@FediTips
Right! So what we’re talking about here is a failure of moderation, or more broadly, a failure of Trust & Safety. Bluesky *was* a functioning social network because its users temporarily browbeat them into doing actual T&S, and not just leaving everything to public blocklists as they originally intended to do. But now their failures in moderation have outed them as the crypto-enthusiast neo-reactionaries that many suspected them of being, and their most vulnerable users will not be protected on that platform.
But also, let’s not pretend like T&S was a solved issue here on the fedi. As if the biggest de facto instance mastodon dot social, currently federating with Meta, wouldn't host those same government accounts if approached.
Large swaths of vulnerable minority users came to Mastodon first looking for places safer than twitter and quickly abandoned it for bsky because Mastodon did NOT protect them. The servers they adopted repeatedly failed their minority users because intersectional moderation is a rarity, and fundamental T&S is routinely ignored in the fedi.
I’ve repeatedly seen server meltdown after meltdown because a mod wouldn’t restrict obvious hate speech, or a mod turned out to be a fascist and the admin team shrugged it off, or an admin showed their ass so blatantly it was clear to all their judgment was not to be trusted.
Adding troublesome accounts to blocklists on bsky and defederating troublesome servers on Mastodon are both technical workarounds that do not address the underlying problem of moderation failure. We can point at bsky’s failures, but they do not detract from the planks in our own eyes. The network the platform is built on, while important, is not as vital as Trust & Safety.