Bluesky posted: Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re open-sourcing Ozone, our collaborative moderation tool. With Ozone, individuals and teams can work together and review and label content across the network. Later this week, we’re opening up the ability for you to run your own independent moderation services, seamlessly integrated into the Bluesky app. This means that you’ll be able to create and subscribe to additional moderation services on top of what Bluesky requires, giving you unprecedented control over your social media experience.
At Bluesky, we’re interested in safety from two angles. First, we’ve built our own moderation team dedicated to providing around-the-clock coverage to uphold our community guidelines.
Additionally, we recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to moderation — no single company can get online safety right for every country, culture, and community in the world. So we’ve also been building something bigger — an ecosystem of moderation and open-source safety tools that give communities power to create their own spaces, with their own norms and preferences. Still, Bluesky feels familiar and intuitive. It’s a straightforward app on the surface, but under the hood, we have enabled real innovation and competition in social media by building a new kind of open network.
In designing these moderation services, Bluesky operated by three principles:
Simple and Powerful: Give users a pleasant default experience, with customization options under the hood.
User Choice: Empower users and communities to develop their own moderation systems.
Openness: Create an open system that increases trust in the governance of our digital spaces.
Decentralized Twitter/X rival Bluesky announced on Tuesday that it’s open sourcing Ozone, a tool that lets individuals and teams collaboratively review and label content on the network. The company plans to open up the ability for individuals and teams to run their own independent moderation services later this week, which means users will be able to subscribe to additional moderation services on top of Bluesky’s default moderation, TechCrunch reported.
In a blog post, Bluesky said the change will give users “unprecedented control” over their social media experience. The company’s vision for moderation is a stackable ecosystem of services, which is why it will start allowing users to install filters from independent moderation services on top of what Bluesky already requires. As a result, users will be able to create a customized experience tailored to their preferences.
The Verge reported Bluesky will soon let users customize how its content is moderated in their feeds. The social platform announced that it’s open-sourcing its moderation tool, Ozone, to let developers create additional moderation services that can be selected by users.
As an example, Bluesky says someone could use Ozone to create a moderation services that specifically blocks images of spiders. A user could then subscribe to that service to remove photos of spiders from their feeds. They can also report any spider images that fall through the cracks, allowing the moderation service’s creator to review them.
In my opinion, Bluesky is doing something innovative that other social media sites have ignored. Giving users control over what they want to see — and to suppress things they don’t want to see (such as spiders), will make the platform much more friendly.