@lordaslan.bsky.social and @drabtealexperiment.bsky.social, apologies for mislabeling your accounts earlier. A volunteer moderator made a mistake due to context collapse, and we've reversed the labels and are discussing how we avoid making similar mistakes in the future.

Hi! I'm Lucca, one of the directors of Northsky Social Cooperative. I focus mainly on cooperative development (business stuff), community moderation, and managing our volunteers. I like to welcome our new users with a follow and a hello, but if that's not your thing just lmk, my DMs are open! 💚💜

It is still *so wild to me* that adult tagged posts (NSFW) doesn't blur in the Notifications tab of the Bsky app. (probably doesn't work on northsky.app yet either, but i'll make a ticket for it!)

⚠️Heads-up! We will perform updates and maintenance on our PDS and related services tomorrow 9/22 from 7am to 8am (Pacific time)⚠️ Users may experience brief downtime periods during this window. We'll be back up and running as soon as possible! Updates will be posted here. Link for status:

A real friend never asks you to hide your colors🌈 Some eyes see only two genders, but kind hearts see more. Closed minds and harsh words cannot put out your light. Shine in the way you were born to shine. Chiitan is an ally of transgender people🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

Hi! I'm Lucca, one of the directors of Northsky Social Cooperative. I focus mainly on cooperative development (business stuff), community moderation, and managing our volunteers. I like to welcome our new users with a follow and a hello, but if that's not your thing just lmk, my DMs are open! 💚💜

A good conversation point that came up in one of our collab seshes with other moderators in the indie sky space is... how do you draw the boundaries of "your community"? since Northsky started as a PDS instance, this is where we drew the boundaries at first. but we will need to evolve beyond that.

If I unfollowed you in the last couple minutes... that was unintended 😅 If I followed you, that *was* intended! Hiiii! 😁✨ If you don't want me following you just lmk here or in DMs 🙏

Transphobia isn't just "the beliefs a person espouses" and "how they choose to articulate that" but also their ACTIONS and the IMPACT of those actions. This reality will always be considered when we moderate. Building a permission structure and tools to silence the trans voices is Transphobia.

Recent events have a lot of people asking "what is northsky?" We're still working on revamping our website, but this video about migrating to Northsky does a quick job of explaining our account hosting services:

Migrating to Northsky Social on AT Protocol

YouTube video by Northsky Social

youtu.be

i do think users need to be able to whitelist / override on an account level decisions made by labelers for themselves this is a design oversight that's eroding the usefulness of composable moderation

Comfortably Numb@numb.comfortab.ly · last mo.

I am just unsubscribing from any 3rd-party moderation services (even from Northsky, even though I am on Northsky PDS). Stackable moderation *just doesn't work*.

this is also making posting a little slower for our users... so we're going to try to balance getting people in the door, with posting experience. bear with us while we learn and adjust!

Northsky

Social media as it should be. Find your community among millions of users, unleash your creativity, and have some fun again.

northsky.app

Lucca @ Northsky 💚💜@lucca.northsky.team · 2w ago

we just had the highest number of migrations in a single day that we've ever had! over 100 people claimed their invites and moved onto northsky today! 💚💜

Some new users have reported to me that they're getting harassed when joining Northsky. We've addressed this in one of our previous newsletters, so I'll post some excerpts here. ⚠️Please do not direct any negative attention at any of the users doing this. We don't want to perpetuate harm.⚠️

This is a good time to remind everyone that you can check the health of our services at status.northsky.social This will let you know if we're experiencing an outage, so please add it to your bookmarks 💚💜

We're recovering from an unplanned PDS outage! Apologies for the inconvenience. Services might be slower for a short while, but all user data is safe. Welcome back!

aaaaand we're back! 😅 had a little outage, we will provide a post-mortem on the incident soon. apologies for the inconvenience!

we just had the highest number of migrations in a single day that we've ever had! over 100 people claimed their invites and moved onto northsky today! 💚💜

