Bluesky Introduces New Features to Keep Its Skies Calm… and Blue

Rather than handing more censorship powers to moderators, Bluesky devs are looking to make design changes to encourage its users to be civil.

The social networking platform Bluesky has made a few changes.

There’s nothing new in that, of course. Elon Musk is making changes to X-Twitter all the time — in his case mainly designed to embolden and aid bullies and trolls. Bluesky is taking another route. It’s making changes to encourage good behavior — or at the very least, to discourage bad behavior or tone down rudeness.

This doesn’t mean that the changes Musk has brought to Twitter have been without merit. For one thing, because of his changes, plenty of us have discovered enjoyable social platforms other than the traditional usual suspects of Twitter, Facebook (and all the other Meta sites), TikTok, and maybe Pinterest.

My favorite of the new social sites is Mastodon, because its decentralized federation not only reminds me of Star Trek, it fits right in with my open source, new age, and old hippie ideas about how life and community work best — that is through sharing, co-operation, and keeping ownership to a minimum.

The second favorite on my list, at least since T² (also known as Pebble) went dark in November, is Bluesky, another decentralized social platform that’s built on MIT licensed open source software. Oddly enough, it also has a direct connection to Musk’s Twitter: the platform started life as something of a Twitter initiative and was first announced on Twitter back in 2019 by Jack Dorsey, who was then the blue bird’s CEO.

The project was incorporated in late 2021 as a public benefit LLC separate from Twitter, which was luckily for us, because if it weren’t, Musk would likely be calling the shots there now — which means it would probably be shut down.

One of the thing that Bluesky has in common with Mastodon is the civility of the folks who post there. This doesn’t mean you’re never going to run across a nasty troll — this is the internet, after all — but generally posters on Bluesky seem to understand that courtesy is a good thing, even when you’re in a discussion with someone who thinks that your good is evil, and that your evil is actually good.

I’m old enough to have grown up in a world where such polite discussions among polar opposites were commonplace, so it’s been refreshing to experience people who understand that “seeing things differently” doesn’t mean that one side needs to cease to exist.

In this regard, the folks behind Bluesky recently announced that they’ve been doing some work to figure out new ways to encourage civility on the site, without having to resort to draconian — and conversation stopping — censorship measures, which as anyone who’s recently been put in “time out” by Facebook can tell you, are becoming increasingly more common on some platforms.

Last week Bluesky released a slew of what I’m calling “trial civility features” — some of with might work well, and others maybe need to be rethought. For the time being I would be inclined to encourage these efforts, as long as the people putting them in place remain flexible and willing to change lanes when they discover their great idea, when implemented, turned out to be not-so-great.

Detaching Quote Posts

As of Bluesky version 1.90, users can now view all of the quote posts on any of their given posts. In addition, the creator of the original post can remove their original post from another person’s quote post, which means that the quote post then becomes a post that only contains whatever was said in response to the original post, which usually should make that quote post rather meaningless — sort of a stranded nothing burger.

The problem that Bluesky is attempting to solve here is to stop folks from doing mean-spirited quote posts that deride the original post — which is the rationale that Mastodon gives for not allowing quote posts at all. Personally, I think both approaches are misguided, and I think that Bluesky’s new approach is even more problematic than Mastodon’s outright ban. Most quote posts, when separated from the post being shared, will read as gibberish, and to me this is a shame, because I often use quote posts to add to a conversation while bringing it to a whole new audience.

The folks at Bluesky do recognize that sometimes Quote Posts are used to correct misinformation contained inside the original post and say that they’re working on a way to keep that valuable aspect.

“To address this, we’re leaning into labeling services and hoping to integrate a Community Notes-like feature in the future,” they said.

Time will tell how this works out.

Hiding Replies

Also new to version 1.90, the person who creates a post can hide replies. In a way, this isn’t anything new, since Facebook allows folks to hide replies and gives them the choice to only hide them from “yourself” or from “everybody.” Bluesky brings an interesting new twist to the table, in that hidden replies don’t disappear but are replaced behind a special “Hidden” replies screen.

“They’re still accessible, but much less visible,” Bluesky said.

I think I like this approach, since it lets you hide any reply by a pervert scammer (a big problem on Facebook but so far not a problem on Bluesky as far as I can tell) or rude and unhelpful replies from folks of the opposite political persuasion, so people don’t have to see them. But the fact that they’re still available to those who click on the “Hidden” link might keep people from getting too heavy handed and hiding posts that merely do things like question their post with actual facts.

Other Changes

Priority Notification filters

The Bluesky devs are not only working on ways to help you keep responses to your post nice and polite, they’ve also come up with a few ways to help you adjust what you see.

For example, you now have a smidgen more control of what you see in your Notifications feed — which currently shows you everything that shows up on the site that has your handle on it. Now, if you go to Notifications and then select the Settings cog, you’re given the opportunity to only receive reply and quote notifications from users you follow.

At first I didn’t think this one through and thought it was a good idea, but the first time I tried it I decided, “Nope, it ain’t for me.”

In my case the deal killer was that at the top of my feed was a quote post of one of my posts by someone whom I didn’t follow but who follows me. His post was a nice engagement with my post, which led me to look at his profile and post-feed. It turns out that he’s a person who positively engages with people regularly and who has interests that overlap mine, so I followed him. If had enabled priority notification I wouldn’t have seen his quote post, so I would never have followed him, which would have been my loss.

However, this feature might become more useful in the future.

“We’ll keep tuning this feature and adding additional options for notifications,” Bluesky said.

Changes to how replies show in timelines

This one won’t affect me in any way that I’m likely to notice, since I never use anything but the Discover feed on Bluesky — but that, of course, doesn’t mean it won’t be useful to you.

“Historically, in the Bluesky app we show every reply in the Following feed,” the Bluesky folks explains. “This means that every reply has the same visibility as a top-level post, which is often not a user’s intention. We’re reducing the frequency of showing replies in the Following feed to only show conversations that involve replies between at least two people you follow.

“Additionally, this update should make it much easier for you to update older threads. Now, when you reply to an older thread of yours it’ll get bumped to the top of your followers’ feeds. (You’ll no longer have to repost your own reply to surface it to your followers.) This update also prevents replies from being separated from the top-level post, making them easier to understand.”

That last sounds like a great idea to me.

Applying blocks to lists

This one looks like a minor change that’s probably overdue. There are three kinds of lists in Bluesky, starter packs, curational user lists, and moderation lists (with the later being reserved for moderators, I imagine). With this change, when you block someone who is also the creator of a starter pack or a curational user list, you’ll be filtered out of any lists they create. Blocks will continue to have no effect on moderation lists, because, as Bluesky said, “that would defeat their purpose.”

The platform’s decision makers are also updating policies around acceptable list titles and descriptions and “will be labeling lists more aggressively.” They said the the Trust & Safety team will be sharing more on this in a blog post next week. If there’s any “there” there, I’ll let you know.