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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 5h

Just remembering the time that National/Paula Bennet leaked my name and contact details to the media over the MSD ‘hack’

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 5h

See here

bsky.app/profile/qazm...

Qazm @qazm.de · 21h

My guess would be a `!needs-review` label (which is very much needed to deal with spammers, unfortunately).

I saw that recently on a new account that boosted many funding links and had really high skeet volume because they thought that'd help. I told them to cool it some, label got removed later.

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 5h

Which is essentially a shadow ban, if they don’t get notified of the ban.

Also there’s another content flag ‘’!needs-review” or something like that which also hides posts and replies without much feedback for the user.

So you’ll see a post with 4 replies but only 3 visible. Very confusing!

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 5h

Actually I think it’s a bit more than that? I took a look at a few cases and there’s a situation where a banned user can still post, especially if they are hosted on a third party PDS like blacksky.

But not sure if they get notifications that they are banned/suspended and just ignore them?

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Reposted by Ira

bryan newbold @bnewbold.net · 2d

a bunch of folks are wondering about how mod comms work for other PDS instances. this is also a problem for, eg, labelers trying to reply to appeals.

the plan is this proposal, which we have been making slow progress towards (it has been a very very busy 12 months for mod eng team)

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

Can I ask a couple of questions?

What app are you using?

And if you’re ok to DM me your other handle I can take a look

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

Any yes, that would totally count as a shadow ban if they didn't let you know that you were banned/suspended!

I think I was confused there for a while as your profile pic is the same for both accounts.

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

So @igorbiccas.bsky.social you're saying:
- you have another account
- that account is banned account by bluesky
- you *can still post and reply* with that banned account
- it doesn't show up for anyone else

AFAIK, you shouldn't be able to login and post unless your account is on a non-bluesky PDS?

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

Why would you black out your own handle in the screenshot? 🤔

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Reposted by Ira

Rudy wants revolution. @rude1.blacksky.team · 1d

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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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

Pretty sure it’s scaling/infrastructure limit issue. Here’s the explanation from a BlueSky engineer on exactly what’s happening when a similar thing happened a month ago (posts disappearing and then reappearing)

bsky.app/profile/esb....

Eric @esb.lol · Aug 16

In this case it's just that this endpoint is unfortunately still pretty dumb, and it's prefixed with "unspecced" to reflect this. This endpoint, like the old one, still loads everything into memory before traversal/rendering. Not ideal.

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

Oh that's a cool write up 👀

I was going to do OAuth but decided not to burn tokens on getting that working vs shipping something useful.

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

Ah that's great context, thanks.

Will reference this the next time people bring up shadow banning!

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

Especially since:
- I don't know rust *AT ALL*
- This is my first rust project
- I literally haven't even glanced at the code

But I do have 15 years of fixing other people's code and shipping it to prod, so that does help 😅

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

Yes, this is what I was thinking as well...

CEO post --> massive pile on --> request spikes --> services fail --> data inconsistency until services recover

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

fixed now @jamwil.com - also added a progress bar for the bulk check because why not

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

also still pushing some updates which will log you out every time

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

yep, just fixing it.

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

yeah, just noticed that. Should work on the bulk tab though?

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

Maybe I shouldn't have made it possible to see who liked banned posts but... oh well

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

I fiddled around with some code and built this today for some more transparency around mod labelling:

peek.bsky.nz

at-peek - ATproto Label Inspector

Inspect content moderation labels on ATproto users and posts

peek.bsky.nz

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

I took today's 'moderation is not shadow banning' vibe with the 'we can just build things' vibe from a few days ago and upgraded a shell script into a client-side rust app:

peek.bsky.nz

Gets mod labels on users/posts and shows them if you want, straight from the PDS.

Viewer discretion is advised.

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

How else are you going to do moderation though?

At least this way the moderation is decoupled from the content and the content still exists. Other apps can still serve it up.

On almost any other platform moderation is just deleting the offending content.

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Ira @ira.bailey.nz · 1d

The rust WASM thing build by bots is coming along. I haven't even looked at a line of code yet.

@clango.ghost.boo , looks like it was only 9 seconds after posting before you got the !takedown label applied so very unlikely a human involved.

Screenshot showing website that inspected labels for user posts

Another screenshot with a "Bulk Analysis" tab

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Reposted by Ira

David Ho @davidho.bsky.social · 2d

“People over Papers, a crowdsourcing project that maps sightings of US immigration agents, was taken offline yesterday by Padlet, the collaborative bulletin board platform on which it was built. It’s just the latest ICE-tracking initiative to be pulled by tech platforms in the past few days.”

Another effort to track ICE raids was just taken offline

People over Papers was removed by Padlet, the platform it was built on, yesterday.

www.technologyreview.com

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