Bluesky: The new containment site

A few months ago, I was passed an invite code to Bluesky by @Moon@shitposter.club (thanks a lot!). I’ve been lurking the site once every few days but as I’ve lost interest in doing even that, I think it’s a good time to write what my feelings on it are.

Essentially Bluesky is a very unique kind of containment site; a site made for those who were angry at a different website instead of banned from a different website. Historically these websites have done poorly, and many friends I still have in the furry fandom have abandoned their account after they realized others are not using it often and interaction ratios are mediocre. The community is truly something else however. Essentially; it’s extremely sterile but it’s also interesting to see why people are using it. But I’ll just sum it up in the beginning so you don’t need to read my ramblings; Bluesky is like large Mastodon instances without instance blocking (yet) and enough people to dilute some of the worst people who only post to ask you to “CW and alt text everything.”

A different kind of containment

Bluesky is a different kind of containment site from containment sites in the past. Previously containment sites were founded for a number of reasons. One well known site that falls into this mold is FurAffinity, which was founded after a popular furry art gallery banned adult art in 2005, and another banned furries in 2006. When FurAffinity would ban “cub” characters (in theory furry lolisho which is already one of the most loaded topics online but in reality, whatever the admins declared as such), the users who drew said art would move on over to Inkbunny. In the past decade, containment sites (or “bunker sites” as imageboard users called them in case of an imageboard shutdown or outage) have popped up more and more in result to unapproved political content being heavily banned or censored from the mainstream social media sites.

Over the past decade this would happen more and more, with sites like Gab, Voat, Bitchute, and many more popping up and suffering hosting issues for incidents that Facebook or Google would pay PR firms to make go away. While 8chan took much of the brunt when some guy shot a mosque up in New Zealand, the livestream of the event was posted to Facebook, which had carefully crafted PR agents ready to make the problem go away as they called for more internet censorship.

Of course, even a large social media site can act as a containment site, as Tumblr essentially did before the porn ban destroyed the userbase and value of the site so severely that Automattic now owns it (and sees it as a side project to the flagship product of WordPress). It’s well known that the Tumblr porn ban sent users who were still on Tumblr flocking over to Twitter, and making the mob rule of Twitter that was seeping in so much worse that seemingly overnight it changed the culture of Twitter into something even worse.

But Bluesky and its ilk are a new breed of containment site. In the past, containment sites were designed for people who wanted to post controversial pornography or non-approved political opinions, and quite frankly they didn’t have much appeal for anyone else. There was no reason to use them if you were not banned from social media websites, and even if you were these sites would nearly always devolve into an echo chamber. Only now with so many people being banned on social media or censored for anything and everything, is this finally changing.

Bluesky and similar containment sites like Mastodon.social are not like these other containment sites. Bluesky is something else entirely; it’s not a containment site for someone banned for posting too many FBI crime statistics, but rather a site for someone traumatized by seeing too many uncomfortable statistics and memes. Fueling this is Elon Musk buying Twitter and the object of hate for Twitter users switching from Donald Trump to Elon Musk. Bluesky wants to be the idealized version of early 2010s Twitter, which can no longer happen as the people no longer exist.

BlueSky and it’s weird federation

If Mastodon was piggybacking off the StatusNet network in 2016 to gain access to an established network while flooding it with new users with a different mindset, the devs behind Bluesky are a lot more clever. They knew what Eugen and the Mastodon team have wanted to do with a focus on more censorship than Twitter had to bubblewrap users more, and as a result they are baking moderation into the currently in development protocol. Let’s take a look at this.

As of 2023, Bluesky claims it’s a federated social network as of now but the truth is, right now Bluesky is nowhere near federated. It’s a monolithic social network that currently does not federate with anything. The federation is still in testing and it’s planned for a 2024 release (years after ActivityPub has done the same thing and over a decade since StatusNet). But the planned method of federation for Bluesky is nothing like ActivityPub. If AP is designed to function just like e-mail, ATProto is designed to function just like Napster did in a way. According to a diagram posted on the Bluesky website, personal servers are not intended to talk directly to each other but rather to a “big graph service” server first. Anyone who knows social media services and censorship knows why this could be a problem. In fact, one fedi developer said “nobody would find this to be an issue if they drew an arrow between the PDS servers”. There’s no Github documentation to host your own server as of now either, you’re on your own.

The big idea for reinventing the wheel is to obviously avoid the “losing your posting career when your instance goes down” problem. This can be controversial for someone who cares about privacy due to using universal identities, but the younger generation loves to share usernames and feel like a celebrity posting online. Everything is a show (until it isn’t anymore).

But let’s not kid ourselves, the main reason that they’re reinventing the wheel at BlueSky is to allow for stricter moderation functionality and all one has to do is Google to find this out. In fact, one of the motives for Bluesky being invite-only is to enhance the moderation tools:

Moderation is a necessary feature of social spaces. It’s how bad behavior gets constrained, norms get set, and disputes get resolved. We’ve kept the Bluesky app invite-only and are finishing moderation before the last pieces of open federation because we wanted to prioritize user safety from the start.

