[fc417fc802]

> There is no concept of "instances" on ATproto.

Regardless of name and precise technical details, there are central service components that can ban you. If a proper ecosystem of those ever springs up then the equivalent of fediblock (ie guilt by association) oriented at individual accounts or PDS is the next logical step. At present (last I checked) there's only (approximately) one primary provider plus blacksky making the situation even worse.

This isn't some wild hypothetical - we also see guilt by association in the matrix ecosystem.

[what]

Don’t they already have extensive block lists that you can “subscribe” to? I think some official blue sky account was added to some and they got super mad?

[fc417fc802]

That's an additional (but closely related) issue. AFAIK those lists work at the user level to filter what you see, so while they aren't a network breaking "guilt by association" practice they're a form of centralized, lazy, delegated moderation that has outsized impacts on any borderline cases or false positives.

[tardedmeme]

Besides those appview block lists, relays also block stuff. I know relays block stuff because bluesky isn't being sued for distributing child pornography, as it would be if it didn't block stuff.

[jauntywundrkind]

Details matter. Technical details matter.

Most bans today are at the "appview" level: the big indexed view of all the data, that combines the firehoses ("relays") marks accounts as banned & doesn't show their stuff. But the relay and the PDS still work.

Agreed that there aren't many public appviews for Bluesky posting right now, really just the two. Tangled itself though is an appview, of a different sort: one not for posting but for git issues/pr's/rtc. This appview isnt gated on Bluesky or Blacksky's permission. And folks could pretty comfortably host Tangled aplview themselves, subscribing their Tangled instance to any of the dozens of firehose/relay instances, getting all pre-filtered Tangled activity. And that really is quite decentralized a model that is imminently doable. Regarding the technical properly, the concern here about banning feels premature & naive: it assumes Tangled depends on these appviews at all, and it doesn't.

I will note that Phil's constellation project just tackles the key reverse indexing that comprises much of the appview work: taking all the firehose records, and connecting all the threads and likes together. Constellation runs ok as a public service on an rpi. There's a lot of challenges to making new appviews, but it is astounding and comforting seeing the core indexing for a sizable multi-media social network running on an rpi. What seems like a dire situation may actually be opportunity, if folks actually tried.

Whatever problems we want to foresee dooming us, whatever slopes we want to hypothesize sliding down, what we have here sounds way way better than anything else available to me today. Personally I'm much more bright blue sky sunnier about the prospects rather than your dark raincloud doom fall scare-away. The risk imo is immensely more weighted in not trying more than trying.

[fc417fc802]

I'm not saying people shouldn't build things, merely disputing the idea that the logical equivalent of instances (and the ills they lead to) don't exist on ATProto. Guilt by association currently exists as a fairly common practice on all the community protocols I've made use of - including federated, p2p, and whatever else - so I see no reason to expect it won't also infect ATProto.

The key difference is that ATProto currently only has a small handful of instances, ie it remains largely centralized. Certainly it's a blessing that the operators appear to have generally acted with benevolence to date but that's not really relevant to the point I'm making.