Bluesky, if you’re not there, is a social media site that exists as an entry point to an interesting underlying federated protocol. The team is trying to solve some of the things that we realized Twitter was doing badly, and also partially decouple the protocol and the community.

One of the approaches they’re trying is composable moderation and labeling. A year ago, Jay Graeber outlined the ideas for composable moderation. Moderation is the hardest and most valuable part of a social media destination, and allowing people to select their own level of engagement with different dimensions makes a lot of sense.

Then yesterday, Paul posted this.

Extreme user extensibility, like Bluesky is doing, emergently realizes people’s wants and needs in a way top-down just can’t. Other networks wouldn’t even think to protect you from beans.— Paul “Frazee” 🦋 (@pfrazee.com) May 29, 2024 at 7:15 PM

There’s a whole social-media in-joke about how there are some users who do not want to see content about canned beans. So, in the nature of internet nerds, someone made a content label so that anyone could subscribe to the filter, and be shielded from viewing any content labeled “beans”. (The thread is hilarious, with lots of puns, but not all strictly relevant.

It’s… it’s composable experience. It’s PROGRESSIVE DELIVERY. And Paul just skeeted it out. I mean, he should, no reason why he shoudn’t.

It’s just that the thesis we’ve spent the last 2.5 years thinking and writing about is now accurately described by the ability to get warning labels about IMAGES OF BEANS.

“Shut up about the beans” they’d say in their top down product design meeting. “Users don’t care about beans.” Confidently wrong.— Paul “Frazee” 🦋 (@pfrazee.com) May 29, 2024 at 7:18 PM

The point is that we don’t know what users want. I mean, we do. Users on Bluesky have been asking for DMs since it was created. They didn’t get them right away because creating them well is much harder than just making something, but “we want reasonably private DMs” is the actual user request.

Twitter, famously, started out as a Ruby on Rails application. It worked fine until it didn’t. But it also started in 2007, which was a really different era in terms of abundance and automation. Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and the other contenders for “place you check first” know what kind of scale is possible, and what some of the social media pitfalls are. They’re coming up in an age where abundance and automation are tablestakes, and alignment and autonomy are the cutting edge.

Labeling services are a way for users to have autonomy. Custom lists, interest checkboxes, and the dozen other ways you tune your feed are a part of what you expect now. Last week I was talking about how I have convinced my ad feed that I want to see elaborate light fixtures by always clicking on them. That’s a form of tuning.

Progressive Delivery is here, all around you. I think it’s exciting. I just want us to be building it in on purpose to support what we need now and what we’ll want in the reasonably-near future.