Erin Kissane

Doing uspol info mutual aid at Unbreaking.org. Squinting about knowledge and networks at wreckage/salvage. Previously: COVID Tracking Project + Knight Moz OpenNews + editorial and community in tech and culture orgs.

I want our tools and networks to be better in more ways for more people in more places.

project: https://unbreaking.org
studio/research: https://wrecka.ge
personal site: https://erinkissane.com/
verification: https://erinkissane.com/about

Public Key

npub1sacl4yvfyeurcng493dnfsq4w0hnelqcs9fzk2fk60rn3mpj49ds90kcpe

NIP-05 Address

kissane_at_mas.to@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsgwu06jxyjv7puf52jcke5cq2h8meulsvgz53t9ymd83ecase2jkcpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsu4wu95

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1sacl4yvfyeurcng493dnfsq4w0hnelqcs9fzk2fk60rn3mpj49ds90kcpe

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Last Notes

2026-07-12 16:31:17 UTC

Good morning from Kelpland. Perhaps you’d like to look at some beautiful seaweed and/or think about knowledge.
https://www.wrecka.ge/holdfast-0-situating/

2026-01-16 22:10:44 UTC

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Too late for this update, but AFL-CIO Minneapolis is endorsing a general strike (or "statewide action") on Jan 23 over ICE/CBP violence.
https://minneapolisunions.org/system/files/2026-01/press_release_-_january_16_2026.pdf
#uspol

2026-01-16 21:15:00 UTC

At Unbreaking.org, we added dozens of events across four timelines this week and did a short briefing on Immigration events in the US along with smaller updates from our Data Security, Federal Workforce, and Medical Research teams:
https://unbreaking.org/blog/this-week-at-unbreaking-jan-16/
#uspol

2025-12-26 15:29:26 UTC

I have been very hesitant to repost nice things about my own work but then this year happened and I got over it.

2025-12-23 22:23:39 UTC

Happy holidays, fediverse!
I got you a megathrust earthquake, soil liquefaction, spine-tingling papers about the way our networks confound knowledge, and a PDF in a pear tree. It's my wrap on a year of trying to make sense of how we make sense of what's happening to us.
https://www.wrecka.ge/landslide-a-ghost-story/

2025-11-17 00:28:11 UTC

Heads up that There Is No Antimemetics Division is out in revised and thoroughly superior new version, including an extremely good audio edition, just in time to ruin someone’s winter holidays.

2025-11-14 01:02:31 UTC

best three horror movies from the past 10 years, no torture porn, no hurting children, go

2025-11-12 19:00:57 UTC

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Two years ago, I wrote at very great length about how this played out in Myanmar. It is so upsetting to see how many of the same dynamics are at work here now.
https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-full-series

2025-11-12 18:56:01 UTC

This thing that 404 is writing about in the US—the dehumanizing fake content created purely because Facebook pays people to make it?
https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-videos-of-ice-raids-are-wildly-viral-on-facebook/
It has a direct precedent in the Myanmar genocide and has been widely reported on for years. Karen Hao's work on this is outstanding:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait

2025-11-11 00:25:30 UTC

@npub1lzd…urpr is doing some of the most interesting work on the open social internet, and they're doing it in the most exhilarating ways. I am delighted to be even a little bit involved in the work they have planned:
https://www.wrecka.ge/sparks-fly-up/

2025-10-22 22:06:00 UTC

I wrote about Bluesky’s moderation tensions and the White House’s threats and the critical need for open networks that can do broad connection and also care for communities at Tech Policy Press:
https://www.techpolicy.press/trump-administrations-arrival-on-bluesky-highlights-growing-pains-for-open-networks/

2025-10-08 17:03:04 UTC

I think Mastodon's proposal for starter packs is a significant positive evolution of the way Bluesky rolled them out. I wound up on a bunch of packs there and it was…not a great thing for my specific brain and purpose.
I do hope the people in Masto's comments saying they must allow opt-out and removal will read the actual post, which features both blanket opt-out and individual removal.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/10/our-ideas-about-packs/
https://media.mas.to/media_attachments/files/115/339/612/384/051/837/original/2cab6a197a3946f0.png

2025-06-26 23:08:43 UTC

After some completely predictable stretches of hard slogging, we're getting ourselves sturdied up in the Unbreaking collective (Unbreaking.org), and one of the things on my list for the next month-ish is sorting out where to start offering paths into that project on the fediverse. (1/x)

