Massively Multiplayer Governance
18 December 2024 | 3:00 pm

I'm writing this mostly for the sake of my own mental accounting, so I can look back at this years from now and gauge whether my assumptions or position has since changed.

Until recently I had no idea who Jesse Singal was. I still don't know much, but my Bluesky feed has told me all I really need to know:

  • Jesse Singal's presence on the mainline Bluesky network makes many tens of thousands of people feel unsafe.
  • Several people whom I defer to for their expertise in community health have proposed Jesse's removal from the network as the best course of action.

There's been a lot of talk about whether Jesse's behavior has explicitly violated Bluesky's Terms of Service, i.e. their declarative community rules. But a community is primarily successful on the merits of its implicit ruleset, as determined by cultural norms.

Emerging out of this debacle, two things stand out to me as techno-social utilities currently lacking in Bluesky:

  • Multiple sandboxes
  • Community governance

Multiplayer Sandboxing

Many have rightly pointed out that this clash between Bluesky's moderation policies and the wishes of the community would have been a trivial issue in the ActivityPub-powered fediverse. In the federated model, Jesse would “simply” have to find himself an instance that aligns with his values and general demeanor.

That's not to say Bluesky has to be fully federated in the same way as ActivityPub to support a similar kind of community sandboxing. That “simple” after all is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Massively Multiplayer games like World of Warcraft, which are operated as fully centralized cloud services, still have multiple different instances for their players to inhabit. Partly this is due to scaling concerns that don't apply to Bluesky's architecture, but these games also have specific types of instances that allow players to self-sort into the style of gameplay they're looking for.

The most common distinction is between PvE (Player versus Environment) and PvP (Player versus Player) instances, or designated zones therein.

This separation is necessary because while some players just wanna enjoy the expansive world and story on their own terms, others enjoy the thrill of clashing with player-characters who present a greater threat than any dungeon boss the game can muster up, since they can literally chase you to the ends of the earth with the tenacity that only a human foe possesses.

We don't all want the same things in our online experience, so it's essential that we have separate sandboxes to play in. I am not however advocating for an instance-picker at the start of the Bluesky signup process, nor is this about seperating The Good Place from The Bad Place.

What I'm saying is that the decision space available to the T&S team becomes a very binary block-or-not when Bluesky is operated as a monolithic super-instance with no further segmentation possible.

Jesse Singal makes my friends deeply uncomfortable, so I don't want him in the same room as us, simple as. That doesn't mean I think Jesse has no right to exist on the open social web. We need a separate room for Jesse.

I can't say yet exactly how I think this should work, but I've jotted down some initial thoughts on “How fedi-instance belonging can be resolved”:

  1. be a member of more than one instance (think dual citizenship)

  2. able to view/follow any public instance’s local feed

  3. default way for instances to ‘disagree’ should be default-hide whole instances, not hard block (no walls between tenants, just tall shrubs)

  4. ratio-blocks per instance should block user from that instance

  5. instance-blocks are enacted democratically

This isn't specific to any protocol, it's just what I believe ought to be possible as a happy middle ground between the prior art of the AP-based fediverse and the emerging ATmosphere.

The main idea here is multi-instance belonging. You may already be familiar with composable moderation; let's also have composable spaces. The difference is that moderation protections are chosen defensively, whereas we choose our spaces on the basis of being drawn in by the people already there, and the notable absence of those who are not.

Erin Kissane talks about picking the right pair of shoes. I recently heard her say on a podcast that we shouldn't have to pick just the one pair; that's exactly what a proper implementation of nomadic identity ought to make possible for us. Credible exit implies a pluriverse if spaces to enter and leave at will.

Let the server instances provide the party venue and then, if you're feeling the vibe, Bring Your Own Identity over for a good time.

Community Governance

'Is Bluesky Decentralized?' has been an ongoing conversation (a delightful one at that). Technicalities aside, it's pretty clear that governance power in the Bluesky community is highly centralized.

Christine Lemmer-Webber's definition of decentralization applies just as well here, even though we're not talking about protocols:

Decentralization is the result of a system that diffuses power throughout its structure, so that no node holds particular power at the center.

Stack as many moderation services together as you want, but there's only one institutional node with the power to delete Jesse Singal from Bluesky inc's public square.

That centrality of authority is exactly what is making a lot of people very upset, especially when the authority insists that their hands are tied so long as there’s no egregious violation of their ToS, as if there cannot be other levers of change to address edge cases unfit for standard procedure.

Note: I vehemently disapprove of anyone who directed their anger at the Bluesky team in harmful ways. The best explanation I can come up with for their behavior is that they want the people in authority to experience the unsafety that was imposed on them by the authority’s inaction. I understand the emotional response, but I do not excuse it, and I hope the worst offenders have faced consequences for the harms they caused. Be better.

It seems pretty clear that if the network held a referendum by putting the issue of 'Ban Jesse Singal?' to a vote, the network would vote him off the island. This can be inferred from the very loud signal of Jesse being the most blocked person on the Bluesky network by a large margin.

And this is where instance segmentation comes in to lower the stakes, because the people of Bluesky Island can then resort to shipping the unwanted resident over to a neighboring island, as opposed to dropping him in the water.