There’s a good reason Bluesky is doing this: Bluesky wants to experiment with some of the most oppressive moderation systems online, to give the same people who destroyed the rest of the internet a chance to cry out as they shit on your floormat. Take a look at some of the proposals they had for moderation. One such proposal is reply-gating, which is designed to only let certain people reply to you. On Twitter this is one of the most abused features and along with “hiding replies” is a sign that the poster is trying to hide something from you.

Or how about the ability to delete replies?

You know, some things never change. Back in the mid-2010s days of Twitter culture war flamewars, “muh mentions” was a very common way to escape arguments to the point one e-celeb even even made a joke about it.

Another proposal advocates for “content labeling”, which as Twitter community notes has shown, won’t exactly go in the direction the owners of the site want it to. There’s not a lot I can say otherwise about this though.

Not all of these proposals and ideas go over well with users, and one thing BlueSky users have absolutely hated is how blocks are all public. Furthermore, the post even mentions that “rogue apps” can not enforce this blocking behavior, which knowing Pleroma and it’s userbase means that it will happen and that it’s just privacy through obscurity.

In theory, a bad actor could create their own rogue client or interface which ignores some of the blocking behaviors, since the content is posted to a public network. But showing content or notifications to the person who created the block won’t be possible, as that behavior is controlled by their own PDS and client. It’s technically possible for a rogue client to create replies and mentions, but they would be invisible or at least low-impact to the recipient account for the same reasons. Protocol-compliant software in the ecosystem will keep such content invisible to other accounts on the network. If a significant fraction of accounts elected to use noncompliant rogue infrastructure, we would consider that a failure of the entire ecosystem.

Given that one of the main fediverse instance software stacks even includes a feature to reject deletes from servers, this is already a failure. If the people that the AtProto types want to keep away end up using it and not sticking to AP, you just know that this is going to be common. The same goes with ActivityPub scopes being easily MRF’d as well, and some servers will MRF scopes from unlisted to public. In fact with ActivityPub, there’s no longer just one instance software running the show. There are at least 4 main ones (Mastodon, Lemmy, Misskey, Pleroma), and many forks of these (Glitch-soc, hometown, fedibird, Akkoma, Soapbox/Rebased, Firefish (formerly Calckey), and many many more) on top of some smaller players as well (GoToSocial, Pixelfed, WriteFreely, Friendica, the 4 people still using GNU Social, etc.) But I’m getting ahead of myself here, all this is pointless because…

Federation doesn’t even need to work

Bluesky isn’t getting new signups because it’s federated, and the userbase doesn’t care if it is federated either. Rather; Bluesky is popular because of the containment site aspect and the elitism aspect. While Bluesky might have used invites to finetune moderation and curate a community, it’s also given Bluesky an elitist aspect to it. Having a Bluesky account earlier on was a status symbol in the same way having a SomethingAwful or ResetEra account was, people were paying money to get in. A few months later, the hype has fizzled, seemingly every furry has an account, and I’ve struggled to give away invite codes. Even some users I gave them out to haven’t even set profile pictures, that’s how little they could care about it.

The people in on it are similar to those on Mastodon.social, the biggest users are no different than an NPR listener regurgitating left wing talking points. Just by browsing Mastodon.social’s trending page you can see posts about Trump, “election deniers”, complaining about Elon Musk, climate change, George Takei taking a shit, even posts about how masks still work. Bluesky still has some of them mixed with dumb Reddit/Tumblr “safe humor”, George Takei still taking a shit, and signs there’s cracks in paradise. The main difference however is that Bluesky has lots of furries on it, posting overtly sexual content since that’s what furries are notorious for doing.

In a way, BlueSky or some of the big Mastodon instances could be compared to the country of Singapore as described in William Gibson’s famous article, a country where any sort of unique counterculture has been squashed in favor of a country as artificial as a shopping mall or Disneyland was, while the fediverse could be described as how Kowloon was. The artificial feeling of the site isn’t lost on others, with one person on fedi who got an invite as well comparing it to the artificial nature of retirement communities that allow. Of course, just like how the golden days of the 60s won’t come back no matter how many times you listen to the Beach Boys Greatest Hits album on repeat, the 2010s won’t come back when you’re browsing Bluesky with Lapfox on in the background cranked up on your Wal-Mart Skullcandy headphones.

Yet, the community of the fediverse is a turnoff for the typical left wing Twitter account poster, let alone someone who just likes to make jokes online. Many Mastodon instances are notorious for their extremely strict culture that is sterilized just like 90s Singapore was, complete with new instance blocklists that look very polished popping up all the damn time. But perhaps most tellingly, this Reddit thread asking for all the fun people online sums it up. A user asks if there is an instance which doesn’t require you to CW literally everything, and he is berated by screeching harpies who tell him that you’ll totally be defederated for doing so. But the user telling him that not tagging CWs literally leads to Nazis is also the mindset of many bad Mastodon admins and the Bluesky community.

The other side of the fediverse is more like the Kowloon walled city in a way. With light censorship and light rules on things, anyone can spin up an instance and post whatever, not caring if Mastodon.social and some schizophrenic instances block them because unlike Twitter they can say whatever. Naturally, this is also a hard sell for many who want that gated community feel online, as seeing slurs and humor again can cause some people to blow a fuse.

