An email and a blogpost from Bluesky announce their new anti-toxicity, anti-dunking (i.e. unwelcome quote-tweets) feature… and it’s not that it’s bad so much as it enables people (both “good”, and “bad”, whatever your personal taste) to curate their own echo-chambers to an extent that will certainly fragment communities more deeply into in-groups and out-groups.

Members of both communities will doubtless feel safer for not having to publicly defend their positions … but on the other hand they will also learn less about defending their positions, instead expecting the platforms (and, eventually, the state?) to deliver as standard the tools of microcuration.

You can’t say that about me! I’ll unlink it!

Again, these are not “blocklists” nor “killfiles” in the USENET sense, where Bob ignores Alice and/or keywords in posts. Instead this is “Bob eliding what Alice quoted him as saying in her post about his being an abuser and racist, so that Charlotte won’t see it.”

If you’re reading this and looking for a political explanation for {my, the author’s} position being apparently “against” Bluesky, don’t bother because I am actually on Bluesky and I believe it’s doing some interesting work; but instead consider: what will obviously happen is that any critics, trolls and assholes will move to “shadow trolling” by use of sharing immutable screenshots. By further inhibiting communication we will eventually suffer parallel universes with mutually hostile communities, seeing but not communicating with each other.

Bluesky are relying on transparency and community labels to address the rough edges:

As of the latest app version, released today (version 1.90), users can view all the quote posts on a given post. Paired with that, you can detach your original post from someone’s quote post. This helps you maintain control over a thread you started, ideally limiting dog-piling and other forms of harassment. On the other hand, quote posts are often used to correct misinformation too. To address this, we’re leaning into labeling services and hoping to integrate a Community Notes-like feature in the future. Note: Like blocks, quote post removals are public data. The Bluesky app won’t list all the quote post removals directly on your post, but developers with knowledge of the Bluesky API will be able to access this data.

…yet I cannot but think they’re making their own lives harder in pursuit of giving people more control. Who here remembers Google Circles and why they failed?

As ever, the most important thing we can do is keep talking.