So we have invite vetting tooling now and @jdot.blacksky.team thinks it's pretty cool. Neat! 😎

silencing marginalized voices makes it easier to genocide us. this is part of Stage 7 (preparation) of 10 of genocide: www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages

✅ Our signups are back online at: northskysocial.ca/apply

Northsky Social Cooperative@transrights.northsky.social · 2w ago

We're experiencing an outage with our signups right now. (Bad timing, we know!) We'll let y'all know as soon as they're working again.

our volunteer moderators and I have been labeling transphobia all week at about 5x our normal rate of reports thanks to bluesky's unwillingness to recognize transphobic harassment and apologia. and we'll keep doing it, unpaid, because our community deserves that. 👉@moderation.northsky.social👈

anyways, when bluesky inevitably reverses course after the political winds shift and they shitcan aaron, they can hire me at twice his pay and i'll clean up his mess, like women always do.

the average bluesky user can smell the BS coming from that thread

gay thing@dudesmoocher.bsky.social · 2w ago

awesome! so bigots get to 'politely' advocate for policies forcing trans people out of public life with no consequences, meanwhile trans people and allies get de facto shadowbanned for telling them to fuck off using tone-policing to silence minorities is now an AI-automated sitewide policy

"Imagine how much of my job I won't have to do with this automated scoring system! I'll never have to use my brain to make a judgment call again!"

Aaron Rodericks@aaron.bsky.team · 2w ago

The goal of toxicity scores is to cut down on having to make those calls, and reduce exposure for the average user by default. Putting toxic replies below the fold made anti-social reports drop by 80%! Imagine the impact when applied to our most toxic users!

Harassment is not "brutally hard to moderate." Yes, it's a combination of behaviour and content, but it's not hard to recognize when you see it. That's only a difficult call for a machine to make, not a trained human being with experience and institutional knowledge.

Aaron Rodericks@aaron.bsky.team · 2w ago

More broadly, does repeatedly attacking someone in a thread count towards harassment? Yes. Harassment is brutally hard to moderate though. It's a combination of behaviour + content, and the second you publish the details of the rules, people change their behaviour to avoid enforcement.

We don't need your sympathy. We need your protection. You are failing us, and you've been failing us repeatedly for 2 years now, and are obstinately not listening to us. You even locked down this thread so you couldn't be held accountable or learn anything from us.

Aaron Rodericks@aaron.bsky.team · 2w ago

Are they threatening trans users directly? No. Trans folks in the US have been targeted repeatedly. That's awful and you have my sympathy. Within the context of a single post we wouldn't consider it a direct threat or targeting a protected category. Ie send trans folks to concentration camps.

he should have stopped RIGHT HERE. instead he goes on to show his ineptness and ignorance by continuing the thread.

Aaron Rodericks@aaron.bsky.team · 2w ago

For context here, a user was responding in a thread to other users (unrelated to the original post) when they used the phrase "Trans rights or Trans camps. You chose the camps and you're blaming Dems" followed by profanity. > is this user toxic? undeniably yes.

What a time for the head of Bluesky T&S to drop a doozy. We'll get it fixed and let folks know where they can sign up.

Northsky Social Cooperative@transrights.northsky.social · 2w ago

We're experiencing an outage with our signups right now. (Bad timing, we know!) We'll let y'all know as soon as they're working again.

If the "rude" label is any indication of how bluesky T&S will determine who is "toxic", then we can expect this to apply disproportionately to trans and marginalized users suffering under fascism and genocide. This will harm long-term users and not the sock puppets doing coordinated transphobia.

cyber professional@permadeath.com · 2w ago

the people crave bluesky social credit scores

Being on the internet long enough will teach you just how much racism is in EVERYTHING. EVEN IN THE THINGS YOU CARE ABOUT MOST, AND YOU GOTTA LOCK IN AND STOMP THAT SHIT DOWN!