To kind of summarize some of the recent #Bluesky drama. Yesterday Bluesky changed their Terms of Service to require binding arbitration. Users are unhappy, but there's nothing they can do about it because Bluesky is not decentralized and there is no place they can go. Today, Bluesky banned a user for wishing ill of J.K. Rowling for her anti-trans hate. Users are very unhappy, but there's nothing they can do about it because Bluesky is not decentralized and there is no place they can go.

Get it?

@mastodonmigration what about Blacksky? I thought they actually had their own server that uses ATProto and doesn't rely on Bluesky to run, was I misinformed?

You were informed correctly. Blacksky started inviting people to their PDS to people last weekend, hundreds of people have migrated -- which preserves their posting history and the context of their conversations -- something that's impossible on fedi.

The binding artibtration in the proposed ToS certainly is problematic, arguably even worse the problematic binding arbitration Mastodon gGmbH proposed and then withdrew. So we'll see what happens.

@raphaelmorgan @mastodonmigration

Also, following up on the second part of this, users on Bluesky do the same thing when they're unhappy about a moderation decision that Mastodon users do: give the people making the decision a hard time. Sometimes it works; Dani Finn, the author who was suspended, had their account restored. Here's a story they just published, inspired by the suspension. https://danifinn.itch.io/under-cerulean-skies

There's certainly a pattern of bad moderation decisions by Bluesky reflecting anti-trans (and anti-Black,and anti-Palestinian biases) biases. Even when they get reversed, that's bad -- and they often don't get reversed, and that's worse.

Still it's worth keeping in mind what happened here when a debate about moderation decisions related to a JKRgame spiraled into mastodon.lol shutting down. In that case, people give the person making the decision a hard time; instead of reversing the decision, he shut down the instance. Hundreds of people had to move as a result, and they all lost their posting history -- and I know one person who just happened to be off fedi during the three months people had to move, so lost their entire network when they came back.

So while the dynamics are different, it's not like things are always so great here either.

@raphaelmorgan @mastodonmigration

Also, following up on the second part of this, users on Bluesky do the same thing when they're unhappy about a moderation decision that Mastodon users do: give the people making the decision a hard time. Sometimes it works; Dani Finn, the author who was suspended, had their account restored. Here's a story they just published, inspired by the suspension. https://danifinn.itch.io/under-cerulean-skies

There's certainly a pattern of bad moderation decisions by Bluesky reflecting anti-trans (and anti-Black,and anti-Palestinian biases) biases. Even when they get reversed, that's bad -- and they often don't get reversed, and that's worse.

Still it's worth keeping in mind what happened here when a debate about moderation decisions related to a JKRgame spiraled into mastodon.lol shutting down. In that case, people give the person making the decision a hard time; instead of reversing the decision, he shut down the instance. Hundreds of people had to move as a result, and they all lost their posting history -- and I know one person who just happened to be off fedi during the three months people had to move, so lost their entire network when they came back.

So while the dynamics are different, it's not like things are always so great here either.

@raphaelmorgan @mastodonmigration

@thenexusofprivacy @raphaelmorgan

Maybe you know the answer to this. Do Blacksky users need to agree to the Bluesky ToS?

That is, do they create an account through the Bluesky app and have to click through the ToS acknowledgement or in some other way become bound by the arbitration provisions?

@thenexusofprivacy @mastodonmigration oh hey that was my first server lol
And it was Not Fun losing all of my posts because my admin had a breakdown about being accountable to the community that's the other thing, as much as Mastodon proponents say fedi is better because "you can just move servers", at least with Mastodon moving means losing all of your posts which are the main thing I wanted to keep anyway. So not much better than moving from Bluesky to like... Anywhere, especially Blacksky

To use the Bluesky app, you have to agree to the Bluesky ToS (no matter what PDS your data is stored on).

