Discord, bluesky, and the other guys

It's been weeks since I decided social media wasn't for me.

Watching some trans women I had no relation to be pilloried as racists and smeared as sexual deviants for critiquing ATProtocol affiliated projects' efforts to disconnect posts from clients, these being Blacksky and Northsky, despite still being functionally public from the firehose itself. The firehose is presumably named as such because it is a high-pressure, high density, flow of information of every action performed on sites or apps like Bluesky. By design, there is no expectation of privacy, though in practice from the user side this may appear the opposite, the blocking and moderation efforts suggest that isn't the case.

While critiquing Blacksky's implementation makes one wonder about motives, including whether it's racist to critique or disparage those efforts, Blacksky's founder Rudy made the most high profile announcement regarding user segregation in the fallout of Bluesky banning a prominent Black user. The user, Link, dared to criticise Bluesky CEO Jay Graber during a crashout where even the former partner of Something Awful's Lowtax weighed in on Jay's attitude towards her own users. I do not have a screenshot of the specific interaction between Jay and Link, but I don't recall it being anything particularly notable or out of pocket.

Link was banned, however his data was hosted on Blacksky's Personal Data Server (PDS), and was still technically available, just blocked by any service using Bluesky's App View - virtually all of them at the time, certainly the one provided by Bluesky's official client.

It is not hard to see that a popular Black user was targeted by Bluesky who seemingly made up a reason to ban him — isolating a completely unrelated post and arbitrarily determining its meaning as promoting violence, and I believe any reasonable user would describe that action as racist. I think it's racist.

Northsky, a professed haven of LGBT+ social media users had no such uniting moment, and received criticism from the same women relative to the situation, one describing Northsky and Blacksky both as having "annoying" politics. This is where I obviously differ from the developers here. Those "annoying" politics have given me meaning and comradery where. This doesn't invalidate their criticisms of the decisions of Blacksky and Northsky to offer pseudo-privacy in the name of community protection. Which one rhetorically demonstrated how it would be almost trivial to expose so-called private posts to the world at large because of the public nature of the firehose. Myself, I am reminded of the tools Clearsky, Skythread and Context Chain, all providing ways to see data not intended for public consumption, and the former I consider deleterious to one's mental well being if one is to obsess over blocks and their reasoning, whereas the latter two merely allow seeing context denied by the so-called "nuclear block," which destroys threads.

In light of Rudy, rightfully, taking up Link's cause and separately arguing for platform segregation above and beyond App View independence, of course developers are going to have opinions on that, whether they belong to a stigmatised minority, such as trans women are, or not, like the vast majority of cis men in the profession. Regardless, their whining in their own little public corners on the platform were combined by user and modlist curator heika, characterised as racist, and the context collapse began, immediately denying these women of their own minority status to get a knife in, suddenly they're just reduced down to "white developers."

I genuinely cannot see how these criticisms could be called racist any more than they could be transphobic or queerphobic were the shoe on the other foot, and a prominent trans user was banned for getting into Jay's unhinged behaviour as CEO of Bluesky. The criticisms equally applied to Blacksky and Northsky, irrespective of the qualities of their champions, and were utterly benign and completely ignoreable. They literally disappear behind a block!

This was not helped by Rudy apparently seeking to "blow up" an ATProto developer conference because of the absolutely harmless, entirely rhetorical, criticism of these trans women devs.

In my mind that seems like behaviour that would make one unsuitable to run a social media site, echoing the tantrum of the Harry Potter fandom-defending Mastodon instance owner) defending himself against the trans people upset at his apparent endorsement of the transphobe-written franchise through threatening users over Hogwarts Academy spoilers.

The actions of Jay and Rudy both do not give me confidence in the governance of the protocol anymore.

So...

What's that got to do with discord?

On December 10, 2025 Australia implemented its contentious under-16's social media ban. This was on the back of a lazy, emotionally-charged, Australian Labor-backed campaign off the suicide of a young woman and her mother's grief, mirroring such efforts by Brianna Ghey's mother in the UK, who seemingly is more intent on isolating kids than dealing with the overt transphobia, including by UK Labour, that fed into Brianna's stabbing murder. Queer advocates have long criticised this model precisely because it doesn't deal with core social issues of emerging adults.

Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Both Bluesky and Discord both complied in advance, despite not being nominated platforms and censored all Australian users, locking us out from our own tagged "not safe for work" channels, with facial or ID verification necessary to re-access and even moderate our servers. Kind of awkward that an age assurance partner of Discord had a user data breach only months before this.

And that's where I find myself.

I had already lowered my Nitro subscription to the classic option after Discord raised the price of Nitro in Australia in September, 2025. The identification breach did not give me confidence in Discord's user data integrity, and I already had massive concerns about providing training data for AI models. This was only confirmed by Discord utilising Persona during the rollout of age assurance on the platform. Persona is yet another Peter Thiel-related entity, Ashley Belanger in Ars Technica reporting:

On X and other social media platforms, critics warned that Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund was a major investor in Persona. They worried Thiel might have influence over Persona or access to Persona’s data, or, worse, that Thiel’s ties to the Trump administration might mean the government had access to it. Fearing that Discord data may one day be fed into government facial recognition systems, conspiracies swirled, increasing heat on Persona and leaving Song with no choice but to cautiously confront allegations.

Oh, and Persona left their frontend open.

Even if you ignore that children have a United Nations-backed right to political communication, which you shouldn't, why would you do that, what are you, some kind of weirdo? But even if you did, providing yet another mechanism to feed them into an absolute surveillance society, the panopticon, is literally Orwellian in the traditional actually read the book kind of way.

Given it's adults who have to prove we aren't kids, the onus is on us to provide our personal information, and I say no. I really don't want to feed these tech giants designing surveillance mechanisms, with the full support of our climate wrecking, genocide-participating, welfare bashing Australian Labor government.

It's just so incomprehensible to me that I can't even feel safe on these platforms, having been on several discords that have been scraped by open rape apologists for cherry picked drama bait, and attacked by fellow "community" members because they like to indulge in a little context collapse transmisogyny when there's not something more important going on. Nothing has changed since Twitter became X, predators and associated bad actors get to run rampant, and everyone else is policed within an inch of their lives.

Sigh.

Catch me on Matrix. Or UpScrolled. Or Stoat. Or Fluxer. Or Signal.