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Jonathan Bellack

@bellack.com

490 followers 210 following 270 posts

Author of the Platformocracy newsletter, Advisory Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, 30-year Internet veteran, Xoogler, grilling/smoking, an old house, and many, many comic books.

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Jonathan Bellack @bellack.com · Jun 6

I love almost everything about @bsky.app. I don’t love that despite an admirable layer of open moderation, the company retains final power over setting and enforcing rules on its app. I propose separating @safety.bsky.app & @moderation.bsky.app from the Bluesky company, under community control.

Bluesky trust and safety is too important to be left to Bluesky

Bluesky is open about almost everything, except setting and enforcing their community guidelines. They have an opportunity to lead the Internet forward with a democratic alternative.

www.platformocracy.com

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Reposted by Jonathan Bellack

JA Westenberg @joanwestenberg.com · 23h

it just turns out that when you give everyone a button that says “show me more stuff like this” they keep pressing it until they end up somewhere insane. This is called “progress”

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Jonathan Bellack @bellack.com · 2h

One Bestseller After Another

Jonathan Bellack @bellack.com · 1d

The full white paper is available here.

the FIRST PERSON NETWORK

www.firstperson.network

Jonathan Bellack @bellack.com · 1d

The First Person Project could be the future of online trust. It's pretty neat! tl;dr:
1. Digital wallets everywhere
2. Verifiable credentials in your wallet
3. Privacy-preserving credential sharing
4. Peer-to-peer social connections
I sum up their 80-page white paper in this week's Platformocracy.

Explainer #3: The First Person Project could be the future of online identity

A new project with a long pedigree promises to put trust at the center of the Internet. I attempt to summarize their epic 80-page white paper in one post.

www.platformocracy.com

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Reposted by Jonathan Bellack

Paul Frazee @pfrazee.com · 1d

Personal automod

hailey @hailey.at · 1d

reworked this labeler
- ingests posts from jetstream
- pays attention to replies to my posts
- calls out to gemma via LMStudio API
- determines if the reply is bad faith
- labels the reply as bad faith if it is

GitHub - haileyok/dontshowmethis

Contribute to haileyok/dontshowmethis development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Reposted by Jonathan Bellack

󠀁󠁿⁢⁢⁤⁤⁢⁢⁢⁤⁢⁢⁤⁤⁢⁢⁤⁤⁢⁢⁤⁤⁢⁢⁤⁤⁢⁢⁤⁤⁢⁤⁤⁤⁤⁤⁤⁤⁢⁢⁢⁢⁤⁢👻 @0x0.boo · 2d

Yes, forcing users to upload documents for age verification is going to end very badly.

Collecting sensitive documents, like ID is an especially bad idea.

Do not collect shit that you do not need to collect, ever.

If it's not collected it can't be leaked.

That is all.

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Jonathan Bellack @bellack.com · 2d

Put the reply button below all the responses, instead of above them.

Reposted by Jonathan Bellack

Margaret Mitchell @mmitchell.bsky.social · 2d

"Experimenter bias" refers to a mistake in scientific studies where the experimenter wants to see something, and so unconsciously designs protocols to prove what they want to see. RFK here provides an example, Let me explain what we might see based on this. 🧵

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 2d

RFK Jr on Tylenol and autism: "It is not proof. We're doing the studies to make the proof."

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Reposted by Jonathan Bellack

Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 10d

Extremely pleased to announce the release of the ActivityPub Fuzzer! This is a tool that runs in a local development environment and (partially) emulates known ActivityPub software. It can even create a fake local "public fire hose" shaped like what you might see if you hooked your […]

Original post on friend.camp

friend.camp

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Reposted by Jonathan Bellack

Darius Kazemi @darius.friend.camp.ap.brid.gy · 7d

If I were a famous politician I would legally change my name to TKTK just to mess with newspaper editors

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Reposted by Jonathan Bellack

Jill Blake @biscuitkitten.bsky.social · 2d

“the girlfriend of one of the founders of antifa”

Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa Lund in Casablanca

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Reposted by Jonathan Bellack

boo-liet shen 👻 @julietshen.bsky.social · 3d

Rudy is the GOAT

and this kind of collective pluralism is what makes his work a real revolution

Rudy wants revolution. @rude1.blacksky.team · 3d

If this becomes a big enough problem, we can switch gears over time! When Blacksky Private Posts ships (eventually) that won't touch Bluesky services at all and we (the Blacksky community) can decide collectively how we want that to work (maybe we don't allow images/videos at all!) 10/11

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Jonathan Bellack @bellack.com · 3d

www.platformocracy.com/p/there-is-n...

There is no online safety without anonymity

Last week, I said we need real-world identity online. This week, I rebut myself. Nobody said this Internet thing was going to be easy.

www.platformocracy.com

Jonathan Bellack @bellack.com · 3d

I agree! I wrote a piece to that effect in my newsletter a couple of weeks ago. The thing is, giving out accounts like free candy is also bad. It enables abuse at scale & leads to mass surveillance in the name of safety. Ideas like zero knowledge proofs and webs of trust have some promise to help.