Which leads to why Bluesky is popular with some, even if that furry artist you follow posts 5 times as much on Twitter. Bluesky right now does not have that issue of instance blocking wars, or crazy strict moderators, because it has that image of being run by a professional company. As long as you don’t start telling egirls to get a real job or similar, you won’t get banned, because if you do just like in Singapore you’ll be banned real fast. But just like how there’s lots of people who like using big sterile Discord servers either out of necessity or because they actually like them, there’s plenty of people who want to sit on a sanitized social network.

Even worse, there’s a login wall to view Bluesky posts. This is creating an illusion of privacy through obscurity, until someone either creates a post browser or gets an account and starts browsing posts of people they want to screencap. The funny part is, this has led to some of the fattest nude selfies I have unfortunately had to see with my own two eyes. There’s also many features missing with Bluesky from DMs to gifs/video support to pinned posts to even hashtags, but the diehards using it don’t care about all that.

They care about the fact that right now there is no “instance question”, no block wars, and they can feel at home in their sanitized posting website. In a year, it’ll be interesting if anyone talks about it still knowing where it’s going and how long it took the fedi to get to where it is now. Others on the fedi might appreciate how it’s acting as containment to keep the same people who killed the mainstream internet off their turf, so who knows.

There’s more I could probably think of saying, but quite frankly I could care less about Bluesky. It seems like a mess federation wise, and the community on it isn’t giving me confidence.

A quick edit

There’s a few more things I was suggested to touch upon and mention as well. First of all, someone else on the fedi brought up Nostr which is even more decentralized. The issue is, I simply haven’t seen Nostr take off as much as the fediverse has (though a few people I know on fedi have accounts on both). I have not looked too deeply into it and I haven’t had terribly much interest in looking into it as well mostly as I simply haven’t had people I know on it who don’t use something else. Still, I think it’ll be interesting to see where that goes in a year too.

The second thing I just remembered is that Mastodon.social has two things in it’s favor; users who solely post a single topic and “stability”. This attracts normies to it, but unfortunately while Mastodon.social doesn’t have the largest blocklist it has a hefty blocklist. As a result, instance blocking ends up becoming used as a weapon to get people to fall in line by both Mastodon.social and by many other instances blindly pasting in blocklists.

The thing with Bluesky is that while there are blocklists, they’re not server blocklists but rather user blocklists that lots of people willingly import (and they’re designed to be easy to import, as a baked in feature). Hence, if you’re on blocklists due to guilt by association you’ll end up with the awkward scenario of not getting many interactions while users who have blocked you are currently spreading rumors about you. Fun, isn’t it?

Hence, with Bluesky I tend to get the feeling that something is fake about it and that everything is a facade, given I’ve been there before. I’m sure many people who have lived through the same things I have with online communities rotting to the core can agree.

The eternal instance question

So the other day I was talking to someone else I know about the fediverse and was asked about instance recommendations. I was unable to recommend one for obvious reasons given the circles said individual was around, but I’m going to rewrite what I said here since I think it’s valuable information about the state of fedi in 2023.

Essentially, due to who is involved in the fediverse, the changing dynamics of the fediverse from day to day, and how many instance owners have a bad habit of losing interest and deleting the instance, I cannot recommend a single fedi instance. Now I’ll explain my issues with fedi instances.

Fear and Loathing in The Mastodon Network™

The biggest problem on the fediverse has to be the Mastodon Network side. By this, I don’t mean websites running Mastodon as much as I do websites that consider themselves a part of the “Mastodon Network”, or what Eugen sees as the network. This in part due to Eugen’s branding push that only uses the word Fediverse once on the whole frontpage and even includes not letting users change the favicon. This method of marketing has been critiqued by others in the fediverse sphere, as it seems to give Mastodon an appearance of monopolizing the network or being the only fediverse instance software. Given that many people seem to call it “Mastodon” instead of “the fedi” or “fediverse”, this marketing push has paid off. The Mastodon Network namely includes instances that have a very specific set of rules, behaviors, and customs that tend to line up exactly with Twitter from right before the Elon Musk buyout, Bluesky, and pre-porn-ban Tumblr. I am making this distinction because there are servers running Mastodon such as gameliberty.club, mstdn.starnix.network, No Agenda Social, Free Atlantis, and the Japanese Mastodon instances that are both defederated from many of the Mastodon Network instances and do not share the same culture.

Among burnt out users and users of non-Mastodon powered instances, the Mastodon Network is notorious for paranoid instance owners who spend more time yelling at you for not following some unwritten rules, in between yelling about imaginary cyberstalkers that are probably just some guy leaving a hate comment after searching hashtags. 4 out of 5 times when someone is leaving the fediverse for good, it is almost always due to the behavior of an instance admin from the Mastodon side. Lately some of this behavior has been overlapping with that of some Lemmy instances too, given it’s the same group of people. But don’t take my word for it, let me quote you a story about Mastodon and why it was struggling (with the important parts bolded):

