should treehouse defederate the bluesky bridge?

@ariadne is there any particular reason why you're considering it?

@mjdxp yes. there are several people who I follow who boost bluesky political content and I am tired of reading neoliberal shitposting

@ariadne @mjdxp it would disrupt several of my connections which would be unpleasant

have you considered unfollowing people who immerse themselves in neoliberal shitposting instead

@ariadne @mjdxp I'm not a treehouse user and didn't vote in the poll. But given the particular shape of that issue, might only muting the instance from your personal account be more appropriate?

One problem with defederating is some treehouse members might want to federate *into* bluesky. And having bridge support complete complete is nice because it allows things like threads, QRTs, RTs to pass bidi over the bridge.

Trying not to express a specific opinion here.

@whitequark @ariadne this++

i'd have to start looking for another instance if such decisions were to be taken

@valpackett @ariadne yeah, besides the immediate disruption of connections, i'm a lot more uncomfortable with the methodology described here

@mjdxp @whitequark I have. I was just curious about how people felt about the bridge.

@whitequark @valpackett @ariadne Yeah, defed via poll like that is not cool.

@whitequark @valpackett @dalias to be clear this is not "defed by poll", but simply asking whether people find the bridge useful. now I have an answer.

@whitequark @valpackett @dalias (the reason for phrasing the question like that was to encourage comment, as people who are using it would be motivated to say "hey, I'm using this" if they were using it)

@ariadne One possible line is whether the bridge does sufficient moderation to make up for Bluesky's moderation failures. If Bluesky hosts content you would suspend a fedi server for, and you can't get the bridge to block it either, then it's essentially an inadequately moderated fedi server.

The only reason not to suspend in that case is if Bluesky is "too big to fail", but many fedi servers have suspended Threads (which looks bigger in theory).

I'm not voting b/c I'm not on your server.

@skyfaller threads uses an allowlist and treehouse isn't on it, so it's largely a moot issue

conclusion: we keep the bridge as people are actively using it.

@ariadne @skyfaller it does? posts from threads have federated to me and I would be very surprised if I was on the allowlist (I have no idea if federation is working the other way, I have never interacted with a threads user)

@ariadne have an opinion, but not a treehouse user, so kept it to myself :)

sometimes I ask questions in this format to encourage people to actually comment 😂

@ariadne I'm on treehouse specifically because I don't want to have an adversarial relationship with my social media host (either directly or by proxy), so the provocative phrasing really didn't help

to be clear, this went like 5% of the way on a scale where 100% is "holy shit, I have to switch servers immediately" but that's still a bump in blood pressure that is entirely optional

@whitequark as we work on slowly rebuilding infrastructure and organizational capacity, what classes of changes do you think require wider community consensus, as opposed to the current traditional“forum staff’s choice”? How do you wish to be notified of such?

@ariadne

@whitequark fair enough, we can ask questions more softly, but the onus is on you to still respond 🙂

@ariadne I voted in the poll even before the second post went up! (at least on my screen)

@whitequark ah the poll was not for collecting data, it was for driving engagement 😂

the real goal was comment solicitation

@kouhai @ariadne that's a good question that I don't have a ready answer for, but I want to backtrack a bit. the actual 'product' (for lack of a better term, i'm going with the corporate analogy) you're offering is trust, same as an open source maintainer.

in general, even for changes that directly impact me, my inclination is to think "ok, well, that's unfortunate but I think these people and/or creatures have the best interests of the userbase in mind, so it's probably fine". defederation-by-personal-preference stands starkly against this assumption, which immediately raises many further questions that all lead to (in a hypothetical where this is actually used as a basis for decisionmaking) "okay, was my trust misplaced in the end?". i think that never reaching that point is a lot more valuable than governance by active participation (assuming it is possible), because active participation in governance is frankly a ton of work and i just want to live my life in the end

obviously some degree of participation is required. for example, the question in the original post! but there's a chasm of difference between "i'm occasionally asked for feedback on upcoming changes" and "i have to be vigilant about individual operators' vibes lest bad things happen unexpectedly", if this makes sense

@ariadne that's a baffling 5D chess move i don't think i understand the motivation for

anyway, my point is that if the poll was a non-poll post with a question mark i'd respond to it too

@kouhai @ariadne to try and answer the question as stated:

• making the bluesky bridge poll an announcement or sending me an email would have been both really good ways to get my attention
• getting my attention seems justified for moderation questions that are significantly more gray than e.g. dealing with overwhelmingly abusive servers

@kouhai @whitequark to be clear, defed by personal preference is not something we actually do here.

@whitequark the motivation is that when I solicit comments on possible instance changes, people frequently go "meh" and then do not actually provide the solicited feedback

@ariadne @kouhai that is clear to me now. but i usually take people at their word because historically, the consequences of not doing that were too great

@ariadne policymaking by trolling seems suboptimal in its own right

@whitequark yes it is a problem, but what happens if one is not provacative is that we get no feedback

@whitequark yeah, this is roughly the first priority of staff (zeroth being “don’t get sued or arrested”).

“act as benevolent operators” and “decide on behalf of the community” is how internal moderation decisions get made. Or more directly, “does this action improve the community”

now, the community’s stated wants is not necessarily what is best *long term*; judging this and taking action is where we must most carefully exercise that delegated trust

@ariadne

@ariadne

defenestrate?