Also: @kissane.bsky.social wrote some great stuff about Mastodon protocol/platform on her blog (!!!) which was a good reminder of how "open" is not the same as "inclusive."

https://erinkissane.com/blue-skies-over-mastodon

I'm pessimistic about our ability to create protocols that will address the needs of online community though.

And I think the world has already moved on from typing messages at one another in a public-ish space.

Collectively, we calibrated to a level of email spam filters that was "good enough," that kept our Inboxes mostly okay, and now we take care of the rest.

SMS is experiencing a similar problem with spam. The protocols/platforms are going to have to get better, but they'll never be perfect.

Waiting for the bartender to pull the bat out from under the table is a platform mentality; you get to be passive and let the benevolent sky wizard handle the bad guys.

But in my email Inbox, I'm the bartender. I pull the bat out whenever I want.

Everyone wants Bluesky to kick the racist Nazis out of the bar.

But ultimately, the way a community stays safe is with tools that allow them to kick the Nazis out themselves. "We keep us safe" applies to online spaces as well.

I think that like a lot of good & valuable things (see also: journalism), healthy open online communities are ultimately incompatible with capitalism.

They take a lot of work to build & maintain, and usually need the community to contribute some part of that work to feel "healthy"

But it's been a long fucking time since folks grappled with social protocols in a meaningful way. Usenet was already dying when I first started coding HTML websites 25 years ago.

Meanwhile, most of us are using protocols every day of our lives (email, SMS), but we use them in a way that's private, like 1-to-1 or 1-to-A Few Close Friends.

We take their features (like block) for granted. And we've accepted the fact that they are never 100% clean/safe. (Phishing, spam, etc)

Once your platform scales, you experience the content moderation learning curve and everything sucks so much.

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/

In a platform world, the sky wizards of moderation are never able to please everyone.

At a small scale – a Discord server or a sub-reddit for example – this doesn't really matter, because small communities are usually homogenous in the ways that matter.

Good protocols include tools that empower users to feel safe, keep themselves safe, create a space that feels safe. This can feel like "work" but it also puts communities in control.

Good platforms, on the other hand, do the safety work for users with a combo of human & engineering effort.

Cannot fucking wait for every icon on my iPhone to be a derivative of the Windows 95 desktop wallpaper I am so stoked.

Yeah but which one is named Doug?

Stop falling for the bait, dweebs.

What breed is Samson? He's so handsome!