This is like grasping at a boogeyman web3 straw to make a point.
Concretely, Bluesky has an AppView that takes posts from relays and PDSes, subscribes to moderation labelers, filters posts that have labels which have certain labels, then displays them in the browser. Blacksky is the first independent implementation of relays and other large components of the system.
The default Bluesky AppView subscribes to the Bluesky Moderation labeler which cannot be disabled. No independent AppView has been made which can turn off the Bluesky Moderation labeler. That's all.
I have my concerns over the network, namely DAUs decreasing and community politics, but the tech is largely a matter of time I feel. It's true that the ActivityPub ecosystem has a lot more federation happening but ActivityPub is a much older system (which itself derives from OStatus which originated in 2012-ish.) Mastodon was released in 2016. It's bound to be more federated than Bluesky.
This just reads like not a response to the problem, but instead a description of technical implementations.
Concretely, nobody is going to subscribe to anything else in bsky but the default stack, anything else is unlikely to ever gain much adoption, and thus federation is basically meaningless and a technical implementation detail for how they wanted to manage their stuff.
I have to disagree a little.
You might be right simply that no one actual cares about any of this, and 99% of people don't care at all who gets banned or censored and who doesn't. And they'd all just stick around to the one place where everyone else is and that's that.
But this is an argument against the idea that people care or don't.
Assuming people do care, then Bluesky is the first protocol attempt that could actually work, because it lets you move your existing account freely to any alternatives easily, and because it also allows you to control your own recommendation algorithms.
If people don't care, than, people don't care, and that's that.
But if people do care, you need to achieve the above behavior, and that becomes a technical challenge that tech can solve.
Why wouldn't they? You join the platform, make friends with folks who say stuff like "Vance and Singal shouldn't be here but the people that give them death threats should", then they tell you to hop onto "Cleansky" which has its own Appview that filters out Vance, Singal, and platforms your buddies. You don't need to make a new account or anything.
The default experience just needs to be good enough. Beyond that folks with strong opinions will filter into moderation communities that offer them the curation they want. That's the technical side of this at least. There's larger problems around community culture but unrelated to tech.
The decentralization problem in BlueSky is not filtering out users, but rather hearing from users that BlueSky has decided to filter out.
Yeah which is why I added the "and platform your buddies" and the "but the people that give them death threats should" bits but they probably were too parenthetical to come across.
Most recently in my case: "$3.5 million scam victims compensation fund".
People who want me to hear them belong to one of two groups: I want that, or I don't.
The second group may be expected to be overwhelmingly spammers and scammers, with a smattering of tankies and kooks, because the ability to reach the largest possible audience is attractive to them, right? So what you think, should each recipient maintain his/her own filter, or should the platform include some sort of common filter?
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In fact, I'd argue that blue sky encouraged this by nerfing federation from the beginning. Rather than adopting ActivityPub, they made their own boutique protocol and put up barriers for third parties to use that protocol.
ActivityPub is a bad protocol.
I disagree, federation is still useful, it's just not as a competitor to bluesky. It exists as a subset of bluesky, and you can have your own little subset.
It's like stack overflow for teams. Isn't that useless? Why not post on stack overflow? Because this is your stack overflow, for your organization. Stack overflow for teams isn't a competitor or alternative to stack overflow, it's a different use case.
Moderation labels are applied at the client level, not at appview level. Forks of the official client (e.g. deer.social) allow you to completely remove the official moderation labeller.
Yes. Sorry, I was imprecise in my explanation.