#active hostage situation

[djkerr]

Well, it's what some people might call an active hostage situation.

🎥 @NCISverse via YouTube

[source]

NCIS 22x01 Empty Nest

[marsixm]

i guess its good to know im able to know the truth (and therefore so are others) but it is extremely maddening to hear about something happening and see video and first hand testimonial evidence of it happening then googling it and every major outlet is reporting then opposite of what happened. like every one. what the hell

[stuck-in-the-ghost-zone]

i love Ratthi so much. i have since the first book. something about him is just so endearing. does everyone feel like this about Ratthi or is this just a me thing. hes my silly little guy! i get so excited whenever hes in a scene like YES ratthi is here 😊

[where-is-my-whump]

In aller Freundschaft S26 E35/36

[sochilll]

The best part of the x-files is that Mulder is the damsel in distress as often, if not more often, than Scully

[forjustice]

If any of my new followers wonder what my life with my abusive mother is like…I could go on and on about the torments I suffer but to give a brief picture let me give you a list of things I am not allowed to do without my abuser's permission:

Leave the house

See or speak to anyone IRL, or have any IRL friendships with anyone she doesn't approve of

Call anyone

Buy things for my personal pleasure such as books, art commissions, merchandise, etc. (she only minds if she catches me which isn't often but every time I buy something this hangs over my head)

Donate to friends or charity (again, she doesn't often catch me but every time I do this it hangs over my head)

Put money into my private bank account instead of our shared bank account

Have Internet time or any free time whatsoever

Vote

Practice my religion

Experiment with my gender

Buy clothes I want

Wear my hair in a style I want

See a therapist or otherwise have full autonomy over my own medical treatments

Study using the methods I find most effective rather than the ones she suggests

[clownowo]

now that dual destinies is coming to modern systems a whole new generation can experience my favorite part: "wait. hold on. how did you get here. you were in the detention center. being detained. we JUST saw you. how are you here. why are we brushing past this why are we not getting any explanation this isn't an official trial. you shouldn't be here. who brought you here??? ,,,WE'RE GETTING A REAL LIFE JUDGEMENT OUT OF IT????? WHY DID THEY INSIST IT WASN'T OFFICIAL?!?!"

[fates-theysband]

i love my friend to death but she does not know when to end a phone conversation so every time she texts me "hey can i call you" my immediate reaction is FUCK I HAD SO MANY OTHER THINGS I WANTED TO DO TONIGHT

[eclipsecrowned]

i get the idea b.ioware gives us is that the warden is this ultra-hyped living legend who does no wrong but… that’s not aria. and she makes some highly controversial, even defiant decisions knowing she ought to be untouchable. if she has to be among world of men, then she will put every ounce of power she has towards changing the world she was forced into. to make it yield to her and all others who exist without the consent or approval of power structures that were written for a single group.

so what i’m getting at here is that she took every rule the wardens ever had and spits on them both out of practicality and her own bitterness. that she gets way too wrapped up in her own games rather than giving herself wholly to The Cause. that she rails against everything she is supposed to be as the best known member of the grey because she feels she was made for more.

there’s no way her superiors could shuffle her out of command without kicking off a shitstorm, especially in her native ferelden. but i also think, when i do write her bolting off in the aftermath of chantrypalooza, her replacement arrived a little too quickly and a little too ready to take command. the warden leaders were just waiting for an opportunity to take control back from a ‘dog’ who was always trying to slip the leash and bite the hand that fed her.

[daydreamerdrew]

Captain America (2005) #9

[confused-wanderer]

It would be hilarious if villains loved Nightwing and were terrified of Officer Dick Grayson.

Dick Grayson- who is used to open spaces and adrenaline- being stuck in a boring bleak office, surviving on shots of coffee and red bull with caffeine that would make Tim concerned.

The thugs soon realised that unlike most of the other cops - Dick was from Gotham.

No one fucks with Gothamites.

Villain *shooting at Dick with machine guns*

Dick *appearing from the shadows behind him*: Boo.

