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Welp.
I'm not the one to say it authoritatively and maybe I should just keep my mouth shut, but if there's a metric for saying #BlackTwitter moved to #BlueSky,that metric has been met.
It's awesome. I am not expecting l will do much interacting over there but just reading all that joy and sh#t talking is fun.
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.ioThings Mastodon says about BlueSky:
* ATProto sucks! Activity Pub 4 life!
* Jack Dorsey is your daddy!
* You sit on a throne of VC money!
* The crypto pivot is coming! I feel it!
* You say federated, but no one's federated!
* We have federated social media at home!
* Elon can just buy you again! You have learned nothing!
Things Mastodon doesn't say about BlueSky:
* Wow. Composable moderation won over the Black users.
* Wow. Starter packs are great for on-boarding.
* We should do that!
There is nothing stopping Mastodon from adding composable moderation or starter packs. It's not a technical or financial limitation.
Starter kits for ActivityPub.
@mekkaokereke @ohmu Dan's proposal seems to be geared towards server-specific starter packs to let newly registered users get a richer start. I'm trying to find out in the GitHub discussion if we can merge his ideas with mine.
Of the five ActivityPub starter pack projects I know (there may be more), three aim for something closer to the Bluesky idea, where people can create and share starter packs whenever. I have guesses who might get there first, but it's really anybody's game at this stage.
@julian @mekkaokereke @ohmu it doesn't even have to be an AP feature imo. It's something a mastodon client could just add as a feature
@aburka @mekkaokereke @ohmu If we want to have starter packs that one person can create and other people can see and follow, we gotta come up with some way to transfer them between people, which means transferring them between servers, which means ActivityPub one way or another. 
Or am I misunderstanding you?
Well, I guess a client could forge ahead with a centralized directory of starter packs created by all its users and bypass ActivityPub that way, but I don't know if anyone wants that.
@julian @mekkaokereke @ohmu One thing to note is that not everyone wants to be included in a starter pack - I've seen a few people who were unhappy about being included in Bluesky starter packs.
Not sure how to handle the consent side of things, but it bears thinking about.
@StryderNotavi @mekkaokereke @ohmu Indeed! Here are my thoughts on it: https://github.com/pixelfed/starter-kits/issues/1#issuecomment-2475154658
It is an opportunity to prioritze safety where Bluesky decided not to. If someone puts you in a Bluesky starter pack, AFAIK there is nothing you can do about it, and I hear occasional reports about starter packs being used as a harassment vector over there.
@julian @StryderNotavi @mekkaokereke @ohmu i was curious about that. If you join or opt in, or if it's just a play list
@ATLeagle @StryderNotavi @mekkaokereke @ohmu It's one of those things where you can arrive at different conclusions.
In my concept, each starter pack is a bot that follows all starter pack members & boosts their posts, & you can remove yourself from the starter pack by blocking the bot. I would describe that as a "heavy" interaction that ought to respect #nobot and the "discoverable" setting.
If the concept is more like directly sharing a list of people you like, maybe that needs less caution.
@julian @ATLeagle @mekkaokereke @ohmu I'd say you still need a decent self-removal / opt-out mechanism, regardless of the implementation.
@StryderNotavi @julian @ATLeagle @mekkaokereke @ohmu it would I think be nicer for it to be protocol level, and to have separate options for allowing follows from the packs. Like auto-allow, send me a notification to accept follow (probably best default), and refuse all starter pack follows.
Onboarding: There already is something similar on Mastodon with CSV files, these can be used and shared to do mass follows.
However, there may be issues about consent and abuse of mass following. My understanding is Trunk used to offer CSV files years ago on Mastodon so that people could do mass follows, but stopped doing so due to concerns about abuse of mass following features.
Safety features: yes, can never have enough safety options available, especially on a federated network where each admin is responsible for the safety of their users.
This is the most Mastodon reply that I could possibly imagine.
The open source cliche, is to build things that technically work, but have almost negative thought put into user experience.
UX matters. So no, Mastodon does not already have something similar.
We often avoid improving UX with the excuse: "This could be used for abuse!" The solve for that is not UX so poor that users won't use it. The solve is "Fix the UX, and build better trust & safety tools."
"This is the most Mastodon reply that I could possibly imagine."
That wasn't my intention, apologies 
I am not a developer, I wasn't defending the UX.
I just meant, a third party volunteer group (Trunk) offered a mass following system a long time ago but (I think! I am not part of Trunk) ran into issues, so for the sake of safety they deactivated the feature.
I was just trying to add some context about why mass following might not be more widespread on here. If there are safety features that can mitigate problems with mass following, then it could be looked at again.
