Home | Notifications | New Note | Local | Federated | Search | Logout

Note Detail

Mastodon Migration@mastodonmigration@mastodon.online (2026-06-26 01:08:56)
Ken White, aka Popehat, a lawyer and popular poster on #Bluesky was recently suspended (https://www.popehat.com/p/a-bit-of-tedious-drama-at-bluesky). Suspension now over, Ken writes:

"...I believe that returning after a suspension carries with it an implicit promise that I won’t post that, or something like it, again. I won’t make that promise, so I won’t return to Bluesky."

Indeed, Bluesky is demonstrating they can extort censorship with the ban hammer. Other users are put on notice it's not you this time, toe the line.

1/
---Reply---
Mastodon Migration@mastodonmigration@mastodon.online (2026-06-26 01:19:48)
We've seen this movie before. In 2023 journalist Taylor Lorenz @taylorlorenz was suspended from Twitter ironically also for posting about Elon Musk, initiating a regime of increasing censorship and control over user content, mostly self enforced to avoid the same fate.

Bluesky users take note, this is about freedom of expression and the chilling effect of knowing you may be banned for stepping over arbitrary lines set by the owners of your centralized platform. 

https://mastodon.online/@mastodonmigration/109533315401943335

2/

---Replies---

Rob Ricci@ricci@discuss.systems (2026-06-26 01:45:32)
@mastodonmigration My take on this, from a network/protocols/platform perspective, is that this is an indication that the "stacked moderation" that Bluesky is trying is failing to solve the scaling problem with moderation. As Ken points out, many, many other people - most of them more marginalized and with less of a platform than Ken - have been temporarily or permanently banned. In theory, Bluesky has a bunch of tools, including shared blocklists and a "label" system that give users a significant amount of control over their experience, and it's the users themselves that get to create these things. This is good, and the Fediverse has things it should learn from this. However, the original idea was that Bluesky would do minimal moderation at the "base" layer, and these "stacked" tools would be the main way users kept their experience safe and enjoyable. This was supposed to solve the problem that Mike Masnick has written about extensively that good moderation does not scale. Unfortunately, this is not how it has worked out. Yes, users make good use of the stacked tools. But Bluesky is still doing bad moderation at the base layer.