts.

@counterinduration @Susan_Larson_TN @kichae @atomicpoet
@rysiek
> A person having 50 well-behaving accounts accounts should be allowed to continue having 50 well-behaving accounts

Agreed. I'm suggesting a way of identifying patterns of activity deriving from a single source, in case those 50 (or 500 or 5000) accounts are not well behaved. Not just in a speech sense either, this could be useful in mitigating DDOS attacks from within the network, for example.

@counterinduration @Susan_Larson_TN @kichae @atomicpoet
@rysiek
> I can trivially change my MAC address, there is even a GUI for it in my network management interface in my OS

Ok so it's not foolproof, but could it work against anyone who (like me) didn't know that was possible or how to do it? What if you also boiled the IP address into account creation as well, so you'd need to change both MAC and IP between each account creation to evade pattern recognition. That would add cost, right?

@counterinduration @Susan_Larson_TN @kichae @atomicpoet
@strypey no. MAC addresses are not useful here in the slightest.

they can be set by the user, they are not available to the server, and are not really available to the browser.

It makes zero sense to use MAC addresses in this context, at all.

@counterinduration @Susan_Larson_TN @kichae @atomicpoet