WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE UPCOMING MODERATION SERVICES FEATURE
The Bluesky team is working hard on a new feature called Moderation Services, to help with community moderation.
Like how custom feeds are advanced versions of curation lists, mod services are like advanced versions of mod lists.
Mod services, like custom feeds, are services that you host independently, and then can subscribe to in the app. They basically provide the same sort of options as the current "content filters" in the app settings - except people can make their own ones! They can also recieve reports!
In fact, Bluesky's default moderation system will move to this system (although you won't be able to unsubscribe from it, for obvious reasons). But if you wanted to take a much harsher stance on say, hate speech, you could host a mod service and label hateful posts yourself - and get reports too!
Paul shared a WIP screenshot of what this is going to look like. From a user point of view, you can find a moderation service, and then hide/warn/show the posts and profiles that it labels.
Moderation services apply "labels" to both posts and profiles. Your bluesky client will then read these labels and show/warn/hide these posts/profiles accordingly.
Note - your subscriptions are PRIVATE. (although the mod service might know, it's unclear)
However, whereas with custom feeds where the team provided an API and an example template and said "go ham", this time they're open sourcing their internal moderation tooling, named "Ozone", which is a prebuild tool to run your own moderation service
This means there should be very little technical impediment to running your own moderation service, beyond hosting it (and I'm sure community members will figure that out too)
it's up to the moderation service! like custom feeds, they can do anything they like to decide what labels to apply. some might use humans, others might use machine learning, it's completely down to the moderation service how to implement things
However, whereas with custom feeds where the team provided an API and an example template and said "go ham", this time they're open sourcing their internal moderation tooling, named "Ozone", which is a prebuild tool to run your own moderation service
Is that what they're calling it? Ozone?
If it was something like a GPT implementation I would imagine you could feed it a bunch of training data. Maybe like a database of hate symbols and terminology for example. Sounds like loads of work, tbh. I'd rather them hire human moderators.
Ozone is their internal moderation tool. You don't need to necessarily use it though, you could just use the API to implement some sort of AI-powered one if you wanted to, it's totally up to you