Did they issue similar statements encouraging people not to celebrate the plan to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer or when someone threw a Molotov cocktail into Josh Shapiro's Passover celebrations? Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered earlier this year. Did we get a warning against glorifying their deaths?
Political violence is wrong regardless of who or what party is the target. It would be nice if BlueSky demonstrated they shared that belief.
defen · 12m ago
I doubt there were many (if any) legitimate (as in, not bots or sockpuppets) Bluesky accounts celebrating either of those things, so I don't see why a warning would be necessary.
homeonthemtn · 28m ago
There is nothing wrong with policing speech on platforms. If you don't (or do) want specific kinds of speech on the platform you own, it is fully your right to discourage (encourage) users to behavior a certain way.
The repercussions of that are your own. Quite honestly, the repercussions are likely small in the long run if it helps to better establish civil norms and self governance.
SilverElfin · 1h ago
While I am not in favor of censorship, I do wonder if this is a responsible statement to issue at a time where things can spiral to something worse.
At the same time, the exact words they used may not cover the problematic comments I saw, which were more coded:
> "Glorifying violence or harm violates Bluesky's Community Guidelines. We review reports and take action on content that celebrates harm against anyone. Violence has no place in healthy public discourse, and we're committed to fostering healthy, open conversations," the social media platform wrote in a post.
amanaplanacanal · 24m ago
I wonder about this policy: does it only apply to private violence, or does government violence also fall under this guideline? I'm thinking of any discussion of the Ukraine war, ICE raids, etc.
ronsor · 22m ago
Governments have a monopoly on violence
toomuchtodo · 1h ago
I am of two minds of this. I respect Bluesky's right to police their part of the ATProto, while also acknowledging this violates the free speech of its users and is a censorship choke point which should be refactored to defend against. A recent example are the most recent events in Nepal.
I missed the news where the US Gov bought out blue sky??? How else could BlueSky violate someone's free speech?
toomuchtodo · 4m ago
While there is nuance between the government and a private benefit corp like Bluesky restricting speech, I'm rolling it all together for these purposes. I agree there is legal nuance (de facto vs de jure). As I mentioned, Bluesky is entitled to do so, as it is their platform. So, you take your speech to another platform operated on a distributed protocol. This is no different then creators posting their content to Rumble instead of traditional social platforms, for example.
How would you defend against it? Making an alternative social network? Isn’t that only going to lead to more and more echo chambers of limited reach? Or am I not understanding the approach? I am not sure what ATProto is exactly or how it plays a role in this defense.
> In the early days of Bluesky, Black users felt they were being pushed off. Blacksky became a platform for Black users to feel heard and seen. To create Blacksky, we wrote our own implementation of AT Protocol (called “rsky” and pronounced “risky”). An underlying premise of Blacksky’s rsky is to not only “seize the means of production,” as well as the distribution, but to also act as a “dual power” structure.
> Blacksky’s rsky guarantees our community a seat at the table, and ensures that we can leave and easily make our own table if we need to. That’s the true promise of decentralized social media. [My note: Most relevant part, the rest included for context]
> Clearly I think that decentralization is great, not only for the problems it prevents, but also the new possibilities it creates. But if everyone’s running their own servers, apps, and moderation teams, how do we do global social media? That’s where our vibrant open source developer community comes in.
> Blacksky runs our own global relay at https://atproto.africa, which we built from scratch. Every day, our relay stores its own copy of the hundreds of gigabytes of data of all known AT Protocol accounts — 36 million and counting. We also developed what we call our “moderation relay,” which lets us know about all of the moderation decisions ever made by all mod teams globally.
Think of Bluesky not as a Twitter equivalent platform, but a funded experiment and incubator for bootstrapping a protocol where multiple platforms can operate independently of each other. You can scale a community to tens of millions of users for under a few hundred dollars per month in tech spend (storage, compute, transfer). This is very accessible imho.
Broadly speaking, I understand that there might be speech out there that I find exceptionally distasteful, but that is the speech in many cases (but not all) I am willing to protect, because you don't know when the capability to censor will be weaponized. This remains in constant tension so long as humans are humans. There is no solution, only constant evolution.
