Just struck me that decentralized social graphs are necessarily anti-dark-forests. They only allow for symmetric discovery. On centralized graphs it’s possible to see without being seen except the the Central Eye. Block propagation is bait propagation.

Delver at contraptions.venkateshrao.com, running summerofprotocols.com, host of /gloom ☀️

Bluesky may succumb to infant mortality at this rate. Decentralized tech needs dark forest tech to work properly against densely connected hostile groups. Problems like obfuscated blocklist propagation (decentralized shadowbanning?) are unsolvable otherwise.

The phenomenon I hadn’t properly thought through before is that a group may be more densely connected out-of-protocol, so its actions can seem magically coordinated if all you can see is the messaging traffic in-protocol. Like spooky action at a distance via entangled particles.