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Once you turn it on it looks like this

simonwillison.netPrivate School Labeler on BlueskyI am utterly delighted by this subversive use of Bluesky's [labels feature](https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/moderation), which allows you to subscribe to a custom application that then adds...

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

Bluesky has an open API (as does Mastodon), so if someone wanted to build a custom app for targetted harrasment there would be nothing to stop them from doing that So labels is less friction for building something like that - but I agree that less friction does matter

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

22/11/24, 7:26 pm0 reposts2 likes

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?

No I don't think it is. I think blocklists are good enough for abusive users.

Dave Syer

@handle.invalid

So it’s a private decision that you make how to deal with labelled posts

Dave Syer

@handle.invalid

I get what you mean, but ideally isn’t it about a value judgement that you make about the label, not the label itself, or the feature that allows labels?

It looks to me like custom labelers are Bluesky's attempt at building shared blocklists, but I'm still trying to get my head around their moderation model, there's a lot of complexity to it