Johnathan Flowers, an assistant professor of philosophy at California State University Northridge, started a Mastodon account last November after Musk bought Twitter. But after he posted some observations about the racial politics of the platform, users demanded that Flowers, who is Black, hide those posts behind content warnings. “Their problem was that I wasn’t following the cultural codes that they felt should prevail in the digital space … [they felt there should be] a social entitlement to comfort around issues of race and racism,” he says. When he declined to use content warnings, he received a torrent of racist abuse in his inbox. “On Twitter, it took me a little over two years to say something that got me a bunch of racist trolls in my DMs and mentions,” he says. “On Mastodon, it took 48 hours.” The scholar was also hassled by users who were unhappy that he was using a tool to cross-post his posts from Twitter to Mastodon. “I’m just like, ‘What are you guys doing? Why are you being cops?’ There’s no wonder that we started calling Mastodon the homeowners’ association of social media,” he says. In February, Flowers brought up some of his observations to Rochko, Mastodon’s creator. “I am hopeful that it gave him a more nuanced perspective on the platform that he’s running,” Flowers says. “But as for whether it’ll spark real change, your guess is as good as mine. This isn’t a technical problem that one could fix with new features. This is a cultural problem.” (Rochko did not respond to a request to comment for this story.) These days, Flowers has mostly stopped using Mastodon, not necessarily over the race issue, but because its weak discovery and search features made it too hard to find the people he wanted to follow. “It took me weeks to find some of my best friends and academic colleagues,” he says. Now he logs in for two main reasons: to check on “the kind of interestingly diverse Star Trek community there,” and to look at cat pictures.

There are several takeaways from just that one quote of why a lot of people leave the Mastodon side. The first is that the Mastodon community is very much mob run, by users who will harass you for not following unwritten codes. These users are literally the same as the people who sit all day on VRChat or Discord, doing nothing but banning people for breaking some rules like not saying specific words (while not being paid for it). There are many things that you will be harassed for, including but not limited to:

• Not using alt-text
• Saying something you had no idea was a slur (or some flamewar about reclaimed slurs).
• Not tagging posts with a CW
• Not acting like a Tumblr user from 2013
• Not being up to date on the latest current thing
• Liking something you’re not allowed to like according to the Twitter mob.
• Running the wrong software stack on your instance
• Using fba.ryona.agency to pull lists of blocks (that’s literally harassment oof yikes)
• And many more toxic behaviors that you had no idea were problematic~!

But that’s not all. Mastodon discovery is total garbage or has been for the longest time because Eugen would not add search functionality. No really, Eugen and pals saw search as something that only the darn trolls would use. This mindset continued across Mastodon for a while as anyone who wanted to make a search engine would be harassed, but new users were finding out that limiting searches to hashtags only would have issues finding people. Eventually Eugen got told enough times by new users “we want search dammit” and opt-in search was added. This naturally caused some flamewars as Mastodon users were paranoid that the gangstalker trolls would find them and drop racial slurs.

But it gets better. See, this mindset has been going on for years where Mastodon users joined, wanted something “private”, and only got privacy through obscurity. The end result was for the idea guys to yell at Eugen because of features like hashtag trends being added. This quote summed up just what the Mastodon camp was like in 2019, and it has not changed one bit:

Rochko describes Mastodon’s users as separated between two “camps”: those who prefer discoverability, and those who discourage it. It’s more accurate to say Mastodon is increasingly forced to choose between its marginalized, queer userbase and white, well-off, and male tech workers who support Rochko’s BDFL vision. Raphen believes Mastodon is “getting better, slowly” thanks in part to new queer users challenging its “fragile” privileged queer users. But even then, the platform’s remaining queer community has grown increasingly upset with Rochko’s leadership. After Rochko unexpectedly introduced “trends” tracking for words, phrases, and hashtags in summer 2018, marginalized users who feared harassment from the feature criticized its unexpected implementation. Rochko replied with a toot, arguing he “built Mastodon the way I wanted” and that those who disliked the project should not “give me shit about your failed expectations.” “There’s the door, there’s the code, there’s the alternatives,” he on June 2.

Now gee, why would Mastodon have such a userbase like this? Well it goes back to who Eugen courted and who he was writing it for. He was writing Mastodon at first to be Twitter without the “bad people”.

Raphen’s treatment was a breaking point for Mastodon’s queer community, and its users began openly criticizing Rochko’s control over Mastodon. Two weeks later, Mastodon user and GitHub contributor Allie Hart wrote a post-mortem called “Mourning Mastodon” and a follow-up post, “Mourning What Now?!?!“—both of which Raphen considers “Important Historic Documents” for Mastodon’s history. In “Mourning Mastodon,” Hart argues its initial leftist, furry, queer, and disabled base was the “most vocal and most frequent of Mastodon’s unpaid contributors,” designing Mastodon’s features from November 2016 to April 2017. After Graham Linehan and Dan Harmon temporarily moved to Mastodon.social and an April 2017 Motherboard story sparked media attention in the project, a new base arrived at the site, one that gave the project’s queer community less leverage in demanding changes from Rochko, Hart argues.

From reading those posts and the Motherboard story, it’s clear what Mastodon was designed to be. Mastodon was not designed to be the anti-corporate social media, but the utopian version of Twitter:

In fact, mastodon.social bans Nazis. Not even implicitly, but explicitly. The rules of the instance prohibit “content illegal in Germany and/or France, such as holocaust denial or Nazi symbolism” and “conduct promoting the ideology of National Socialism.” The instance also bans “racism or advocation of racism,” “sexism or advocation of sexism,” “discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, or advocation thereof” and “xenophobic and/or violent nationalism.” Mastodon.social is definitely not the free speech wing of the free speech party. But in an increasingly polarized political climate where white nationalists are key advisors in to the US president, banning Nazis is deeply appealing to a lot of people. When asked, users repeatedly cite “Nazis” as a problem they would like Twitter to address. After leaving Twitter, writer Lindy West retorted, “Get back to me when your website isn’t a roiling rat-king of Nazis.”