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Jonathan Bellack @bellack.com · 3d

100%. Also, though, FWIW, the avalanche of garbage is so big because of easy, anonymous signups, which is a gigantic gift to bad actors who can do terrible stuff at scale, and even if they get caught and banned, can walk right back in the front door and do it again.

Reposted by Jonathan Bellack

boo-liet shen 👻 @julietshen.bsky.social · 3d

if you know solid software engineers who want to be part of our open source software adventure, email [email protected]

+10 if they've worked on trust & safety
+10 if they have worked with graphql and/or typescript
+100 if they like chicken puns
+1000 if they want to change the world

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Reposted by Jonathan Bellack

Anne Bertucio @annebdh.bsky.social · 3d

Want to work on open source full time? The @roost.tools engineering team is starting to hatch! Come build OSS tools making a difference in Trust & Safety.

This is a fully remote role, though some schedule overlap with North American time zones is expected.

www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/43...

ROOST.tools hiring Staff Software Engineer in United States | LinkedIn

Posted 8:52:18 PM. About ROOSTROOST is a community effort to build scalable and resilient safety infrastructure for…See this and similar jobs on LinkedIn.

www.linkedin.com

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Reposted by Jonathan Bellack

rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social · 3d

And I just want to reiterate this ( from a thread deep in replies). I started doing this work before any of these tools existed. The number of my contemporaries in the field who have died by suicide is NOT A SMALL NUMBER. The work is incredibly traumatizing.

rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social · 3d

As someone who was doing that human review of images before even PhotoDNA existed, I can testify that the amount of human suffering automated image classification prevents is MASSIVE. Like, I am the best case scenario of the human cost of that work and I still have lifelong consequences from it.

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Devin Gaffney @devingaffney.com · 3d

Time to up your donation amounts folks

Rudy wants revolution. @rude1.blacksky.team · 3d

I hear and see your concerns. Over the weekend, a couple users hosted on Blacksky's PDS were banned from the Bluesky app and thus the Bluesky API servers. This was a weakness of our system I've been aware of and hoped we had more time to address before any kind of public incident. 1/11

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Reposted by Jonathan Bellack

Rudy wants revolution. @rude1.blacksky.team · 3d

Suspension of accts from Bluesky has called into question the mission and very existence of Blacksky. "If bsky can still suspend you, what's the point?"

For one usually Bluesky doesn't just suspend you. They delete all of your data AND suspend you. Moving to Blacksky prevents that. 4/11

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Reposted by Jonathan Bellack

Christine Lemmer-Webber @dustyweb.bsky.social · 4d

I had a back and forth with a member of Bluesky's team about decentralization in my second blogpost, which takes a bigger deep dive into several details, including challenges with what will happen if Bluesky's architecture actually *was* federated.

Also maybe worth a re-read. How does it hold up?

Christine Lemmer-Webber @dustyweb.bsky.social · Dec 13

Three weeks ago I wrote "How decentralized is Bluesky really?" dustycloud.org/blog/how-dec...

Shortly thereafter, @bnewbold.net wrote his response: whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net...

I have written my (final) response blogpost: dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-b...

And as last time, 🧵. Buckle up.

Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization -- Dustycloud Brainstorms

dustycloud.org

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Jonathan Bellack @bellack.com · 4d

This, right here, is the problem. Nobody can foster a healthy community if they can only afford to spend 30 seconds on each decision. If the money is not there, involve the community. Reddit is not perfect, but it at least has delegated a lot of moderation to subredditors.

Aaron Rodericks @aaron.bsky.team · 5d

A single moderator reviews thousands of reports per year — often making a decision in under 30 seconds. Expanding the scope of what counts as “evidence” makes it much harder to act fairly and consistently. 2/9

Jonathan Bellack @bellack.com · 4d

💯💯💯👏👏👏

Ryan J. Gallagher @ryanjgallag.com · 4d

Moderation isn't simply about taking things down, it's also about building a collectively safe space. Telling someone they can just "label" (or hide/block) something they don't like won't address their concern that their community isn't safe

Jonathan Bellack @bellack.com · 4d

At a minimum. Full separation of powers would be better. I wrote this back in June.

Bluesky trust and safety is too important to be left to Bluesky

Bluesky is open about almost everything, except setting and enforcing their community guidelines. They have an opportunity to lead the Internet forward with a democratic alternative.

www.platformocracy.com

Jonathan Bellack @bellack.com · 4d

Great point, +1 to all. Most social media platforms have a huge gap around coordinated abuse. Forcing the target to report one bad post at a time revictimizes them and doesn't get moderators the needed context anyway.

Perhaps hire ombudsmen or citizen advocates to investigate + support.