Post

I am utterly delighted by this subversive use of the Bluesky label feature, where you can subscribe to a custom app that then adds visible labels to profiles This one shows you which posh expensive private school British public figures attended, plus their current fees bsky.app/profile/dadd...

Once you turn it on it looks like this

Wrote a bit more about labelers on my blog simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/22/...

A lot of people are concerned about the potential for abuse with this custom label feature What's the worst case scenario here, given that labels are only visible to the people who opt-in to seeing labels from that specific labeler?

Co-ordinated harrasment campaigns can already share links to Bluesky profiles that they plan to target using off-site mechanisms like shared Google Docs, WhatsApp groups etc Is the threat from custom labels purely one of making things more convenient for those groups, or is there something else?

My opinion right now is that the features to watch out for are features that make some form of harassment possible that isn't possible at all if the feature doesn't exist - and I don't think custom labelers qualify for that I'm very ready to be convinced otherwise

It just makes it that much easier, which doesn't seem great to me. There's a big difference between going somewhere to look up a name and seeing some label pushed into your face

On Twitter you could build that as a Chrome extension, which these days isn't necessarily that much harder than building a custom labeler - but of course Chrome extensions aren't an option for the Twitter native mobile apps

I think it's orders of magnitude less likely that people will subscribe to a bunch of chrome extensions (or bother to build and support them) for this than they are to do the labeling thing but just because it can be done now doesn't make it good?

I believe that the labels feature was originally built so that people could use it to track abusive users - sharing warnings with each other about bad behavior Is the feature worth having for that positive use-case even if bad people can use it too?