Villain: THIS IS A FIVE STOREY BUILDING HOW THE HELL DID YOU GET HERE

Or

Thief *throwing a counting down bomb at Dick*

Dick: *catching and tossing the bomb at a safe distance before turning round and shooting it so it explodes mid air while running after thief*

Thief: .. what the actual fuck

Dick: Gee look at all that time you had! Shame you threw it away :D

Thief:

Dick: I’m from Gotham

Thief *realising they fucked up* : Please don’t steal my bones

OR

Shooter: *sets elaborate booby traps throughout the houses in an active hostage situation*

Dick *using his training as robin and inhuman flexibility to surpass them with ease*: Ah been a while since I got to have a nice stretch thank you.

Shooter:

Dick:

Shooter:

Dick: .. Hi :)

Shooter: Are you Satan?

AND

In interrogation room

Murderer: I think I’ll take your eyes and add them to my collection

Dick *running on spite and caffeine that could give Superman a sugar rush* : Funny.. I was going to say the same thing to you

Murderer: .. what

Dick: I wouldn’t take your eyes though.. they look like the inspiration behind the whole Medusa’s “look at it and you turn to stone” thing-

Murderer: Hey! Take that back before I gut you

Dick *smile stretching wider without blinking* : oh? Or what? I know everything about you. Who says I can’t kill you and walk out with everyone being none the wiser? I know how to kill someone too..you aren’t special.

Murderer:

Murderer: I’m scared for my safety.

Because the thing is, Nightwing is who Dick really is. It’s who he can be free as, be himself as without red tapes and regulations. Where he can give as good as he gets, and he’s kind and empathetic. He gets to help the downtrodden and goes easy on most of them if they give up right away, not to mention the fact that he never causes permanent damage.

But officer Dick Grayson is a different story. He runs on sleepless nights and no self preservation. Seeing an officer with an uncanny skill set they’re scarily good at, not to mention the cheery attitude he always has scares the shit out of criminals. Cuz no way in hell is a smiling Gothamite not a deranged one. He chases crimes like a bloodhound, and isn’t afraid to make good on threats he makes to ensure they never hurt anyone again.

Bonus if the batfam doesn’t know about this.

Red hood: Shit I can’t believe we ended up in Bludhaven

Red Robin *tying up the corrupt politican* : Since this is a sensitive case, we need someone we can trust to make sure it is seen through.

Red hood: .. So we paying a visit to Officer Grayson?

Politician *screeching* : NO NO NO NO! PLEASE NOT HIM!! JUST KILL ME INSTEAD AND TAKE ALL MY MONEY I CANT DEAL WITH HIM!

Red hood: .. is he fucking serious?

Henchmen: Sir he is. And we agree. Please take our bones and kill us but don’t take us to Officer Grayson.

Red Robin: Wait what did he do?

Henchman 1: He asked boss if the hat was sentient.. and said that if it was would it make that hat the top and boss the bottom.

Henchman 2: Last time we met I tried to shoot him but suddenly my gun was blank and he raised his hand and let the ammo drop

Red Hood: Well even I could do that-

Henchman 2: They were my bullets. I had selected the colour personally.

Red robin *growing concerned*

Henchman 3: He sang a lullaby to a child when we were holding the station hostage, and replaced the people with my family members. He even sang their social security numbers!

Henchman 4: He’s the most dangerous of them all. I ain’t shitting ya when I say he’s as scary as the bat from Gotham.

*all nodding in agreement*

Red hood:

Red Robin:

Red hood: Nah that doesn’t sound like Dick

Red Robin: Agreed. Let’s go there Hood.

*villains’ sobbing intensifies*

[koushirouizumi]

THIS IS DELIBERATE MIS-INFO SPREADING THIS IS DELIBERATE MIS-INFO SPREADING THIS IS DELIBERATE AND VERY DANGEROUS MIS-INFO SPREADING AND DISGUSTING OF THIS PERSON TO DO

[valtsv]

i never understood why baiting someone into getting emotional enough to screw up was considered such an effective strategy and also one of the most underhanded things you could do in any kind of competitive or combative scenario when i was younger, but now i'm an adult entirely responsible for my own actions i get it. every day i face situations that turn my internal landscape into an active hostage negotiation at gunpoint.