2025-05-23 17:35:33 UTC

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Turns out some old (and new) friends were feeling the same way, so we got a crew together from the Old Days and we spun up a collective, got fiscal hosting with Raft Foundation (badasses!), and spent a couple of months building processes and testing ways to work and things to make, and now we're up:
https://unbreaking.org
We started with three pages we've been using to test and build our collaborative processes:
Equality at Work (part one): https://unbreaking.org/issues/equality-at-work-decimating-the-federal-workforce/

2025-05-23 17:31:24 UTC

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I started fretting/posting about this in January and blogged about it in February:
https://erinkissane.com/against-entropy
I hoped, then, that an existing org would pick up the hammer and MAKE THE THING that I thought needs making, but no one quite did. Hundreds of people are tracking data, which is vital, and think tanks are out there thinking online for a readership other experts. Movement orgs are movementing. But this middle layer of durable knowledge wasn't happening.

2025-05-23 17:28:20 UTC

I don't think it's possible to be where we are in #uspol (and in the global authoritarian slide) without our information ecosystems being such a mess.
There's a ton of work to do on the distribution side of the problem, but also on the info-making side: Even great newsrooms aren't built to make the kind of knowledge we need in this moment, bc what they make are endless streams of atomized stories.
And we ordinary people are all out here in the feeds trying to piece it together in our heads.

2025-05-23 02:51:20 UTC

The day I most look forward to the whole year is the day the first Salmonberry bird/Swainson’s thrush arrives in our woods, and this year that day was today.
No one’s recording gets them quite right, it’s the most beautiful sound in the world.
https://www.birdnote.org/podcasts/birdnote-daily/salmonberry-bird

2025-05-11 19:28:13 UTC

I’m still so mad about the new James Burke Connections fiasco, in case anyone was wondering.

2024-12-21 01:14:02 UTC

gotta go turn into a bone horse, see you next year
https://media.mas.to/media_attachments/files/113/688/159/311/834/047/original/75a5f1acf8767791.jpeg

2024-12-20 05:07:23 UTC

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I love that! Do you publish your syllabus for the class?

2024-12-20 05:06:32 UTC

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LOVE IT love it
I promised myself I’d get a new font for a thing over the holidays and I’m vacillating like you’d wouldn’t believe

2024-12-20 03:40:49 UTC

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Fascinating! How do your students find it?

2024-12-20 03:17:47 UTC

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This is very helpful info, thank you!

2024-12-20 02:33:29 UTC

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it took me sooooo long oh god

2024-12-20 02:32:40 UTC

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Writeup on exactly this coming soonish! (It’s a complicated answer.)

2024-12-19 23:46:44 UTC

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Probably yes!

2024-12-19 23:02:33 UTC

Hey I would love help calibrating something, if you see this and you’ve read Joshua Meyrowitz’s No Sense of Place (more than short excerpts), would you let me know?
If you haven’t, you don’t have to say, I will assume most people have not!

2024-12-19 21:21:18 UTC

I can't have zotero and a code editor open in the same work session or everything truly goes to hell, can't explain it but it's unquestionably true and someday I will learn

2024-12-19 20:24:13 UTC

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my counterpoint: the big truck I was behind a couple weeks back with a THINKING ABOUT THE ROMAN EMPIRE sticker *and* a bigass Ægishjálmur sticker from the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery on it seemed like it was probably being driven by someone I would enjoy talking to on the internet ,or maybe the opposite, hard to say

2024-12-19 18:55:53 UTC

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Anything good here is yours dude, I just write the crimes

2024-12-19 18:54:36 UTC

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Also I should say, Nick Sherman's type at @npub1usx…9984 is just so great
https://hex.xyz
I use Margo now because every time I see it I'm transported into a childhood basement with a stack of heavily foxed secondhand paperbacks but I fully intend to make up reasons to use every other font HEX makes, ugh

2024-12-19 18:45:56 UTC

Hey I made a basic style switcher for folks who find the headers on my site to be A Bit Much and by "I made" I mean @npub1qgg…0ptl VERY KINDLY extracted and simplified his js and css for me because Im baby about everything this week.
Switcher's in the footer!
https://www.wrecka.ge
(The ugly CSS and any glitches are 100% my fault, Ethan's code was ofc pristine but I did selector crimes to work around a theme conflict that I'm not clever enough to solve this week, ask me nothing.)
https://media.mas.to/media_attachments/files/113/680/956/465/184/047/original/23b81b2141fe44c1.png

2024-12-19 01:28:05 UTC

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Ahhh you’re the best. It’s the tiniest thing! But I’ve been astonished at how meaningful even just a little bit of respite is, for lots of people. I’m going to be thinking about this for a while.