You heard that right. Twitter is the biggest Nazi platform online, and before Musk Derangement Syndrome this is who was moving to the fediverse. Of course; anyone with experience of those people online knows exactly what this entails and it means you now have to deal with people paranoid about Nazis under the bed. But there’s a special feature I should mention and that is the instance blocking feature.

Instance Block Wars

One of the features introduced as a result of this mindset is the infamous problem of instance blocking. Even as far back as 2017, a post said that instance blocking would kill the fediverse.

Okay, so that all sounds pretty good. Why do I remain convinced that Mastodon, in its current form, will fail? The foremost problem is that federation is a lie. Well, it’s partially a lie. The benefits described above do work; if you send a message to anyone at @username@custom.website, it will be delivered to them. But if @custom.website is a domain that mastodon.social deems inappropriate, replies from that users on that domain don’t show up in your notifications or on your feed, unless you explicitly follow them. So if you’re having a conversation with your friend, @person@custom.website, and another user from custom.website wants to chime in, they will be invisible to you. Okay. So how does one end up on this blacklist? Take a deep breath, folks. Let’s look at mastodon.social’s community policy:

The following types of content will be removed from the public timeline, and may result in account suspension and revocation of access to the service:

– Racism or advocation of racism- Sexism or advocation of sexism- Discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, or advocation thereof- Xenophobic and/or violent nationalism.

At this point, my audience will predictably split sharply into two camps. There remains a significant portion of the internet who believes that determining whether someone’s speech is “racist, sexist, discriminatory, or xenophobic” is a totally obvious and non-controversial determination, and is 100% happy with giving a single moderation team the ability to cut off entire instances based off of individual reports of misconduct. The other camp says, hmm, maybe not so much.

The reality is that it is so much worse than this 2017 naïve viewpoint. Instances can get blocked over any reason the admin feels. Some of my favorite reasons include:

• Federating with the “usual suspects”
• “Pleroma Crimes” (running Pleroma and being “problematic”)
• Dox Materials (posting the name and photo of the admin of said instance to the point of making it an emoji to get under his skin
• Every *ism and *phobia you can imagine
• A friend was accused of hosting loli after getting into an argument over if it was the year of the Linux Desktop or not.

These reasons are then added to random blocklists and new instances will pull from these lists, and at least one guide says you should have a blocklist in place before accepting new users. Furthermore, signed fetches are notorious for also making it so you can’t even see posts from other instances, that is if you’re not using workarounds like some instances are known to. As a result, anyone willing to federate with the Mastodon Network™ has the problem of trying not to offend the mob, ending up on the blocklist and losing access to high amounts of reposts. Or worse, as a user on those instances you will now need several accounts to follow different groups of people because of actions outside their control

Essentially; it’s a foreign concept for anyone on Twitter to have to use several different follow accounts because of instance blocks (and it would be considered stalking even), but on Mastodon/fedi it’s normal to have to do this. The only way to avoid these situations is to self-host and talk to whoever you want to online. The worst part is, many instances due to “harassment” reasons (like people asking why did you block this) will actually hide their blocklist to anyone who isn’t signed up, with this being a common sight on Mastodon servers:

The punchline of course is despite all this, mass blocklists are never enough to keep the chuds out, users leave because of the blocks, and then some users will go on to write essays about how blocks are never enough.

Who the Hell thought it was a good idea to allow anyone to just show up to the whole network with a server? Even IRC figured out this model was untenable decades ago. There was once a single IRC network, and then a server linked that allowed anyone to link, and EFNet and separate IRC networks as we know them were born. We cannot allow servers who are not trusted to join, or at least keep them contained to their own little Hellholes. We cannot allow Nazis to join. We cannot allow tankies to join. We cannot allow pedophiles to join. We cannot allow freeze-peach people to join. We cannot allow assholes to join. We cannot allow racists to join. You must either respect others or get the fuck out. We must exclude these people, by design. And the way to do that is to end the ability for them to join in the first place.

Bad instance owners

The second problem with the fediverse is that instance owners within the Mastodon Network and on the fedi overall tend to work on a cycle. They will be interested in the fedi for a few months, lose interest, and then pull hosting leaving users high and dry and having to migrate. Or they will run out of money, or get involved in some shitty dating drama and leave the internet forever (and resurface under a new name next week). Or a fedi admin will be sloppy with data, from the chudbuds admin being hacked with a Minecraft mod (that was fake) to a high profile case of a sloppy Mastodon admin having unencrypted backups on an external HDD when the FBI raided him for being at a protest. It was so high profile that even the EFF ran a post on it. Or an instance will go down suddenly because the domain expired and the prices for domains seem to be going up lately.

