Is the Bluesky-Shine Wearing Off Already?

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Like I do, I’ve been semi-tracking and participating in the boom of the Bluesky social network, even though it’s not decentralized, currently, in any meaningful way. In my own experience, I’m having a hard time finding “my people.” I don’t even know if I have a “my people” anymore. But, that aside, from within my feed, I’m watching and seeing reports of constant troll attacks, some stating, “Yeah, I don’t like it here actually.” So, let’s talk about Mastodon, again, maybe?

Over the past week or so, I’ve seen posts from people talking about, and have experienced personally, Kiwifarms trolls following people in some inane scare tactic. If you don’t know what KF is, it’s an extremely niche stalker website full of pyschopaths whose only hobbies are documenting and stalking people online, with mostly fabricated information.

It’s been giving people a bit of a sour taste in their mouths in regards to sticking to this, basically, brand new platform.

To add insult to injury, it seems now, as of today, that trolls are going around sending users extremely graphic and violent images of death.

I want to note, that Mastodon is not perfect by any stretch. But this is where true decentralization comes in, and saves the day.

If you’re on a community run instance on Mastodon (or other AcitivityPub software), or your own, you don’t have to put up with this kind of behavior. You don’t have to play whack-a-mole with every new account that pops up. You can just … block out the instance that is acting as the source of this behavior.

Of course, Mastodon does have its own issues. There are a lot of basic FOSS guys, and do they love to either give you bad advice, unprompted advice, or scold you for doing things your way.

I’m showing you this, in order to be fully transparent about what you may encounter on Mastodon, and how we would deal with this. For context, I have Python scripts running on a VPS, and one of them sends random images from top posts across different subreddits, to Mastodon. Some of them are NSFW, some of them aren’t. Either way, I also have it tagging each post with hashtags I wanted to have on it, like #python (because it’s running on python!)

This isn’t favorable to some. Simply using your mute button isn’t enough. Some people have to tell you that they don’t like that you’re using your software, your instance, and your social media to do whatever you want, your own way.

And that’s fine!

We can send him into the ether, never to be heard from again. Or, we can block the entirety of the instance he’s coming from.

In this example, I’m not sure what kind of behavior usually comes out of chaos.social, but we can check it to see if this is the attitude of more of its users, or if this guy is an outlier.

So, chaos.social looks pretty run-of-the-mill and likely not a massive source of basic FOSS guys trying to dictate to random people on the fediverse how they should post. We won’t have to block the whole entire instance. But! Since blocking single users is probably something everyone’s already familiar with, and doesn’t take a lot to figure out how to do, let me just show you how one would block the whole instance, if in fact it was a bed of trolls and hats of the arse.

If you click that little pea-pod under a user’s post, and look down, you can see the option to, as a singular user, block the entire domain.

What this will do, is evaporate all posts coming from that server, entirely. You will never see them again, unless you unblock them.

In the instance that a server happens to be a bed of trolls, maybe trolls who are sending people threats, being assholes, or generally gross, this is an awesome feature.

Now, I get it. The perfect social media experience would be never having to interact with, or deal with trolls, or people with a superiority complex. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we currently live in. When choosing a Mastodon server, or a server of any kind that’s connected to ActivityPub, it is very important to make sure that server has rules, and guidelines for behavior.

I understand that this is, for some, an incredible extra step to just signing up, and posting. But it’s essential. It … will really help avoid situations down the line where you’re suddenly asking the entire fediverse, “Hey, why are there so many trolls???” and then everyone’s pointing to your instance, that has no rules.

If you decide Bluesky isn’t the right place for you, don’t go back to Twitter. Give the “Linux of social media” a chance, and maybe you won’t be disappointed. Mileage may vary, but there really is something to using software that is highly customizable, near completely user owned, and run.