Comment by fc417fc802 3 days ago
> does not account for users banned from Bluesky by Bluesky for breaking the ToS or PDS abuse.
Then you are missing the point. I am asking how much censorship power the largest node in the network has.
If being blocked by the largest provider means 95% of users can't see me anymore then the situation is strictly worse than Mastodon vs ActivityPub-at-large.
First you made incorrect and misleading statements. Then when I point it out you try to rhetorically shift blame on to me.
To answer your misleading and irrelevant question, I have never been banned by Bluesky. What did you do to get banned on Mastodon? Do you understand that "moderation" and "banned for violating the ToS" are one and the same?
ATProto is not any better than ActivityPub (ie Mastodon) regarding the impact of network effects on moderation. The "big few" retain their outsized influence with both protocols, at least as far as I am aware. If there is a technical misunderstanding about this on my part then do please point it out.
Moreover, the current situation is significantly worse on ATProto because the vast majority of the network currently relies on a single provider.
To be clear, I am not opposed to ATProto. I am only opposed to inaccurate technical comparisons.
I was using the indeterminate "you" for a hypothetical question, one that gets asked often
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ATProto moderation is technically and fundamentally different from ActivityPub: https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...
The question remains misleading and irrelevant whether it was addressed to me or the room at large.
I am well aware that ATProto makes improvements to both account migration and end user moderation. Those are of course good things in my view. As previously stated I have noting against ATProto.
This entire subthread started because I responded to your claim that "It's like if every Mastodon user ran their own server". That is highly misleading at best, outright wrong at worst. It is only equivalent to that scenario if every ATProto user manages their own account as well as every single other required service, at which point you might as well just have run your own Mastodon instance as it likely would have been both simpler and less resource intensive.
The reality is that this is never expected to happen. ATProto is expected to be like Mastodon, with the improvements that you can share a single account between multiple servers and there are tools to apply additional filtering so that you don't have to see (as much of) things you don't like. Those are certainly welcome improvements but they do nothing to address the outsized effects on censorship that large nodes have in federated networks.
Purely in theory, you could simultaneously use a single account with a full set of politically correct ATProto services (such as Bluesky) and a competing set of politically incorrect ones operated by someone else. However, if history is anything to go off of then this will quickly get you banned by either one or both of the operators. Merely interacting with those guilty of wrongthink has always been an easy way to get kicked off of a surprisingly large number of Mastodon servers.
Even supposing that the above doesn't happen to get you banned by either node, the potential still remains that it could. Whether or not a large node chooses to exercise its outsized influence doesn't change the fact that it possesses it. ATProto doesn't fix that.
What did you do to get banned? Most people who make this claim are unwilling to share the behavior that led to it. Bans are not arbitrary, nor is anyone obligated to host or show your speech
ATProto is young compared to the alternatives, give the network time to build out an ecosystem and the resilience we need.