@mekkaokereke @ohmu for Mastodon specifically, this is a resource problem, as many things. We started exploring what would be required and it is totally doable with some work, especially if they need to be usable outside of your server. Bluesky implementation also has some T&S issues that should be avoided (for example you need to be able to report a SP, or have a way to not be added to them). I can’t promise anything yet, but they may come soon
@mekkaokereke @ohmu all of these things can be true simultaneously, plus I've seen a bunch of people talking about starter packs over here -- I believe the pixelfed guy wrote up a proposal
@mekkaokereke @ohmu I could sure do without the people saying "we don't want anyone who held onto twitter this long" though
@aburka @mekkaokereke @ohmu I've seen some starterpacks in German plus some proposals for getting journalists & politicians interested in Mastodon. All from a very white perspective, I'm afraid...
Sigh.
All of that. Yes.
@mekkaokereke, as long as you are here to pass on the word about the next Great Riverboat Brawl or similar event, I'm here for you.
I would never have known about that.
But I'll also be there. Just quieter.
I don't know what composable moderation is, but (as an instance owner) I'm totally open to including it if there's some way for me to do that with my approximately nonexistent dev resources...
(I have a vague idea of what "starter packs" are; the same combination of enthusiasm and limitations also applies. :-/ )
@woozle @mekkaokereke @ohmu
Yeah, there really needs to be a push by the dev teams to expand Moderation, not just on the admin side, but both on the individual level and the federated level.
Let's suppose that you're a new BlueSky user that's a Black woman, and doesn't want to see any MAGA politician stuff, or deplorable accounts. You want to block them all en masse, and want the list auto-updated.
1. Search for "MAGA"
2. Find the MAGA List
3. Click on "subscribe" and "Block accounts"
Your account is pretty empty, and you want to follow a bunch of Black women in tech.
1. Search for "Black women in tech"
2. Find the starter pack
3. Click "Follow all"
1/N
Another Black user asks you to add yourself to BlackSky. You ask what's that. They say it's a custom feed of Black users on BlueSky. Basically the new Black Twitter.
1. Search for BlackSky
2. Add the Custom Feed
After a few days you decide that it is great, and you'd be OK with your posts showing up there. So you make a post with the hashtag #addToBlackSky. The owner of the BlackSky feed sees it, looks at your account, verifies you, and then adds your account to the feed.
2/N
This is similar to ideas I'd been bapping around in my head for some years now. Very handy that there's a concrete implementation of it now to work from!
Would you say it's substantially different from "Communities" on Google+? More like "Circles", maybe? I need to map out my memory/understanding of how each of those things worked, for comparison...
@mekkaokereke @ohmu my wife just showed me a starter list, and it made the entire thing feel so much better.
I'm not moving to a VC backed future shit site, but its a shame they got it so much more right so quickly
@mekkaokereke @ohmu funny. i never said any of the exaggerations from the first list (the remaining three points are just facts).
and I'm definitely for borrowing everything that works on bluesky; this includes quote posts, better audience controls, and the recently announced ability to disconnect a message from a quote post, as well as the algorithmic, synthetic timelines.
(i'm not exactly bought into the composable moderation, because it's more of a filtering then moderation, i.e. it does not remove the hurtful content. but the ease of creation of, and subscription to a personal block and mute lists is definitely something we could use).
and i never pretended that mastodon's moderation is particularly good (the tools are abysmal, and there's no inter-instance workflow, all meaningful communication must be done out of band).
@mekkaokereke @ohmu (and one thing i'd rather not borrow from bluesky is its – built into protocol – lack of user privacy. i'd rather not have an equivalent of the clearsky app for the fediverse.)
@mekkaokereke @ohmu Its all true though!
We want to be more accessible and welcoming for new users from diverse backgrounds in part *so* they can find community away from moneyed interests.
@mekkaokereke like you said, these issues aren't limited to technical limitations, so it's a bummer that folks spun up a new protocol instead of adding them to the existing systems. When I chatted with ActivityPub and Mastodon folks about some of ATP's features, the main thing I heard was, "these are cool ideas and we could totally add them if we had more developers."
@docpop @mekkaokereke And that's why I bumped up my monthly contribution to the Mastodon patreon, since that's the only thing I can do about that.
@mekkaokereke I think the first one of the things we don't say counts more than some little list feature.
People go places in groups mostly. The personalities who will stick through a place that is not popular, but has potential, are not the followers. People who build new things are not followers.
To me the issue here that I think I see is all the incessant whining. Why would you go somewhere as a group that is not fun and welcoming?
I'm not sure I fully understand what you're saying? Can you say more?
@mekkaokereke Yeah. I think the moderation part is absolutely a big part of where this place dropped the mark. You have to end up on a server that does it well to have it be a decent experience and this is a platform for everyone coming over, so why isn't that across the board.
Also I have looked at BlueSky and think even if those things in the top list sounds annoying, they are true, like things you say about politics here that come true. It's a damn carbon copy. And people are showing that they will just follow each other without much real thought. That's where the after party is. Ok.
But then if I hop over there and plug this place and the whole explore page is overly serious political stuff, I'm not exactly inviting them to a party. That's what I mean.
Got it. Thank you for clarifying!