Whatever the reason, unlike a social media site there is no sense of stability with how most admins on the fedi have behaved and how few instances have lasted for even 5 years. People will stay on Twitter and choose to self-censor or not talk about certain things to stay on the stable site and get those connections. Or they’ll go to FB/Insta/YouTube/VK/somewhere else for them. There is no professional, neutral fedi instance for the most part for the English language, and even one like Pawoo had a pedophile problem so severe that not only was it mentioned by name in a high-profile Discord chat leak as a place to find CSAM at, but it has gained a reputation of harboring pedophiles “looking to trade” said content (recently as a result of losing domain registrars yet again as a result of this, Pawoo put new accounts on manual approval). Notice my wording of neutral, because…

Few instances are politically neutral

I am well aware everything now has to be political. You can’t go in a community for people who want to discuss thing anymore without it devolving into wars in the middle east or discussion about trans rights. But go on Mastodon.social at any given time of day and you will see in the “posts” category the most cookie cutter left wing posts. Join any Mastodon Network instance and you will see the same thing.

Thanks to how Mastodon funnels the top posts as the default view on V4, you will see political stuff no matter if you look on an instance for old tech:

To posts about talking animals showing up in a talking animal instance:

That’s of course, before you read the rules and see in most cases they are the same thing overall. Less censored fedi instances or ones not running Mastodon tend to have a greater variety of political views, and they don’t have a “top posts” algorithm to funnel new users political rage bait as easily. Yet a good majority of them are politically aligned, sometimes as self-defense but a lot of times to post rage bait and “HAPPENING” news articles.

“Stop posting what I don’t like”

There’s also inevitably the same thing I talked about in my last post, which is that there is a non trival part of the internet which feels as if you should stop posting what they don’t like. Some instances are known to ban a wide ranging variety of content as “loli”. Sometimes it’s due to legal reasons (Japanese censorship laws come to mind), but in a lot of cases it’s due to political reasons.

I won’t repeat myself here other than saying it’s still an issue.

Many instances close registrations

Many instances I do like or would recommend have closed off registration, for valid reasons. Sometimes they had a wave of pedophiles, edgy /pol/ rejects (or FBI agents) who have no interests other than complaining about some ethnic group, or people who just didn’t fit with the culture signing up. Sometimes these instances grew too big to maintain or to a point it was diluting the culture. Some instances just want to curate specific people.

Either way, if you’re someone trying to sign up you have to dig for an instance with open registrations. Of course the monoculture of mastodon.social always seems to be open, I wonder why…

The answer

With all these factors mentioned, there are only two universal answers to the question of “what instance should I join?” that I feel are acceptable. You either need to know someone deep on the side of the fedi you want to join, or you need to host your own and follow people you like. Hosting your own is a bit harder as you need to know a few things about computers at least or be willing to learn from others about SQL/Databases, web hosting, Linux, and more. Even using something like fediverse.express isn’t fully managed, and fully managed fedi hosting as of now isn’t that popular.

The situation is especially dire for certain communities such as furries due to the lack of technical knowledge, how much that scene overlaps with politics these days, and said community being a lightning rod for drama. Furries would rather use something like Bluesky for a reason, there is no need to worry about instance blocking. Sure there is no federation right now on Bluesky but that’s the thing, just like how BitChute hasn’t used a torrent backend in ages, BlueSky does not even need working federation. In fact, federation would scare the userbase away to the next walled garden.

Maybe this will eventually change for more communities as those communities set up shop in the fedi, but for now they would rather stick to walled gardens because this question can be extremely hard to answer.

The fediverse doesn’t stop rising

In the past few months (which is now over a year since I ran a fediverse instance server on an old SPARC workstation as a proof of concept), a lot of things have happened. There have been competitors to the ActivityPub, with middling amounts of success. Nostr hasn’t exactly taken off too much and the community is notorious for begging for “zaps”. Bluesky has also become notable for having certain communities such as furries signing up en masse, and not much in the way elsewhere. Furthermore, both platforms do not exactly have an easy interface for those without an account to view posts, and Bluesky in particular has felt like a gated community compared to the fedi. Most notably, while Nostr tries to be decentralized even more than AP is, Bluesky hasn’t even implemented federation yet.

But while it’s easy to argue all day about protocol wars, ActivityPub has gotten a few boosts as of recently. I’m not talking the all-too-common trend of even government funded news agencies experimenting with it. I’m talking things like Minds now interoperating with the ActivityPub network complete with an in-house implementation. While Minds might be a fringe social network and an example of why the walled garden is a failure, someone larger than Minds just added it as well: WordPress. After buying an AP plugin and hiring the dev on, the plugin is now supported on even free wordpress.com sites like this one (at least for now) is! I have followed this account (pleromanonx86.wordpress.com@pleromanonx86.wordpress.com) on an instance I am on to see if it will federate. This is a big deal because now any random WordPress blog can federate with the fediverse and it can become another form of sharing and commenting.

But that’s not all, it gets even better for the fediverse. A few months back, there was an infamous reddit API “blackout” protest over Reddit locking out access to third party apps. Unlike other protests, this one failed as Reddit’s CEO refused to budge and as a result this has left many subreddits with less activity, moderation, and some permanently locked down because of angry admins. As a result of this many users took their posting over to Lemmy, an ActivityPub based Reddit clone. While this is going to struggle to top the number one reason Reddit continues to have users if crawlers can’t crawl it, it’s going to lower the quality of Reddit.

