And I was afraid I wouldn't have anything to blog this week!

Am I really postmortem-ing this one? Too soon? Never, I have a whole weekend coming up to wipe my brain completely smooth. Gotta get it out first.

If you don't have context for this (bless you), we had some confusion around a moderation issue yesterday, and I jumped in with this:

I decided to engage on this issue because when I woke up in the morning and saw a user expressing legitimate concerns, the platform UX that led to those concerns seemed very obviously wrong to me. I wanted to do as little as possible before we had a real resolution established to reassure them that a) this was in some way wrong and b) not their fault. This was a risk — taking initiative with comms at 8am is only sort of Devrel's job — but if I'd left it there I think I would've had a win for the day. Unfortunately...

For better or worse, some other folks in the network who'd noticed our relative quiet on this issue eventually found my post by later in the day, and I, like Hank Kingsley in the Larry Sanders episode when he gets to host the show (nobody will get this reference), was emboldened by my earlier win and decided to get '''casual''' with it:

Do I regret this post? Yeah, a little. Did I lose sleep over it? Genuinely yes, but only about an hour. Would I go back in time and undo it? Sure, but luckily, life is full of small regrets, and not-that-bad ways of learning lessons. The next time it's 5 in the afternoon and I'm standing in the kitchen for about 3 minutes, feeding my cats before heading back to my computer to play Lego Voyagers online with a friend (this was unbelievably good btw) and I check my mentions to find someone I respect engaging with a semi-annoying topic I've been trying to message around all day, I will probably not hammer out a relatable-and-funny-but-maybe-only-to-me response while verifying the cats are not stealing each other's food too much.

A few things to interrogate here. First, on the topic of too-playfully stereotyping my audience:

For what it's worth, I pretty much see myself like this all the time. It's 2026; even if you don't have an overenthusiastic tendency for pattern matching or maybe a Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy habit, there are a lot of things that scan as "conspiracy" that are maaaaybe actually mostly true. Gosh are we all dealing with that lately! That is a pretty sensitive subject that people might take personally rather than read it and go "hahaha he's right that's so me." That's my fault. Shouldn't have gone there. I apologize. And yes, I work for this company, which doesn't make it better!

Which brings me to my bigger takeaway — this was the first time in my nearly 5 months here that I actively waded into Trust and Safety discourse specifically. I knew what to expect, but I did not know what to expect.

Most of the time, I'm engaging with fairly technical users, talking up the various dev surfaces for building around and up the platform. This entails a fair amount of empowerment; it's the "we can just do things" attitude that I operate within most of the time, with an audience for whom that usually rings true. Those are not the same assumptions that people have when they're dealing with Bluesky moderation or non-technical policy questions, and I totally failed to shift gears here. And it's not just about being cautious — to put it mildly, my teammates and I do not generally post like we're in fear of our community; I admittedly don't understand why some people's first reaction is that we should be (that seems worse). But I took for granted that I had the right assumptions for a very different audience than I normally engage with, and I blew it! There's a lot of history on that side of the shop that I won't take for granted again.

Bluesky, like everything else, is made of people; I see that every day, just as I have at other workplaces. I have a real love for how the sausage gets made; I like complex processes and negotiations. One of my favorite filmmakers who just passed away was a favorite specifically because he captured so many everyday, human bureaucracies in very fine detail. I like to be as open as I can about our process (see: this blog), and I know I can't make everyone the same amount of trusting or curious without context, especially if I'm just somebody else with a *.bsky.team username in their eyes. For moderation topics, I definitely did not have enough established trust to joke around! But my neverending desire to humanize our decision making was more or less why I made a dumb joke that was easy to read in bad faith.

The main reason I try not to read people in bad faith on the internet is because it's boring. Simple as. There are many large, nefarious entities out there that I know I have a responsibility to read in bad faith, but I don't like it, and I try really hard to never extend that further than necessary. I even like it when people make art that has strange and inconsistent political perspectives , not because I think I really need to "challenge my beliefs" or "be exposed to other points of view," but because I find it genuinely fascinating when someone does a lot of work getting from point A to point B in a way that I never, ever would. In my opinion, it's fun(ny) and humanizing to be totally mystified by the wild swings people take, even and especially when they're transgressive or simply dumb in ways that are not obviously worth the reaction they inspire 😊

This, after all, is why I like Bluesky so much! The public sphere is wild, and people put some really ill-conceived stuff in there! Before microblogging, it was hard to find truly awful quotes — the kind where you're impressed that a person didn't realize how strange their inner monologue sounded out loud — outside of professional sports coaches ; now, we're lucky enough to have pizza on a bagel any time. These are all silly things to cite in a mission statement (luckily this is my personal blog), but they really are a big part of the appeal here. And I know a lot has changed in 20 years of microblogging, that we're now all a bit traumatized and wanting maintainers that we can trust, and tone that doesn't threaten to curdle any second, and we're all engaging in an act of good faith by being here, and my job is to cultivate rather than spoil that.

On the other hand... life is a rich canvas:

Anyway. Thank you for your patience with me when I fuck up; I really, truly hope we can all be more patient with each other. I will try not to be "be more patient" zero in any future outbreaks. And I'll keep thinking about the very different ways that technical and non-technical users experience this platform and how it makes them feel empowered or disempowered, because I think there are real distinctions there right now, and I feel them at times like this.

Anyway! Thank you for bearing with me through all that. I'm at SCaLE this weekend and will actually be giving a talk Saturday morning — if you're in LA, come through! And if you can't make a Saturday, we're about to host our first LA area meetup in a couple weeks, right before ATmosphereConf , come to that too! More soon.