Comment by NitpickLawyer
7 days ago
Interesting idea, but I'm not sure it's gonna work in the long run. There is a key difference between reddit / forums and bsky / other apps like it. Forums are many to many, and the focus is around community. Someone (doesn't really matter who) posts something, and lots of people comment. You go there to read the voices of many people. Bsky / birdapp on the other hand focus on one to many. The person posting matters the most, and the commenters are usually "followers" or people interested in what one person has to say.
It's a key difference IMO, and the main reason I like forums and heavily dislike the twitter-style apps. I want to read the voices of many, not the voices of few "influencers". You can make it look like a forum, but it's still gonna be focused on the voices of few.
That being said, with reddit going crazy over the last few years (and especially this last election cycle), I'm open to suggestions on new places to try that focus on forum-style discussions.
Agreed and there's also the problem that on Bluesky, one user blocking another means that the thread of conversation gets broken for everyone else who may read it.
See e.g. https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/7021
> As it stands, if 20 people are involved in a discussion, and ONE single person decides to block someone, then all of a sudden, the 19 other people in the discussion (+ any other viewers) are now inconvenienced simply because one person had an issue with someone else.
> Bluesky does have a bit of a block culture, and as such, this issue is only going to get worse and worse, and threads are going to get harder and harder to read and follow as more and more people get blocked.
Trying to create a Reddit-like experience around this limitation would be very difficult, as the thread breakage is done server-side so the clients don't even get enough info to reconstruct the conversation.
I haven't looked at how Threadsky does it, and I don't want to weigh in on the merits of different approaches.
But blocking in ATProto happens at the application (AppView) layer. A different application can absolutely make different choices from the Bluesky app about how blocking works and is displayed.
Presumably you still need server code to prevent blocked users from interacting with each other, no?
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I'm struggling to come up with what intent this behavior was supposed to perform. I block probably one person every other thread.
I don't block you because I had some kind of conflict, I blocked you because I don't like what you tweet and I don't want to see it and it's not clear what "not interested" actually does. Why this would impact anyone other than whom I'm blocking is perplexing. I certainly can't vouch for what they want to see and whom they want to interact with.
The reason this impacts other people is because Bluesky wants to discourage “dunk” culture in which one user continues to make fun of or harass another user who has indicated they do not wish to interact or participate. By orphaning interactions after users block each other, it becomes much harder for unrelated users to QT a post and add their own commentary to something that has already been definitively concluded.
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The way blocking works on Bluesky is easily the most frustrating part of the platform I've encountered. I'm all for blocking trolls, spammers, etc but it seems even a mild divergence from the crowd gets you whacked. It's a bit stifling in my experience. I wonder if they'll change the way it works..
They won’t change the way it works as the “nuclear block” is part of what most Bluesky users like about the platform.
There's Lemmy and nostr, for example.
But I absolutely agree that the individual-centered social media is as toxic as it can be. Forum-style social media is just a bit less toxic but can be more constructive since it's centered about community and ideas rather than particular individuals/personas.