But wait, there’s even more. As a result of Twitter screwing over artists online, many in Japan at least are moving over to Misskey.io. Misskey.io now has nearly 400k users, constantly having new signups every time Twitter does something stupid. Notably, not only is it now the 5^th biggest fedi instance currently according to Fedilist, but it also is the largest instance that does not run Mastodon software, running Misskey instead. This is a great thing because now the 5^th largest instance according to Fedilist is now not running Mastodon. Others in the west are fleeing to other “alt-sites” (or alternative social media sites) such as Cohost and invite only Bluesky.

It didn’t happen for no reason whatsoever

This rise in users is bigger than any sort of previous expansion. If the fedi gained users because of fears of Elon banning people or because an eceleb lost his Twitter account, or because another website was being hammered with DDoS attacks, the factors behind this rise are far more blatant.

The first factor for the rise in the fedi just recently is obvious, after Elon Musk bought Twitter and engaged in aggressive cost cutting at the expense of the user experience, users have been fatigued with the site. But they’re also scattering to tons of different websites. No two people can agree on if the next big place is BlueSky, or Cohost, or some Mastodon instance, and the list goes on. There’s also been a bit of Musk Derangement Syndrome going on, after the most mild right wing and useless figures weren’t banned from Twitter (never mind the fact that someone who might actually be effective on the right wing like Kevin MacDonald got banned with zero reasons given).

The second factor boosting the fediverse has been this thing called interest rates. See with interest rates going up, there is now a sudden urge for companies that have spent so much money influencing the public sphere to now make money. This has been seen everywhere from Unity’s price model change controversy (which led to the CEO stepping down), to Volition closing as a result of the “woke” saints row being a critical and commercial flop, to the HBO Max tax write-off resulting in shows being pulled and movies being canceled. But this also explains why so many companies all at once are making decisions users just hate, and can’t be attributed to a single person. Just like how ESG is highly speculated to have caused a cultural shift, interest rates are causing a different kind of shift: make money now or go under. Literally just now it came out that YouTube is trying an anti-adblock script and this has caused drama given how you need adblockers to make the internet usable.

Big tech companies saw the competition fail, be it vidme running out of money to “alt-tech” sites being targets for hackers and unflattering CNN reports featuring blonde women watching Moon Man videos. Even something like Odysee today is branded as Nazi YouTube, if you simply search Odysee in Google News the hit pieces don’t stop coming. Of course, in Odysee’s favor they simply don’t brand themselves as such a site and just censor far less. I have a feeling that the “news” tab is whitelisted as well (it definitely has a blacklist for sites like Infowars, Gateway Pundit, etc.) They don’t need to do a single thing when they literally write the rules for the optics game, if they try to allow something YouTube doesn’t the journalists and the ADL/SPLC will be on the case to save the day.

No seriously. This is what they actually tell you. I keep forgetting that journalists and the like are living in Groundhog Day except it’s always August 2017.

There are of course a few smaller side stories to this. There’s the death of imageboards; the slow neutering of 4chan and death of 8chan (combined with the zoomer “omg 4chan hackers/Nazis” mindset that keeps new users away) have been just slightly less catastrophic as Tumblr killing porn. No really, as imageboards have suffered due to Fred/Hotwheels committing the largest backstabbing online in recent years mixed with internal drama like the Mark from /v/ saga, users have been fleeing to other sites. A lot of people involved with imageboard and shitposter culture have been big on fedi ever since the rise of kiwifarms.cc.

There’s also the fact that bunker sites in general have been moderately successful, outside of the imageboard example. While imageboards struggled to set up shop due to the tendency of users with no account to post violent threats or CSAM while reporting the site in another VM to get it taken down or make it hard to host (for multiple reasons), multiple Reddit bunkers such as rdrama and communities.win have been successful (and this was before the API stuff even!) Needless to say, banning entire communities over drama only served to boost the fedi, as now there were communities online without a website.

“Blocking tags alone is not enough”

The truth is, the internet in 2023 is heavily divided more than it was ever before. This is a unique strength that keeps the fediverse going. It’s not just one person running a bad Twitter clone out of a basement, it’s a whole network. It’s not just one website where someone can call their hosting company at 6 in the morning for some “girl talk”, but an entire network of them.

It’s very obvious why too. The internet of 2007 is gone. Even the internet of 2010 or early months of 2014 is gone. It was naturally taken out back and shot 12 times in a row after the time Leslie Jones wouldn’t stop overreacting to RIP HARAMBE memes, and its remains were desecrated after Trump won, Charlottesville became 9/11 for the ivory tower, the NZ shooting livestream, the grand COVID hysteria, J6, Ukraine, and many cultural shifts such as the rise of pronouns. Each of these major events and the many cultural shifts were used to force progressively more aggressive forms of internet censorship to the point it’s become comical. These were also used with blitzes of propaganda that have unintentionally broken Google search while further dividing the anglosphere.

As a result of this, there are a lot of fault lines on the modern internet and this is why it is hard to just start a new clone of a website, because people want different stuff. Case in point, the “loli question” which has provoked strong responses from users and fedi admins. Or all the political divisions, fueled by everything from Trump to the current Israel-Palestine conflict to even operating system choice.

Unlike in 2007, it’s going to be 100% impossible for someone to come along and make a social media site for one group without pissing off another. Furthermore, one group you might piss off online is going to wage war against your high-profile site to the point that reports on your site being hacked will read like hit pieces. This is an issue with sties like Gab, these sites are so high profile that any nobody online looking to make a name for himself can just hack it and get clout instantly.

