Oh, in the beginning of the interview Masnick talks about "freedom of association" and the idea that each server should be able to have their own rules, much in the veins of so I thought he was going in the right direction, but later he forgets that entirely and reverts to the all-powerful "app" paradigm above. It could be that he had good ideas that could have lead him to something more like Nostr with sovereign servers that make their own rules, but them he got confused by the weird view presented to him by the Bluesky team that involves "labeling" and "custom algorithmic feeds". I've seen many people (although that is decreasing now) talk about those things (they often use the misnomer "algorithmic choice" which makes no sense) as if they were relevant to the discussion of "Bluesky decentralization", but they're not. They are very cool and elegant and I understand why people would like the idea, but they are just features provided by a centralized "app" (in fact they assume a centralized server and can only work with that), they're not principles of a decentralized protocol.
Constant's avatar Constant
My presentation about Nostr on #FOSDEM 2025.
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So you get this world in which all the problems of selective censorship are "solved" not by the app (i.e. the centralized server) censoring things, but by giving the user the tools to censor what he wants. This will obviously break because the censorship is never about what you want to see, but about what you want to prevent others from seeing, so there will be pressure for the app to apply absolute censorship. And the app owners themselves will want to censor some things, like they have done with CSAM from day one, and no one disagrees with that at first, but then as time passes their opinions will change too, just like it happens on every platform. The same applies to the choice of algorithms: users are free to choose, but only within the limits of what the app allows them and for as long as the app allows them.