2024-12-18 14:57:53 UTC

So this week I wrote to everyone who was working on something “for”/adjacent to me and suggest that they might like to intentionally boot it to January and honestly, based on responses, this is the way. (I come from publishing culture, which runs on guilt and exhaustion and gently pestering people so maybe that’s why it took me so long to humanize.)

2024-12-18 14:49:06 UTC

I think when the owls are still hooting at wake-up time it means we should go back to bed

2024-12-17 22:33:39 UTC

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Security seems like the thing that maybe changed the most while somehow still remaining the weirdest subfield.
I do wonder what's going to happen to all the ML kids.

2024-12-17 22:30:54 UTC

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HomeSite, bless. Nothing but good sides.
(The thesis was unspeakably bad, I will stop speaking of it.)

2024-12-17 22:29:21 UTC

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Someday when my life resimplifies I'm going back to self-hosting, just to keep from having a relaxing life. (I do miss having logs.)

2024-12-17 22:22:38 UTC

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COLDFUSION
(my thesis was a science fiction novella/cutup based on a foundational Korean folktale with diagrams of eyeballs in it so uh, cheers to us)

2024-12-17 22:20:03 UTC

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Yep! Everyone I knew with any CS classwork at all got snapped up into higher-paying work they were totally unready for and then they had to hire all the liberal arts majors for everything else.
I got a referral bonus when my employer hired my partner and we took all our also-baby friends out for dinner about once a week. A year or so later, the layoffs hit. And this is how I can spot a gold rush a mile away!

2024-12-17 22:09:15 UTC

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Nah, but if Tinylytics or GoatCounter don't work out, I think Matamo is an easy integration.

2024-12-17 22:03:05 UTC

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Yeah, no logs, but that looks doable! Tx!

2024-12-17 21:59:00 UTC

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In retrospect, the fact that I came in knowing, like, HTML and very little else and they handed me the server keys for quite a large tech consultancy's websites and were like "Eh, go for it, kid," was indicative of The Times.
I'd literally never worked on a Windows machine and two weeks later I was administering the NT servers and then I led a redesign and built out a new CMS and then moved us to a new hosting company to save money and like…what a fundamentally hilarious series of events??

2024-12-17 21:53:04 UTC

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thank you! this looks about right, tbh!

2024-12-17 21:52:47 UTC

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retvrn (to angelfire)

2024-12-17 21:52:25 UTC

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Thank you!

2024-12-17 21:52:16 UTC

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Thank you!

2024-12-17 21:51:22 UTC

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Fun factoid in my very first real computer job out of undergrad my title was "Web Master" (two words) and analyzing logs was a good chunk of what I did, along with faking a CMS in, iirc, Perl. (The real CMS was me.)

2024-12-17 21:46:26 UTC

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I'm not self-hosting, so I don't have them, alas.

2024-12-17 21:34:50 UTC

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My fault! Someday I will maybe return to the old ways. I miss log files.

2024-12-17 21:34:11 UTC

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It's the silliest problem but I love the type designers and I want to do right!

2024-12-17 21:33:09 UTC

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Thank you!

2024-12-17 21:32:42 UTC

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Ooo thanks!

2024-12-17 21:32:32 UTC

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Thank you! I've heard good things about them.

2024-12-17 21:32:13 UTC

@npub1xcd…yvjh Alas, alas for me, no logs.

2024-12-17 21:31:51 UTC

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I should have clarified, I'm using GhostPro. I don't self-host anymore, my brain has too many things on it.

2024-12-17 21:30:36 UTC

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GhostPro, I should have said!

2024-12-17 21:30:17 UTC

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Nope, I stopped self-hosting when I had a kid. I know my limits.

2024-12-17 21:26:27 UTC

So I need a tiny bit of traffic analysis on my Ghost website, but like…tiny. I don't need or want details, just a rough count of views (partly so I can pay for the right type licenses) and referrers, and Ghost doesn't do that.
I don't want to use Google Analytics. I could use Plausible, but it produces more info than I need and the number of $10/month add-on services I use adds up. Recommendations?
(I appreciate the "never track anything" POV, but I could really use basics here.)