I don’t have all the answers, but I believe there’s a great opportunity here for liquid democracy in action. Democratic community governance is arguably even more challenging than designing a user-friendly, open and plausibly decentralized social network, so I know I'm asking for a lot.

Still, if you have brought 25 million people together and you're not trying to leverage the wisdom of the crowd for communal sense-making, what is the point of your platform?


Prosocial Discourse
27 November 2024 | 12:47 pm

The multi-polar Social Web of my dreams has been beautifully exemplified in two recent articles.

First, there’s How decentralized is Bluesky really? by Christine Lemmer-Webber, co-author of the ActivityPub protocol.

Christine’s article opens with:

recently I have received some direct encouragement from a core Bluesky developer that they have found my writings insightful and useful and would be happy to see me write on the subject. So here are my thoughts.

She also goes on to praise Jay Graber, the Bluesky CEO:

For that matter, I think the part of Bluesky I probably respect most personally is Jay Graber. I was not surprised when she was awarded the position of leading Bluesky; she was the obvious choice given her leadership in the process and project, and every interaction I have had with Jay personally has been a positive one. I believe she leads her team with sincerity and care. Furthermore, though a technical critique and reframing follows, I know Jay's team is full of other people who sincerely care about Bluesky and its stated goals as well.

In conclusion..

Bluesky is built by good people who care, and it is providing something that people desperately want and need. If you are looking for a Twitter replacement, you can find it in Bluesky today.

This post was positively received by the Bluesky team, lauded for its deep detail and even-handedness. It filled a void that had been created by a flurry of reactionary takes written in bad faith, motivated by us-vs-them binaries and tribal protectionism.

A few days later the aforementioned bridge-builder and ‘core Bluesky developer’ Bryan Newbold responded with his Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization, which opened thusly:

This is a reply to Christine Lemmer-Webber's thoughtful (and widely read) “How decentralized is Bluesky really?” blog post.

I am so happy and grateful that Christine took the time to write up her thoughts and put them out in public. Her writing sheds light on substantive differences between protocols and projects, and raises the bar on analysis in this space.

Fellow netizens, this is what prosocial engagement grounded in mutual respect and curiosity looks like. It is exactly the kind of adulting I want to see (and frankly expect) from our protocol elders — a title they’ll just have to accept, even if begrudgingly.

In closing, a note on Bryan’s musings on appropriate terminology:

Overall, I think federation isn't the best term for Bluesky to emphasize going forward (…)

What would be a better term? At some point we started using “social web” more, and I think that matches the atproto architecture well. There is some tension around that term because it is used by the W3C Social Web Community Group, and the recently launched Social Web Foundation, both of which are ActivityPub / Fediverse projects.

The amicable exchange that just happened between Bryan and Christine is the web at its most social, and it took place on several different platforms and protocols, interlinked by the mighty URL.

That’s the social web I always have and will continue to be part of.


Too late
12 October 2024 | 11:33 am

A decade ago I embarked on a journey to Rashidieh, a mixed but primarily Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon. I spent three months there as a volunteering youth envoy of ‘Palestinakomiteen i Norge’ together with the close friend who had invited me along.

Though it’s referred to as a ‘camp’, Rashidieh is a dense city of brick & cement, housing over 30,000 people, same as Molde, the biggest city an hour away from my tiny home town. Established in 1936, Rashidieh camp is nearly a century old. As such it is an unusual place with its own flow of time.

I had done this type of longer-term stay abroad a handful times before; a rare privilege afforded to me as a worldly Norwegian citizen. While I do believe in the genuine altruism of myself and others, these journeys have always been for a selfish reason at heart. An escape. A search.

This time I was searching for meaning in the wake of my mother’s passing a year prior. In that community I was met with heartfelt compassion from people for whom the loss of family members – whole families even – was a brutally regular occurrence of life. There was no comparing my bereavement to theirs, yet we grieved together all the same, and in that grief we were equals.


For the past year I’ve kept a certain distance to the apocalyptic destruction of Palestine. I joined some of the protests and read some of the articles, but for the most part I retreated to my work for the sake of my sanity: Stay the course and focus on what you can control. Grow strong enough to lift others up when you’re able.

The invasion of southern Lebanon however shook something loose in me. So much of my work in my adult life has been driven by a desire to give back to that place, down in the south, now under siege. I had dreamed up some Big Plans for how I was going to be a good little helper. It seems now I may be too late.

Earlier this week I spent half a day just staring into empty space, sobbing. In the midst of all that sadness, it felt good and right to be emotionally connected to that place and those people again.


Yesterday I participated in the first call for the Post Growth Entrepreneurship incubator. In a small breakout group where we were encouraged to check in with each other, I spoke those feelings aloud for the first time and teared up once more.

By the end there was relief. I realized this is something very real that I’m processing, not just some imagined empathy borne out of good-boy solidarity with the oppressed.

I’m not done with that place. I haven’t given it my all yet. But I may have missed my opportunity to be the giver I imagined myself to be, and there’s a deep, heartbreaking sense of inadequacy in that recognition.

Hence the words on this page, to make space for the guilt, the anger, and the shame. I can’t do my work in the world as an ally before I’ve let these emotions pass freely through me – not to be shed as waste, but rather to be integrated with the whole of my being, like tattoos on the heart.

There’s no quick resolution to be found here. The plan failed, but my resolve as a waking citizen of the global village remains unshaken.



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