[CactusBlue]

How do you feel about the recent communication failures from the team to the userbase? As another builder of an open-source social platform, we must all understand that it is paramount for any company to not antagonize its customers, doubly so for a SOCIAL platform. I do understand that Bluesky and ATProto has to deal with a lot of baggage from both the old userbase and the new influx from the X/Twitter exodus, but engaging in user-antagonistic communication caused me to sour on the whole protocol.

[parl_match]

> user-antagonistic communication

could you provide some examples? i didn't really see this, but maybe i just missed it

[CactusBlue]

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/05/waffles-eat-bluesky/

[parl_match]

I don't like Jesse Singal's work or his political positions (he fucking sucks!), but this is hardly antagonistic except to maybe a small group of terminally online posters who take posting too seriously.

Although, I guess that is the audience bluesky was targeting when they first started. So I guess I understand the criticism.

Also, it is a very ironic demonstration of the pancakes/waffles meme. Interjecting into an unrelated topic to ask the mods to ban someone you don't like is a tradition as old as dial up BBS. So I'm glad to see the torch is being carried forward to a younger generation.

[CactusBlue]

I don't even think having Jesse Singal on the platform is the problem (like it or not, I believe that all beings must have the right to communicate); the problem here was the communication failure when communicating this decision to the userbase. They could have just reiterated their rules and left it at that; instead, they chose to mock their userbase, write them off as harassment, and banned users left and right, abusing their position in network to censor people at every layer of the protocol.

[easterncalculus]

> instead, they chose to mock their userbase

It's a CEO's personal account. CEOs do this on Twitter all the time without it becoming a techcrunch article.

Let's just be honest about what happened - the CEO of Bluesky gave a (still not proportionally as) absurd response to an extremely absurd harassment campaign. That's what this and the article intentionally obscure.

Again, this is never how the web was supposed to work, and it (BARELY) holding on to that is the real story.

[parl_match]

> instead, they chose to mock their userbase

Doing the pancakes/waffles thing in the thread about pancakes/waffles is so fucking on the nose and demonstrates a complete lack of self awareness.

> They could have just reiterated their rules and left it at that; instead, they chose to mock their userbase, write them off as harassment, and banned users left and right, abusing their position in network to censor people at every layer of the protocol.

The more I dig into it, the more your one-sided whinging falls apart. I agree they could have handled it somewhat better, but I have very little sympathy for the terminally online bullshit that I'm seeing coming from the banned users.

Anyways, I feel we're apart on this issue. Feel free to have the last word if you wish.

[jrflowers]

> Doing the pancakes/waffles thing in the thread about pancakes/waffles is so fucking on the nose

Wait what do you think “the pancakes/waffles thing” refers to? You posted 2 hours ago that you had never heard of it.

I can see that how it could be confusing because there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay wrote about about people complaining to the CEO when the moderation team doesn’t respond as being equivalent to that meme, and then there’s “the pancakes/waffles thing” where Jay started posting pictures of pancakes and waffles as some sort of… joke or dunk? I never quite got the 4D comedy chess there.

It doesn’t seem like anybody is “doing the pancakes/waffles thing” in either case. Nobody is asking Jay, as CEO, to ban anyone in the thread about Jay not being the CEO anymore. And I don’t think I’ve seen anyone ironically posting metahumor pictures of pancakes.

The term has become so overused that definition creep now means that it could mean “anything that might bother Jay” in this context.

[inquirerGeneral]

The offended people are the type I least respect on the internet and remember how much better it was before they existed

[Karrot_Kream]

> Although, I guess that is the audience bluesky was targeting when they first started. So I guess I understand the criticism.

I was in the invite only cohort of Bluesky users and I don't really think so. I think what happened is after the election a bunch of very online, political news addicted anti-Musk folks migrated to Bluesky and created the current culture. Even though I'm pretty sure most folks on the network shared pretty much the same politics, the culture on the network changed completely within a few days of this.

[mossTechnician]

The central complaint doesn't seem to be distaste, but rather the fact that he is uniquely privileged over other users, despite violating Bluesky's terms of service.[0]

[0]: https://www.change.org/p/bluesky-must-enforce-its-community-...

[Levitz]

The central complaint isn't "distaste" because you can't call for someone to be banned because of a "distaste".

"Jesse Singal has distributed private medical information on Bluesky without the consent of the patient" translates to publishing a quote from a patient included in a therapist's letter of support for hormones.

The problem in this situation is that the complaint itself as well as the whole drama surrounding the person is an exercise of harassment towards Singal. In this context, I don't think that saying "waffles" is out of order. I'm not sure of what else can be done about crybullying, since by its very nature innocent bystanders would be surely affected if action was taken against those complaining.

[mossTechnician]

Distributing private medical information without consent is a violation of Bluesky's terms.

