Bluesky confronts a distinctive predicament in the era of the incoming Trump administration. The President, who faced suspension from major platforms following his role in inciting violence and spreading false claims surrounding the 2020 election, now presents an acute test for the nascent social network. The platform was conceived around principles of openness and interoperability, yet it now stands alone as a focal point for governmental and political pressure. Should Bluesky enforce its policies against incitement or harassment when directed at Trump administration officials, it exposes itself to potential retaliation. Should it instead relax or avoid enforcing those same policies, it risks alienating the communities that migrated to the platform precisely to escape coordinated harassment campaigns.
Composable moderation—a system that distributes rule-making authority by allowing users to select moderation services aligned with their own principles—offers a potential remedy. This framework relocates enforcement responsibilities from a single platform operator into a network of independent, user-chosen moderation providers. By eliminating a centralized authority to pressure, the model deprives political actors and influential figures of the traditional leverage to "work the refs" and sway a single trust and safety department toward partisan outcomes.
Distributing the weight of content governance
The company distinguishes between "Bluesky the app," its consumer-facing social application, and the AT Protocol, the decentralized social networking infrastructure it is constructing. The consumer product represents merely one client within what will eventually constitute a larger ecosystem of services built atop the protocol. Currently, however, Bluesky the company retains complete responsibility for moderation and governance across the AT Protocol network.
A single company managing governance across a decentralized protocol cannot endure prolonged political or social assault. When one entity establishes moderation standards for a network designed to be open and distributed, it becomes a concentrated target for governments, advocacy organizations, and powerful individuals. The AT Protocol's Ethos statement articulates a long-term vision drawing from three distinct traditions: the open-publishing character of the early internet, the peer-to-peer emphasis on self-verifying and decentralized information, and the large-scale distributed infrastructure that powers contemporary online services.
Bluesky's aspiration is for AT Protocol to merge the web's accessibility, the autonomy inherent in peer-to-peer systems, and the scalability of modern platforms. The future could encompass image-sharing platforms, discussion communities, academic applications, and countless other services all operating on shared user identities and social connections. Bluesky represents a single instantiation of the protocol, not its ultimate expression.
Composable moderation constitutes the mechanism enabling this vision. Rather than implementing network-wide removals, the system employs labels to characterize concerns about content or accounts, permitting individual applications to determine their own response. Following correspondence from Daphne Keller, Martin Husovec, and Mallory Knodel, Bluesky has pledged to embrace this methodology.
Under this model, instead of expelling someone from every application operating on the protocol, Bluesky would apply a label to a suspended account that influences its presentation solely within Bluesky itself. Other applications retain the discretion to conceal the account, display it alongside a caution, or disregard the label altogether. Critically, the underlying account persists, since it resides on the user's personal data server, or PDS—the infrastructure storing their identity and content—which should only be eliminated for grave violations such as illegal material. The outcome is a more adaptive, distributed arrangement where no single application determines a user's continued presence on the network.
How this framework addresses the potential Trump administration challenge
The most instructive parallel in contemporary social media is Reddit's operational structure: the corporation establishes baseline standards, yet tens of thousands of subreddit communities layer their own policies, tools, and enforcement methodologies atop those standards. Consider r/AskHistorians, which demands thorough, well-documented responses grounded in contemporary scholarly consensus, with moderators regularly eliminating unsubstantiated or conjectural contributions falling short of that threshold. Composable moderation extends this stratified, community-driven framework to the protocol layer itself, enabling numerous applications and services to adopt moderation strategies reflecting their own commitments.
Since moderation could originate from multiple applications and services rather than Bluesky alone, it diminishes the political exposure arising from concentrating enforcement authority in a single organization. Communities gain the capacity to select moderation services reflecting their particular circumstances and requirements, granting marginalized populations greater agency over the safeguards they depend upon. Should one application or operator face failure or political coercion, alternative services can maintain their own enforcement standards while preserving network integrity.
In aggregate, this transformation could enable Bluesky and subsequent AT Protocol applications to manage the tensions outlined above, dispersing authority throughout the network architecture rather than consolidating it within a solitary enterprise.
Source: Tech Policy Press
