Every day it seems we have some version of The Discourse About Social Media Community Values, Norms, and Tone. I see it on Bluesky now and mostly because that's where I spend my time, but versions of it persist and recur, and reflect prior recurrences, on every platform and as far back as there have been social media platforms. The idea is that everyone, mashed together into a single feed (or a single global village or town square, or clustered around a single watercooler) has things to say about "What kind of place this should be." As if it can be one place. As if it should.
What you get are loud communities that aren't the whole of the community, but sub-communities that imagine themselves to be the community, or the dominant community. Or the community that ought to dominate. On Bluesky, this is sometimes the people who hate AI. Not just people who are concerned about it, but people who think it is destroying, or will destroy, all of humanity. That it is an existential threat, in both senses of existential. And so if someone posts, "Hey, here's this thing I did with Claude," down this community will descend, to drive out the heretic. Or at least make the heretic feel really bad about themselves. Or you get the far-left, sometimes communist and sometimes communist-adjacent, who have certain views about capitalism or certain views about what political issues are the most salient, and then just as strongly held certain views about how you can talk about those things, or the range of not just acceptable, but permissible opinions to hold about them. And if you challenge at all, or even if you express something that doesn't align with that moralized worldview, you're a heretic, and we run the same routine.
Other places, it's different. X does the same, but the same is only in form, not content. But the point, here, isn't the content. The point is the form, and what it tells us about social media, and why, to be cliché, it so often feels like anti-social media. And what we can do about it.
It's true that, returning to Bluesky because, again, it's what I know, the place does feel weighted, if in nothing else than in loudness, towards communities that tend to be toxic in the ways I just discussed. And part of their loudness is a demand that the Bluesky developers, the mods, force their preferences on everyone else through moderation decisions. They demand that Bluesky not just be a place where there are people like them, but that it be a place where there are only people like them.
Put another way, the trouble with these toxic communities is they believe their norms aren't just obviously the only valid norms, but that forcing them on everyone else is a righteous act.
What I think about, when I see this play out (and play out again) is liberal pluralism and liberal cosmopolitanism. Robust pluralism in the real world is typically pretty appealing and delightful. It's why big cities are the greatest places in the world and why cities have historically been the epicenters of progress. Jam a bunch of people together, let them live and thrive in peace, and they do awesome things.
But that same kind of extraordinary diversity, that same heightened pluralism, in online spaces often—but not always—leads to toxicity and social friction. To people getting piled on, harassed, driven out. And not bad people. Not the kind of people you really don't want to associate with. Not Nazi bar people. But genuinely good and decent people who just want to enjoy a good and decent place online with other good and decent people it's fun to hang out with.
To give it some parallelism, cities are great because they're diverse and crowded and always changing, yet each city also has its own character you get a feel for pretty quick after spending some time there. Social media platforms are also diverse and crowded and always changing, and each has its own character you can feel out in short order. But, unlike cities, they're pretty often not great. So what's going on?
I think a few things, interrelated. First, in the offline world, we understand that we can be among everyone, neck deep in that cosmopolitan pluralism, without interacting with everyone or having any desire to interact with anyone. And the norms of socializing in a city aren't "Maximize the quantity of people you interact with." In fact, if you try that, if you make conversation with or argue with every random person on the metro, or every random person at the coffee shop, people think you're kind of weird.
In a city, we can simply enjoy pluralism, dipping in and out of it and finding our preferred pieces of it. But an online platform isn't different just because it's text or video (though that matters and I'll get to it), but because it's a place of frictionless interaction. On Bluesky, it is easy to reply to or quote post anyone at any time. And so people do. They yell at strangers because it's easy to yell at strangers, and then your yelling gets you likes from people who also want to yell at that stranger. Which means not only do you, venturing into this pluralism, run the risk of getting yelled at, any time by anyone, but you also need to think, constantly, about whether whatever it is you're about to post will get you yelled at by a stranger. Or a hundred strangers.
Outside of blocking, blocklists, and a handful of interaction settings, in a digital space like Bluesky you lack the ability to draw boundaries. To sit in the metro and enjoy the presence of others, but have your headphones on. Enjoyable diversity becomes a constant threat that someone is going to decide you're the stranger they want to yell at.
And digital spaces reward this behavior. Not just likes and reposts, but replies and follows. By yelling at strangers you become conspicuous, and social platforms reward conspicuousness. So they develop norms of casual stranger interaction and challenge.
Then, to make matters worse, and as I promised to get back to, these spaces are text. Maybe video. They're not face to face, unmediated. This makes empathy easier to set aside. We're more comfortable being mean to a screen name and avatar than a physical and human presence in front of us. And that reinforces a culture of saying mean things to strangers instead of, as in a city, overhearing and moving on.
The way you solve this isn't necessarily a full retreat from social media and into small group chats. Though there's nothing wrong with that. Instead, the way you solve that is to make social media more like cities. And you do that by introducing privacy. If you live in a city, then you have your space in that city. A space that is yours, with a door you can close, and rules you can set about who can enter. That doesn't mean you're alone in there. You can always invite people in, and a lot of people, as many as you can pack. Then, when you want to, you can venture out, in other spaces, some public and some likewise private, and interact with all that wonderful pluralism in its vastness. But you have carved out spaces for your people, your peers, your perspective-sharers. And even in the public spaces, the norms of "You needn't and shouldn't engage with everyone" make the pluralism a texture you can zoom in on, or not, and enjoy no matter how zoomed in you want to get, and not a threat that you'll get singled out by someone who is very loud and that will attract more people who are very loud and then you'll find yourself at the center of a crowd pointing fingers and jeering at you.
We can build that online. Bluesky, in fact, has just that in alpha release right now, as , Bluesky's lead protocol developer, discusses in Reintroducing Spaces. Think of it kind of like reddits, which can be huge, or small, and public or private, and every one can set its own rules, and you can belong to as many as you want, and find your friends across all of them. Private (even if very large) communities will enable building barriers to that, and letting a thousand norms bloom.
Private communities in a shared environment (which is what Bluesky private data and communities will create) is the solution to this problem of digital pluralism, because it allows engagement with robust pluralism (thousands of overlapping communities) while also allowing walls against those who are overwhelmingly toxic. They can still rage that everyone must be like them, but you and your friends can just close your door and enjoy each other’s company in peace.