And to me, that sounds like a much more concrete example of someone being a bully.

[easterncalculus]

Yeah here's the problem with this argument:

1. People want him banned for any and no reason, so this is a post-hoc justification. The same people (let's be real, likely including you) wanted Singal banned the second he made his account.

2. This change.org petition, despite proving how many uninformed people will blindly click agree on a petition, proves nothing about how Singal broke literally any rule anywhere, in law or on Bluesky.

[tekla]

Why do people keep lying about this?

He pulled a quote from a publically available affidavit.

There was no identifying information whatsoever either.

[jmcgough]

I think Jesse Singal is an awful person, but Jay responded appropriately there.

[easterncalculus]

There aren't really any, the user you're replying to is just disappointed the campaign to ban users for no (on platform, or really any) reason was not successful.

[hitekker]

Yeah, that's the vibe I got after reading more into it.

I respect the CEO for laughing at a melodramatic harassment campaign. The last thing those outrage addicts need is coddling & corporate babytalk.

[CactusBlue]

I don't care about the specific situation either way; What I am observant of is how the core team has handled their userbase and lack of protocol robustness.

[jauntywundrkind]

Meh. People are going to antagonize themselves. Trying to win em all is a fools game.

I wrote this to a discord on the 7th:

> i know it's so obviously stupid, but i like that they are having fun with being online, even if it is at their users expense. and omg the users are so so awful to them, so much. again, it seems obviously bad to do, but i can't help but want them to keep at having fun online anyways.

That was in semi private. I'd de-enohazize the expense part seirously, I'd spin it a little differently now, emphasizing more the Douglas Adams nature of it all:

> In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people angry, and been widely regarded as a bad move.

But that is also not owning it either, and I think this is an ownable lesson in just being human too, in deciding whether online mediums are corporate, lawyer, marketing, and engineer checked reviewed approved and wise correct words, or whether there must be some permission to be ourselves online, and some expectations that people are only human, and we should be thankful they are sharing their human experiences with us or not. It's not just having fun: whether we can be ourselves online is in question. Whether that is socially allowed.

(And generally I haven't found the character of the team to be deeply off. They haven't been, in my view, going out of their way to create injury, but they have been sharing sides that people have never wanted to hear!)

I see how this has been a bad taste for some. And I don't want to belittle your feelings here at all. Yes being more correct would be the wise obvious choice. Ultimately though I think these team member's are more beholden to remaining human, having fun, enjoying themselves.

And to creating (to credit another soul in the discord) personal / compsable moderation & filter systems (not top down enforcement!) such that they can enjoy being a "main character" online (like it or not), even in the midst of strident focused directed continual hostility. Which is a capability atproto is truly uniquely without compare set up to support & enable.

Props to the team. Please keep posting. Sorry about humanity. Sorry to people who are upset and turned off by this. No one is perfect, we work with what we got, and our responses are human and our own and valid, whether they are the wisest sharpest most all correct choice or no. With the good willing souls, we work towards synthesis & understanding; hopefully all sides find that agreeable.

[yuestion]

The most vocal and obnoxious of the Bluesky userbase get antagonized by pretty much anything. Pleasing that lot is a fruitless task.

What Bluesky should do now is focus on expanding their userbase away from this particular group of insufferables.

[subscribed]

What do you compare this userbase to? Twitter? Facebook? Reddit? HN? All of these places have similar or worse userbase and worse filtering/blocking options than bsky.

[CactusBlue]

As a startup founder, your userbase is your god. Either treat them with utmost respect, or learn to explicitly fire your customers.

[yuestion]

If they want to remain a niche echo-chamber platform rather than become a major social network, that would be an appropriate strategy. However, I expect they have higher ambitions.

What they should also do is redesign (or remove) the "nuclear block" feature. In its current state, it helps perpetuate a hostile and exclusionary atmosphere to new users, which isn't going to help Bluesky grow an active and diverse userbase.

[jauntywundrkind]

You have more than one user base.

You have to make hard product decisions about which user bases to serve.

[CactusBlue]

Then explicitly refuse service, instead of mocking your userbase.

[pfraze]

By... banning them? What are you suggesting?

[marxisttemp]

They should focus on implementing ActivityPub instead of their useless proprietary protocol

[danabramov]

It's not "proprietary", it's openly specified and is literally being taken to IETF: https://docs.bsky.app/blog/taking-at-to-ietf

Also, unlike ActivityPub, it's actually useful for building features that normal people expect from social apps — for example, algorithmic feeds and search, and a single interlinked world (rather than fragmented "servers").

[CactusBlue]

Eh, AP has its own sets of problems (underspecified protocol, split-brained on discoverability, new developments are met with hostility in the community)

[catapart]

Big time +1, here. Would love to hear something - anything - from the bsky team that takes some accountability.