2024-12-17 19:08:02 UTC

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I didn't entirely believe in the existence of the soul until the dog went through puberty and started scaring it completely out of my body five or eleven times a day.

2024-12-13 20:52:41 UTC

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I kinda love blot.im, it's incredibly easy to use and demands less of me than anything else I've used in decades. It goes down once or twice a year, but not for super long.

2024-12-13 20:08:42 UTC

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It's SO BAD and so pervasive. I learned a ton about the global subsidy for US tech platforms working on part one of this long thing https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup
The telcos have a lot to answer for.

2024-12-13 20:07:20 UTC

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Yeah, they get into the data hegemony stuff, which is I think not super well understood by a lot of OSS/alt tech advocates in the US, at least.

2024-12-13 20:06:28 UTC

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No argument from me! "Smash capitalism and the machinery of colonialism" is sort of the invisible watermark on the paper of this kind of work. (One of the lead authors has a background in documenting atrocities and I can't speak for him, but I don't know anyone in that field who doesn't live with permanent simmering rage.)
I do think that in the meantime, foregrounding the voices of humans working in these contexts is more useful than most other modes of research.

2024-12-13 06:44:23 UTC

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If it's hurting brains, it's a priority! I just have to put out some mild fires first—at the latest, though, I can work on it over winter break.

2024-12-13 06:33:01 UTC

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I'm sorry it hurts your brain! I'd need to do a bunch of design fussing, but I can try switching to the non-italicized version of the heading type, though I can't promise to get to it immediately given the state of my must-do list 😬

2024-12-13 03:48:22 UTC

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Nathan! I am so glad, this is wonderful. They're lucky to have you!

2024-12-13 03:47:39 UTC

I wrote up the things I think are the most relevant for fediverse advocates and network builders from a great new Engine Room report on what activists and other folks doing social justice/civil society work in the Majority World/Global South need from networks. I'll do a thread tomorrow, but here's the link for the night shift:
https://www.wrecka.ge/what-people-in-the-global-majority-need-from-networks/

2024-12-13 03:42:40 UTC

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oh I don't design type, I am just extremely fussy

2024-12-12 21:43:25 UTC

the things I do for fonts

2024-12-12 19:35:28 UTC

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Oh good! I mean—not good for someone else, but whew, glad there's not anything happening to me that I don't know about 😅

2024-12-12 17:34:33 UTC

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Wait, which post? Did I miss something that got weird? (I’m mostly off socials this month.)

2024-12-12 17:33:14 UTC

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Mmm, good point.

2024-12-11 21:47:28 UTC

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Thank you! Ghost federation is still in the works, so it's just email (which is free!) or RSS for now, but also I post links to everything on this account, so that's another informal option.

2024-12-11 21:46:31 UTC

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Yesss. Ty. I'm trying to build as much structure in as possible now so I don't have to go back and reconstruct it later when this is unwieldy and messy.
@npub13ps…mpqm

2024-12-11 20:16:39 UTC

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Absolutely—I think this piece is so important in establishing the POV of any research project. And I'm not an academic, so I don't have to be polite about sketchy funding.

2024-12-11 20:00:27 UTC

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Totally helpful! I was thinking of alternating between summaries and shallower roundups, since realistically, I can't do good summaries of more than one or two a month.

2024-12-11 19:54:16 UTC

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For the researchers themselves? Or the networks they study?
(My first summary will be on a research group's findings on global social justice communities' experiences with alt networks like Mastodon.)

2024-12-11 19:38:29 UTC

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There's SO MUCH great work around, and I think only a tiny fraction of it gets seen, but tbh I also worry that posting even good summaries won't be enough to get eyes on the material, so I will also Write A Long Thread or whatever, and then iterate based on how that seems to go.

2024-12-11 19:31:56 UTC

I'm posting my first summaries of other people's research on https://wrecka.ge soon, and I realized should ask what kinds of things people here would find helpful.
I'm covering who did the research and their stated goals, known funding info, overall findings, and why I think the work is relevant/interesting for people working on and interested in better networks for humans. (My non-secret goal is to lure people into reading the research itself.)
What else would you want to know?

