Essay series about how Bluesky works.
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Discussion
If nobody is using it
It doesn't work
Bluesky’s got 5 million users. People are using Bluesky, even if your friends aren’t.
Notice the author’s primary focus (for mainstream audience) is “how content is moderated”. Bluesky has nailed this feature and talking point, and has been widely adopted because of it.
Nostr’s architecture makes possible a similar kind of decentralized moderation. But we lack the focused resources to design, implement and talk about a convincing solution.
Delivering “the right” content to people is more of a social problem than a technical one. The way bluesky originated as a closed protocol developed by a single company gave them the focus to see this and solve accordingly.
Nostr is rag tag. Started and largely influenced by anarcho technophiles. We love this about Nostr. But we also suffer because of it.
Prolly won’t get better, but hopefully nostr will find (and hodl) its own niche.
I think we can and should have a way of users to have a chosen third party moderation service in nostr. We need there to be multiple compatible providers and users can opt out all together. I got a demo of their ozone moderation tool a couple of days ago and I’m wondering if we could make an adaptor to have it work for nostr too.
Nostr works for folks who develop a community here, but we don’t work well for new users who are trying to find or cultivate a new community. We can solve that problem, in fact we ned to if we’re going to be able to see nostr’s full potential.
Looks to me like Ozone is not only “black box” moderation tools (at least “for now”), but also relies on individuals with “elevated” status (by the central agency?) to provide the moderation services for “the rest of us”.
I don’t think this wd fly well for nostr.
I have presented a better solution to Linda, and talked about it lots here.
Nostr is in a position to have truly decentralized content “moderation”. We really should be talking more.
If we had something like ozone which could be run with multiple instances then you could choose a moderation service who you wanted to pay to support.
One group could run anti-woke rules while another ran one for family friendly content, maybe nostr:npub1jlrs53pkdfjnts29kveljul2sm0actt6n8dxrrzqcersttvcuv3qdjynqn would help run one focused on christian values, and someone else could have one for sex workers who want porn but are protecting the creators against scams and harassment. Maybe we could have an instance focused on weeding out crypto scams.
Ozone will be open sourced soon. As it is, it is a single service run as a blackbox inside of Bluesky inc.
wb 🤙🏼💜