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.
Aware this is a bit late, but how porn hostile is X now?
The reason I ask is that I hear X being defended as a haven for free speech, and I wondered if that extended to adult content and workers, not just politics as has been reported elsewhere.
Not looking to make this about politics, just curious if X has changed for the adult community recently, or remains firmly adult hostile.
Finagle, I really can’t answer that, because I stopped using Twitter or monitoring its pornocalypse policies when Musk bought it. His weird alt-right lurch had just begun at that point, but it was clear that he intended to make the platform a haven for “anti-woke” nonsense and fascist-adjacent weirdos. Now that he’s puppeteering an outright wannabe fascist dictator that he bought for a whole lot less than he paid for Twitter, I don’t think it makes sense to think about X as a free speech platform. There have been dozens of reports of people getting banned from X for criticizing Musk or his buddies or their fascist schemes. I genuinely don’t know how sex workers and porn are doing over there, but historically fascists aren’t friendly to adult entertainment of any kind and are murderous toward alternative sexualities of every kind, so I don’t really see it as a place with future for the 21st-century porn industry.
That’s the exact thought process I’d been following, assuming that the only changes were to allow the far right a platform.
I just wondered, since talking to friends about Musk’s recent attacks on the UK government highlighted that we were all making assumptions. Largely based on how Musk has revealed he is really Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Watch You Only Live Twice and tell me I’m wrong.
finagle, a lot of sex workers and people in the porn industry were on Twitter back when it was private, which suggests to me that it was less hostile than the alternatives. But that stance required knowledge and backbone to resist the same forces that make all the other services booby-hostile but Nazi-curious, and the new owner and his goons lack backbone and knowledge.
Mike Masnick wrote an essay on the subject back in 2022 https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/
On twitter when it was on the stock market, sorry.
A lot of people’s ideas about politics focus on culture war stuff or a left/right binary and don’t ask about attitudes to concentrated power or money. Whatever their position on trans people, most web services are booby-hostile but Nazi-curious because that is what established power in the USA wants. One of old twitter’s few virtues is that it actually took the US concept of free speech seriously.