2024-12-04 18:53:43 UTC

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A lot of people also went to Buttondown, which is a great service for the email part.
https://buttondown.com

2024-12-04 15:05:25 UTC

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Thank you so much!

2024-12-04 00:09:03 UTC

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Thank you twice over!!

2024-12-04 00:08:54 UTC

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Ty Ethan! It's VERY GOOD COMPANY to be in <3

2024-12-04 00:03:37 UTC

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No offense taken! People are suffering and it comes out through the cracks.

2024-12-03 23:59:53 UTC

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You replied to my post about Bluesky suspending LoTT by saying you were now "downright happy" you blocked the bridge.
That *looked* like a troll, but I didn't want to make an ungenerous assumption, so I asked a clarifying question.
I'm still not sure how my post and your reply are related, but I'm okay not knowing. ✌️

2024-12-03 23:02:06 UTC

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You're happy to block them because they suspended a right-wing stochastic terrorist account?

2024-12-03 23:00:14 UTC

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Ahhhh it's HAZING, got it.
(<3 Jaz, you're the best)

2024-12-03 22:59:19 UTC

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Yeah, I still can't find an official reference but Klabnik confirms that that's how it works (DID blocked at the appview level) and he's completely solid.
https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3lcgq3ay3kk25
Other systems using ATP would still, of course, but able to do whatever.

2024-12-03 22:37:43 UTC

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I *think* I've seen a dev address the suspension circumvention question as well, but months ago and in a random thread.
My suspicion is that illegal content gets filtered out of the whole AT ecosystem, but suspended accounts get filtered out of Bluesky-the-app, regardless of PDS, but that's based on a very faint memory and shouldn't be trusted.

2024-12-03 20:34:14 UTC

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I'm definitely not here to chase anyone to Bluesky, to be clear! I'm just trying to understand and communicate what I see around the networks, while working to make fedi easier and safer to join and use.

2024-12-03 20:30:28 UTC

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I believe some of the moderation happens at the relay/appview levels, but I'm not confident in my interpretation of, like, hackernews comments and devs posting in replies, so I've never been clear about which things rise to that level.

2024-12-03 20:27:13 UTC

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I think they eventually got every account I saw, but the username thing was such an own goal! One of several problems, early on.
I'm sort of constitutionally skeptical about all networks, but I think they've been on a good trajectory so far on moderation, and I'm hoping to see some successes in the rest of the mods stack. (The funding situation is another whole thing.)

2024-12-03 20:19:49 UTC

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They are still publicly committed to stackable moderation, but they've been doing basic central mods as part of that stack from pretty far back. (As soon as I joined the closed beta I saw Nazi accounts getting nailed, but community mods are usually faster.)

2024-12-03 20:17:51 UTC

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Unknown/currently unknowable outside the Bsky team, I believe. (If they've commented publicly, I haven't seen it.)
They posted their usual stuff and the community guidelines are broad enough to cover a lot of that without stretching.
https://bsky.social/about/support/community-guidelines

2024-12-03 20:14:50 UTC

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The features of this platform mean that you *can* argue about whether blocking is unfair/mean/bad for society in the replies to this post, and there's nothing I can do to stop you, but I will not myself be participating in that conversation.

2024-12-03 20:11:22 UTC

For people keeping track but maybe not on Bluesky itself, Libs of TikTok started posting there last week, immediately become one of the most blocked accounts on the platform via individual blocks and shared lists, and then got suspended by Bsky central mods.
This was the specific account/interaction I was waiting for to gauge how it's going to shake out over there, mods-culture-wise.
(Off-site citation https://jewelcitytimes.com/2024/12/02/bluesky-social-suspends-far-right-libs-of-tiktok-account/)

2024-12-03 18:57:26 UTC

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I was raised in a culture that forbade taking credit for gifts or contributions and wow does that stuff stick even when the teachers turn out to be hypocritical weirdos.
(Also, woman on the internet, so yeah.)

2024-12-03 18:46:00 UTC

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Thank you! I am so excited to find more direct ways to help.

2024-12-03 18:44:50 UTC

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Oh! And I've joined the IFTAS Advisory Board to formalize my hollering and hype-ups.
IFTAS is the #1 org I try to direct funder attention to whenever I talk about fedi growth and culture in public, and it's a real honor to be on this list. Many thanks to @npub17sj…03qd for the invitation!
https://about.iftas.org/about-us/