UrineSqueegee · 43m ago
you know something is wrong when even Bluesky is too conservative for them
oldpersonintx2 · 1h ago
why issue a warning? it is who these people are, and to a large extent, who uses HN
you've all been inculcated with the notion of "rebel chic" by your professors and you have internalized it
bsky staff only issued this warning begrudgingly, they were likely high-fiving each other for hours
SilverElfin · 1h ago
> bsky staff only issued this warning begrudgingly, they were likely high-fiving each other for hours
That is certainly possible. Many tech companies have very powerful and organized internal activists that influenced their actions and culture for years, especially following the 2016 election. I do wonder if the management of these “events” is now done more by a small executive team and a PR or crisis team, rather than everyday employees. As in - there may be two distinct groups, one that acts maturely like with these statements, and the other doing the “high-fiving”.
stayhydratedboy · 55m ago
Rebellion against the status quo is what moves things forward - in tech, in politics, in life. It matters little how or against what you rebel, only that you do rebel. It's little wonder why HN and big tech in general are supportive.
krapp · 18m ago
I don't know if you've been living under a rock over the last few months but HN and big tech have shifted to the right/anti-woke/pro Trump side of the spectrum.
Don't confuse the "move fast and break things" rebellion of startup culture or the pandering of corporations to progressive ideals (until the winds change) with actual sincere anti-establishment rebellion. HN and big tech absolutely support the staus quo when it aligns with their financial interests.
lawlessone · 50m ago
>you've all been inculcated with the notion of "rebel chic" by your professors and you have internalized it
Ok...
i don't recall because it was some time ago but i guess we were very liberal with memory management when i studied...
I'm not sure what you think college is but it certainly doesn't match reality.
Political violence is wrong regardless of who or what party is the target. It would be nice if BlueSky demonstrated they shared that belief.
The repercussions of that are your own. Quite honestly, the repercussions are likely small in the long run if it helps to better establish civil norms and self governance.
At the same time, the exact words they used may not cover the problematic comments I saw, which were more coded:
> "Glorifying violence or harm violates Bluesky's Community Guidelines. We review reports and take action on content that celebrates harm against anyone. Violence has no place in healthy public discourse, and we're committed to fostering healthy, open conversations," the social media platform wrote in a post.
Nepal Prime Minister Resigns. Parliament / Ministires set on Fire. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45179679 - September 2025
https://corp.rumble.com/our-story/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/20/what-is-r...
Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45018773 - August 2025
Introduction to AT Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965233 - August 2025
> In the early days of Bluesky, Black users felt they were being pushed off. Blacksky became a platform for Black users to feel heard and seen. To create Blacksky, we wrote our own implementation of AT Protocol (called “rsky” and pronounced “risky”). An underlying premise of Blacksky’s rsky is to not only “seize the means of production,” as well as the distribution, but to also act as a “dual power” structure.
> Blacksky’s rsky guarantees our community a seat at the table, and ensures that we can leave and easily make our own table if we need to. That’s the true promise of decentralized social media. [My note: Most relevant part, the rest included for context]
> Clearly I think that decentralization is great, not only for the problems it prevents, but also the new possibilities it creates. But if everyone’s running their own servers, apps, and moderation teams, how do we do global social media? That’s where our vibrant open source developer community comes in.
> Blacksky runs our own global relay at https://atproto.africa, which we built from scratch. Every day, our relay stores its own copy of the hundreds of gigabytes of data of all known AT Protocol accounts — 36 million and counting. We also developed what we call our “moderation relay,” which lets us know about all of the moderation decisions ever made by all mod teams globally.
Think of Bluesky not as a Twitter equivalent platform, but a funded experiment and incubator for bootstrapping a protocol where multiple platforms can operate independently of each other. You can scale a community to tens of millions of users for under a few hundred dollars per month in tech spend (storage, compute, transfer). This is very accessible imho.
Broadly speaking, I understand that there might be speech out there that I find exceptionally distasteful, but that is the speech in many cases (but not all) I am willing to protect, because you don't know when the capability to censor will be weaponized. This remains in constant tension so long as humans are humans. There is no solution, only constant evolution.
you've all been inculcated with the notion of "rebel chic" by your professors and you have internalized it
bsky staff only issued this warning begrudgingly, they were likely high-fiving each other for hours
That is certainly possible. Many tech companies have very powerful and organized internal activists that influenced their actions and culture for years, especially following the 2016 election. I do wonder if the management of these “events” is now done more by a small executive team and a PR or crisis team, rather than everyday employees. As in - there may be two distinct groups, one that acts maturely like with these statements, and the other doing the “high-fiving”.
Don't confuse the "move fast and break things" rebellion of startup culture or the pandering of corporations to progressive ideals (until the winds change) with actual sincere anti-establishment rebellion. HN and big tech absolutely support the staus quo when it aligns with their financial interests.
Ok... i don't recall because it was some time ago but i guess we were very liberal with memory management when i studied...
I'm not sure what you think college is but it certainly doesn't match reality.