However, you can use other apps as well, in which case you don't have to agree to Bluesky's ToS, and can ignore their moderation labels. This is how people get around Bluesky's requirements for age verification for the Online Safety Act (etc). Similarly when the Turkish government ordered them to block access to the accounts of dozens of Turkish dissidents tn Turkey, people who used non-Bliuesky apps could still get to those accounts . [So could people not in Turkey using the Bluesky app, but that's a different mechanism -- country-based moderation decisions, something that's standard on commercial social networks, although not Mastodon).

Again I am absolutely not defending Bluesky's moderation, it is far worse than well-moderated fedi instances. And today almost nobody uses the alternate apps, so if they ban somebody from the Bluesky app at least for now it really does in practice cut off interactions from their network. I'm just saying that the grass isn't actually greener here.

@mastodonmigration @raphaelmorgan

@thenexusofprivacy @raphaelmorgan

Understood about grass greener etc. The question is whether you need to agree to the Bluesky ToS even if you use another app [side question: What are other viable apps?] Can you create an account on another app or do you still need the Bluesky app to create an account? And for this you obviously would need to agree to the ToS. That would mean it is not the same thing as the age verification thing which you can bypass using another app.

You were informed correctly. Blacksky started inviting people to their PDS to people last weekend, hundreds of people have migrated -- which preserves their posting history and the context of their conversations -- something that's impossible on fedi.

The binding artibtration in the proposed ToS certainly is problematic, arguably even worse the problematic binding arbitration Mastodon gGmbH proposed and then withdrew. So we'll see what happens.

@raphaelmorgan @mastodonmigration

@thenexusofprivacy @raphaelmorgan @mastodonmigration I know I’m replying to an old thread but there’s a few Fedi platforns that allow for complete post migration. It’s impossible on Mastodon vut it’s very possible, and it’s accomplished, regularly, in the Fedi.

deer.social is one example of an alternate app. Blacksky's working on one that should be out fairly soon. To create an account completely outside of the Bluesky ToS, you might also need an alternate AppView server -- i'm not sure about that tbh. zeppelin.social and AppViewLite are two Bluesky-compatible AppViews that are about as easy to run as a fedi instance although at this point almost nobody is using them.

spark.so (a Brazlian video app) is probably farthest down the road with a complete parallel stack; Blacksky, Gander (a Canadian project), and various stuff lumped together as Eurosky are getting there as well.

In general the attitude there is "yeah we know we can't trust Bluesky PBC, let's make this alternative infrastructure real." So a lot of things that seem like huge gotchas to people in fedi are basically viewed over there as problems that they're working on addressing -- and making steady progress. Of course it's still TBD how the actual power distributions will shake out in the ATmosphere ... then again it's still TBD how the actual power distributions will shake out over here!

@mastodonmigration @raphaelmorgan

#bluesky

@thenexusofprivacy @mastodonmigration @raphaelmorgan Seems like that also creates complexity hazards. For example, you mentioned AppViews possibly being subject to Bluesky's binding arbitration agreement. A lot of that infrastructure is basically opaque to most casual users, which creates the potential for situations where a person believes they're not subject to the BS TOS, but are because the extended infrastructure of their AT use routes through BS services or servers.

Yeah, it's all very complex.

@neil flagged similar problems with the language in Mastodon's (now-withdrawn) proposed ToS changes, where it wasn't clear whether they applied only to registered users of an instance or anybody whose posts federate there. And some of that same language is also in mstdn.social's existing ToS (which already require binding arbitration but for some reason never get mentioned in these conversations).

In general I don't think there's a good understanding of how to craft ToS for decentralized social networks -- or regulations (as we're currently seeing with Online Services Act). So companies and regulators have every incentive to state things as broadly as possible to give them the flexibility, and at some poit we'll see what the courts have to say.

@lrhodes @mastodonmigration @raphaelmorgan

@thenexusofprivacy @lrhodes @mastodonmigration @raphaelmorgan

> I don't think there's a good understanding of how to craft ToS for decentralized social networks

Here is my attempt:

https://forge.neilzone.co.uk/neil/sample_fedi_terms