- Joined
- Feb 28, 2021
If anyone's unclear how this works, basically Aegis is an opt in moderation service. On its top level, it applies labels to accounts that it considers to be bad news in some way, for example "boundary violators".
If a particular "Skeet" is specifically doing something bad, then the post itself will get tagged and will be hidden behind a warning if you're subscribed to Aegis:
This is separate to the actual site moderators, who will hide posts they deem to be problematic due to sitewide rules:
The maintained lists also give you the option of either muting or blocking anyone labelled by Aegis in various categories (for example, you could block anyone labelled transphobe but only mute people labelled racist).
It's an interesting approach because it means literally anyone can decide to become a janny and label people as having wrongthink, but their janny activity is only visible to people who opt in to being jannied by those people. In theory this would allow a much broader diversity of opinion there, but the obvious consequence is that when something becomes the gold standard they have a lot of power - if Aegis is the defacto opt in, then a trans person on Bluesky will need to opt into it, and then they have no excuse for interacting with accounts that have been cancelled by Aegis (and will be cancelled for failing to comply).
In this case a poweruser on Bluesky got labelled a boundary violator by Aegis, but people were then criticising Aegis for how long they took to act, and then got labelled trolls. This mean they were then instantly cut off from a large portion of their community who had their filters to set up to automatically block anyone tagged as a troll by Aegis, and heavily restricted from interacting with the rest as they had a "troll" pink triangle on their account which warned off others. Hence why Aegis is now shutting down.
This sort of thing is why Kevin is likely taking such pains to argue about the revenge porn. On Twitter, he can't be banned for someone claiming he leaked revenge porn elsewhere, and he'd be able to weather the storm and maybe only lose a few hundred followers while arguing and gaslighting his way out of it. On Bluesky, if someone who runs a community moderation list labels him a boundary violator, creepy perv or whatever other label they wanted to apply to him, then he's going to be filtered out of thousands of trans bluesky accounts and he won't even have an appeals process like with a site ban, because the community moderation filtering is entirely opt in. So he needs to try and shut down revenge porn allegations or else he'll end up with a scarlet letter.
Look at how gleefully Kevin doxed Elle/TCS.