But politics aren’t the sole dividing line. The loli question and the neopuritanism in the art sphere is one as well. There is no negoating with a lot of the internet. You will either ban it, or someone won’t use the site (and tell others it’s bad). Take for example trying to run an art site. The loli question will come up even if you ban it, because some busybody will say “it’s loli” and someone else will say “no it’s not”, and they will 100% be militant about it, and either choice is going to risk something. Even if there’s no sexual situations involved, it’s very common for people to call fans of something they don’t like pedophiles in this day and age. If you think this can’t happen to you, look at the irrelevant art site furry network:

Or how about Furry Life Online which took things a step further with a policy that was trying to ban “feral” or “quadruped” characters and comes off as the most autistic thing you’ve heard:

And these are just two examples of this. I think you get my point. My point is, with the severe amount of division on the modern day internet, it is impossible for there to be a new one size fits all “social media platform”, PERIOD! Remember, forcing people to tag this content isn’t enough, it literally cannot exist to quite a few people (be it trans flags or the wrong kind of drawn porn).

If you stay out of political stuff or only virtue signal the opinions supported by the giant corporations, you have a much better chance of being hosted (for controversial art) as Inkbunny (which has only a no humans rule) or e621 has shown. While these websites have their own issues, you will never hear about Inkbunny losing Hurricane Electric or having hosting issues like Kiwi Farms is. But even then, all it takes is one busybody politician being pissed off and your site can lose hosting.

Nobody targets these sites as they don’t know they exist, someone explaining what Inkbunny is to someone else might prompt the awkward “so how do you know about this” question (if they don’t treat it like a funny or shock site), or they hate sites like Kiwi Farms so much more. Yet because of the content, there are a good chunk of artists who will refuse to touch said site because “blocking tags alone is not enough”.

The fedi is the solution

Thankfully, the fediverse and ActivityPub is the solution to the problem of “this content should not exist” for one reason: if you don’t like the rules of an instance or giant instance you can host your own. This means that someone who wants to host content banned at over 109 instances can start his own instance.

This is very important because it completely sidesteps the problem previous websites had with content hosting: you don’t have to worry about that one user telling you to ban this and that blocking tags is not enough, because you can just ban him or tell him “Hey buddy, go join this other instance”. As more and more people are banned from Twitter or want to move off site, they’re going to find it harder to move to something like Bluesky (with login walls) than a fediverse instance.

The strengths of the fedi work in its favor as well. The fediverse succeeds where alt-sites and containment sites failed as they don’t have to worry about being targeted by some college kid trying to make a name for himself by hacking a “nazi social network”. It also avoids some of the problems those sites and alt-sites had by federating. The echo chamber effect is neutered as you will find people from other instances into different interests, and the same goes with the effect of a community feeling empty. A lot of alternatives to big tech sites failed when users saw these sites were ghost towns, but with the fediverse you just need to make an account on a half-decent instance and you can talk to people.

There are some issues of course, many to do with the community and the side of the fedi that wants more censorship. Believe it or not, a chunk of the fediverse joined because they wanted more censorship, which also proves my point about how divided the internet is. The fact it has gotten to the point where more people are saying in chats “yeah I have a mastodon” should tell you enough.

Possible issues

Yet there are a few notable issues with the fediverse that are going to be interesting to see play out. The obvious one is, Mastodon seemingly has an “IE6 effect” or “Chromium effect” on the network where most people on the network run one software stack and as a result it has the most pull. Thanks to the rise of Misskey and Pleroma (and forks), this influence is waning. But that isn’t the sole place where the wrong people are in control.

There aren’t a lot of professionally run fedi instances, and one of the reasons people joined FB/Twitter/others for the longest time was the image of “stability”. Elon Musk having a binge tweeting session is nothing like a fedi instance owner getting in a very real flamewar with another instance admin to the point of sabotage. Nor is it on the level of many Mastodon instances with hidden blocklists, IP blackholes and “signed fetches” to keep others from seeing posts, and in the case of Akkoma literal code sabotage designed to deliberately inconvenience the suckers who unlike the dev lack a solid friend enemy distinction or sense of pattern recognition.

There’s the very real risk of corporate monopolization as with Chrome and web browsers or Google’s cartel monopolizing email. There’s the risk of corporations embracing it and abandoning it or only using it for internal garbage like XMPP. There’s the risk of users just running to a new gated community as a result of drama, or users congregating on massive instances for stability (this already happens). There’s already one group trying to sway people into their instances with specific sets of rules.

And of course, there’s the worst issue: the untrustworthy instance admin who posts a long “who cares” essay and decides to pull his instance soon. This has become somewhat of a cliché in the fediverse, doubled by the fact that everyone on it is essentially here forever (it’s only a matter of time before their new alt or persona are found).

Regardless, the next year is going to be a very interesting time for the fediverse because the fact of the matter is with interest rates rising and companies under obligation to now make money and not just serve as a pricey social control mechanism, suddenly now they have to cut costs any way they can. While many people are going to sit back and let Google/FB/Twitter treat them like a boomer boss, more and more people are moving to alternatives and this is something that hasn’t been seen in a while.