While discussing BlueSky’s custom feeds and composable moderation with a friend, he wondered:
I will need to ponder whether it is viable at scale for millions of users to put in the effort to customize their feeds in a thoughtful way […]
They don’t have to - they only need one person they trust (or are willing to take at face value for a test) to create a feed, or to add a feed to a starter pack.
But more importantly, I realized, any customization someone can do, thoughtful or not, is an improvement. It introduces some delta on the perspective, even while they are within a group, instead of putting them into the monoculture dictated by which news items are more clickbaity and likely to bring ad revenue.
It is the same way with genetics: even small mutations can help diversify the perspective gene pool.
There are two gigantic issues with social media as we have it now.
Like it or not, we have monkey brains. They did not evolve to deal with the scale of information (and misinformation) that they are being exposed to. The monkey brain sees that something has 15,000 re-tweets, and assumes that one of those 15k other monkeys viewed it and vetted it.
The other is that people are getting a firehose of content into a single mental context.
We do not intend to enforce any sort of identity verification or unique identities in distributed[C]. We do not think encouraging people to doxx themselves is a good idea.
This goes beyond concerns about privacy, though. We believe that having multiple personas, which you can use depending on the context you are in, is healthy.
This raises concerns regarding disinformation. If the platform is uncensorable, and we do not plan to enforce identity, how will this not become a cesspool of fake news?