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Laurens

@laurenshof.online

11K followers 1.1K following 4.3K posts

I care about an ethical internet. I write about Bluesky and the ATmosphere at connectedplaces.online 🇳🇱, mostly post in English https://ger.mx/A7wQM6oeukC5_1J8D27CvfjlUAaep5t2rcwmqEvVRRLk#did:plc:mdjhvva6vlrswsj26cftjttd

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 19d

‘Blueskyism’, Political Violence, and Open Social Networks Under Authoritarianism

on how the last weeks have shifted the threat model for open social networks: from fighting platform decay to the threat of authoritarianism

connectedplaces.online/blueskyism-p...

‘Blueskyism’, Political Violence, and Open Social Networks Under Authoritarianism

After Kirk's murder, calls for censorship and the crackdown on political places started to include Bluesky. Open social networks must now fight political suppression as well as platform monopolies.

connectedplaces.online

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 11h

there was also recently a fediverse app mainly for mastodon that also allowed peertube instances to log in with that couldnt get their update through the play store because you could access peertube videos that show you how to download youtube videos

Laurens @laurenshof.online · 11h

app stores dont univerally allow this actually. currently theyre fine with mastodon clients and mastodon servers. but the peertube app for ios only allows a preset list of peertube instances, not all peertube instances that are available

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 12h

OAuth stands for OnlyAuth, is what im taking away from this

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 17h

theres also that the more bubbly this becomes, the bubble moves from ai, to being a bubble in financial shenanigans for funding hypothetical future datacenters

so in a lot of ways its an "ai" "bubble" now

Laurens @laurenshof.online · 1d

then again, if you assume you have the same legal responsibilities as if youd host a mastodon server, i think you get pretty far

regarding mod capabilities for a PDS, see this post by bryan:
whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net...

you can do account takedowns on a pds and content blob takedowns

Laurens @laurenshof.online · 1d

1: rsky looks cool, but considering how few people use it yet (github.com/mary-ext/atp...) id personally go with the reference implementation

2: legal uncertainty is one of the main aspects holding back more widespread pds hosting in eu

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 1d

like, i agree that people would likely want the platonic ideal of a social network that consists of hosted spaces

we just dont know how to build those, only the messy flawed ones

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 1d

so the state of the network ends up being quite dependent on who incidentally has control over the new types of chokepoints that emerge

in case of fedi, that turned out to be eugen. we can argue eugen's flaws, but alternative universe fedi would just have had someone else with other types of flaws

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 1d

i think you can make the case that the mastodon as it historically existed, with all its flaws, is strongly related to the fact that a network that consists of 'hosted spaces' is just extremely messy.

its really hard (impossible?) to get strong agreement on how to move the space forward

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 1d

i think hosted spaces where the userbase has control over access and participation are indeed the solution

but the performative declarative statements by large accounts this week that "theyll never go to mastodon" shows that the problem is that people think they do not actually want this

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 2d

like, its very easy to say "bsky should just get better comms" (because they clearly do), but i think the outcomes of that might just be quite different than from what people expect

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 2d

also im pretty sure that a hypothetical comms person at this point would prioritise the communication (both in language and in behaviour) to gov relations over users at this point in time

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 2d

like, if funding would be a concern, that would most likely be because of growth stagnation, and in that context there was really no need at all for her to start talking about sonnet 4.5, considering shes clearly aware of the dominant thought regarding llms on here

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 2d

i dont think its funding personally. I think the tone shift actually happened a few days before the 'waffles' thing, when jay started posting about her experiences with sonnet 4.5

for the longest time jay has been super careful in her posting style, uncontroversial in a way that felt deliberate

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 2d

as someone who keeps close track of the atproto dev community as a job, this is my view too

i think the longterm fallout of this whole situation is still unknown, but i definitely would not rule a net benefit for atproto dev ecosystem longterm out as a possibility

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 3d

ugh ive been preparing my notes to write about the waffles stuff next week, and its clear i need to incorporate this new discourse as well, but uggghhh

Reposted by Laurens

May @kamo.moe · 3d

on kindness

お互いに

pondering.kamo.moe

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 3d

Forest in fall

Dead tree surrounded by mushrooms on all sides

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Reposted by Laurens

Jay 🦋 @jay.bsky.team · 5d

dec/acc

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 5d

Hell yeah

Laurens @laurenshof.online · 5d

I don’t think that’s a coincidence at all

Laurens @laurenshof.online · 5d

its pretty clear whats going to happen at some point

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 5d

connect the dots

jason koebler post: so the US government just forced a tech company to delete an app it doesn’t like, which is totally normal stuff, with link to 404. media article

truth social post by trump, calling the democratic party the party of hate, evil and satan

THE FEDERALIST: While this alleged assassin used Discord, there are other platforms that are cesspools of left-wing radicalism — where the standard-bearers of the American liberal movement are openly cheering Kirk’s assassination. Another such platform is Bluesky.

While Apple, Amazon, and Google removed the social media app Parler from their platforms after it was falsely said to have had a connection with the January 6 riot at the Capitol, they are silent on the fact that Discord and Bluesky are allowing the celebration and encouragement of political violence.

The Big Tech oligarchs could use some encouragement, perhaps in the form of legal liability.

Blueskyism
American political pundit Nate Silver wrote about Blueskyism early september. In the article, Silver first sets out the statistics of how user activity on Bluesky is declining (which it is). Then he follows with the statement that Blueskyism predates Bluesky, and describes Blueskyism as behaviour Silver does not approve of: criticising people on other parts of the political spectrum, valuing academic authority, and being too dissatisfied with the current state of the world.

Blogger and centrist pundit Noah Smith followed up on Silver’s writing about Blueskyism, in a blog titled ‘The Bluesky-ization of the American left’. The article is mainly about grievances that Bari Weiss got criticised too hard on Twitter in the late 2010s, and how he’s upset that Jamelle Bouie called Smith a ‘a weird antisocial loser’.

On the surface these articles are simply grievances from centrist pundits who are extremely online and are very bothered that people on Bluesky criticise them. They are trying to paint a picture of Bluesky as a network in decline. Their articles do not mention it at all, but at least Silver is explicitly aware how important Bluesky has become to the scientific community.

However, both articles serve two important purposes:

It provides moral cover for people who might otherwise grapple with the implications of being active on X that it’s fine to do so because Bluesky is not a real alternative.
It sets up a permission structure where Bluesky is seen as a left and democratic space. This is what makes both articles relevant. I think their arguments are petty and show that they have not grappled with the subject matter well, but that matters little: it is a major contributor to the idea that Bluesky is a ‘left’ space.

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Laurens @laurenshof.online · 5d

*dont think i knew

Laurens @laurenshof.online · 5d

i think its a good thing! pretty similar to the FYP on tiktok, thats also super fast to update daily preferences

dont think about that embedding feed, but that sounds really fun

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