Maybe Bluesky has "won"

Twitter / X, for political reasons, allowed extremely toxic behavior while at the same time disempowered communities from moderating themselves. If you force each individual user to manually block every troll, bot, or disgusting person it's a losing battle and low quality speech will overwhelm conversations. X folks know that but did it anyways.

It's also becoming more and more clear that we need a relatively neutral medium for free speech. Musk claimed to be building that on X but then did exactly the opposite. It's very hard to trust the algorithm isn't being manipulated in one way or another.

On BlueSky it's incredible how much value is already being produced by connecting intelligent and creative folks as compared to what Twitter became.

https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes

For better or worse, X / Twitter was never really about communities. It has always been focused on allowing individuals to broadcast their thoughts. If you want a moderated community discussion then there are much better platforms for that.

We do have neutral mediums for free speech: HTTP and SMTP.

What I consider "toxic" is using slurs, trying to make people angry, bad faith arguments, spamming replies without giving them much thought, etc.

But on X too much value was / is being lost due to policy and algorithmic choices that discourage signal and encourage noise.

I used to go there for critical discussion of various tech issues or smart people talking about innovations at the cutting edge. As an example I used to use X to learn about modern graphics programming by searching certain terms to see what the smartest people in the field were saying while talking to each other.

It used to be that if a big account Tweeted something often you'd see true experts responding as the first replies. Now you'll see dozens of Bluechecks spamming memes or gross statements before you get to any substance, which inevitably has lower engagement.

Too many smart people have been turned away from the platform and it just doesn't generate the quality of discussion it used to. Already in the communities I care about I'm finding vastly more substance on BlueSky.

I'm seeing vastly more signal and less noise on topics I care about like game dev, urbanism, art, and tech.

You can either rely on Bluesky's standard labeler only or subscribe to ones that handle certain niches or the higher standards of moderation that you may want.

There's also lists made by other users that you can use to just block all the trolls/bots/etc on them at once (and as more are added).

X was locked down in a way that seemed to be giving the bots and trolls a significant advantage.

That aside, why wouldn't "reasonable" do the heavy lifting, and how is that a problem? Should we come to some other conclusion about the people that voted for him? Aren't we then forced to say these reasonable people just didn't know any better due to ignorance or lack of education? Somehow, that doesn't seem like an improvement. I'm okay with saying these are unreasonable people as well.