How Adult-Hostile Is BlueSky?
Those of you who, like me, have rather lost interest in corporate social media and its inevitable enshittifications, might not have been paying attention to BlueSky, which has been growing up in recent months as a possible Twitter replacement. I haven’t tried it because by all accounts it’s quite adult-hostile, which is consistent — given my theory of pornocalypse — with its venture-capital funding sources.
That means I’m not fully briefed on what it means (in terms of search invisibility, loss of algorithmic juice, and so forth) to have your content flagged as adult content on BlueSky. But there’s never been an algorithmically-driven pornocalypse platform where the involuntary adult-content flag was a good thing. And what’s adult content on BlueSky? Well, mentioning vaginas, apparently. Here’s the Vagina Museum in London complaining on Mastodon about BlueSky’s moderation:
Maybe the filter kicks in based on the titilating content at the link destination? Let’s go see:
Oh, wow! Salacious! Lewd!
I’d welcome a discussion in the comments about your experiences on BlueSky with adult content and moderation.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=33600
Are they cool with the Icelandic Phallological Museum?
Tech: There are multiple tagging services, including the default one. Users can have their client obey that, or ignore it entirely. Decentralized moderation has issues but they’re giving it a go.
There is plenty of adult content, including a lot of curated “feeds” of different groups of content creators.
The pornocalypse may well arrive there, but for now it’s just “some stuff gets tagged such that a default user will have to click it to see it”. Which I appreciate when I’m scrolling on the subway.
Nathan, I don’t think I can see flagged BlueSky posts unless I create an account and log in.
Stoya stoya.bsky.social and Jiz Lee jizlee.bsky.social appear to have BlueSky accounts but I think they make most of their money as writers and social media coordinators these days. The page I checked flagged Jiz’s latest holiday card with “explicit sexual content” (photos of a femme-bodied nonbinary person prancing around a pool topless, per her website).
Per their (Jiz’s) website sorry.
Its possible that the NYC journalists who got Stoya the gig with Slate want her to be active on BlueSky. Online and in-person SW seem to have migrated to BlueSky but you would have to ask them what they get out of it.