[petrenocka]

The reason Evil Morty is Evil is because he hates Rick and the Central Finite Curve is a pro-Rick multiverse.

no but i fucking LOVE the concept of "evil morty" being considered "evil" because he's tired of Rick and wants to do anything he can to get away from him. This is like a PERFECT metaphor for victims of abuse.

You do not owe your abusers kindness. In fact, if you're trying to get away from someone who is TORMENTING you, actively hurting you, etc., I personally believe you are within your rights to do whatever you can to get away from them. Of course, I'd personally say that you shouldn't endanger surrounding family, friends etc, but that's just it... Evil Morty is symbolic of someone who has been stuck in this cycle of abuse for so long he doesn't fucking CARE if there's collateral damage, and why should he?

When no matter who you go to, and try to explain your case to, and they take the side of your abuser. When no matter where you go, your abuser is praised or adored, and it feels like only you are aware of how this CAN'T continue-- and anyone who IS sympathetic is telling you things like "Oh you have to be the bigger person, you can't stoop to their level, just think positive" or whatever.

Evil Morty says it himself "I'm only evil because I'm sick of him. If you've ever been sick of him, then you're evil, too." And I resonated so strongly with that line.

So what does he do? He gets the fuck out. He does the work, he gets to a point where he feels like he has the same pull, the same influence, and then he burns it all down just so he can get the fuck away. It's not meant to be emulated, but I really feel like you're supposed to, in some ways, root for him. Because it resonates with some part of you, more so if you've been where he's been, metaphorically.

And when we next see him, he's not trying to "win" or amass power, he really, TRULY, just wants to be left alone, but he's willing to defend himself if necessary. And I think that's beautiful.

There's so much I could say, I just adore that character so SO much. I don't mind calling him Evil Morty, it feels empowering honestly. I've been considered Evil, but those standards. I'd rather be Evil than Good.

[miley1442111]

saving me- s.reid

-------------------------------

-------------------------------

a/n: fem reader, but as always imagine what you like :)

summary: spencer has to save you before it's too late.

pairing: spencer reid x fem bau! reader

warnings: general cm topics, sexual assault, hostage situation, drugging, the team don't know about you and spencer, injuries, reader gets injured, reader is allergic to opioids, drugs, alergic reaction, knives, guns, reader begs to be killed, spencer shoots someone. (i think that's it, tell me if i missed anything :))

-------------------------------

Another migraine. Another fucking migraine. 

Your life was truly a joke. 

You sat beside Emily in the car, eyes heavy with pain as you profusely rubbed them, the sunlight from the sky beside you far too bright. 

“Y/l/n? Any ideas?” Morgan asked, kicking you softly under the table.

“The unsub will probably be extremely interested in the investigation but they probably won’t bring themselves into it. We’ll end up seeking them out,” you rattled off. 

“Are you alright?” Prentiss whispered. 

“Fine,” you lied. “Just tired eyes.” 

-------------------------------

Spencer’s eyes were on you from the second you’d spoken about your ‘tired eyes’. He was meant to be working up a geological profile, but his focus was completely on you. ‘Tired eyes’, you’d been wearing glasses or contacts all week, you’d been drinking enough liquids, you’d been eating, he assumed you’d slept, you'd been busy most of the week and sleeping at your own apartment instead of his. 

What could cause ‘tired eyes’?

“Reid!” Seaver all but shouted in his ear. 

“Y-yeah? Yes?” He answered, eyes focusing on the map again. 

“Is Y/l/n here?” Rossi asked. 

“W-what? No. I thought she went with Hotch and Prentiss,” he hesitated. 

“She told them she was with us,” Rossi sighed. “So then where is she?”

“I-I don’t know,” Spencer admitted. “I’ll call her.”

Rossi held up your cell phone and Spencer’s stomach dropped.

“Shit,” he cursed.

“Shit is right,” Rossi nodded. 

-------------------------------

It had been 24 hours, you were officially a missing person. You had no idea where you were, someone must’ve drugged you. That hadn’t been a regular migraine. Your head thumped with pain as you struggled against the duct tape around your hands and feet. 

“You’re one beautiful girl, aren’t you?” You could hear the smirk in his voice, feel the way he was watching you. 

You tried to scream but the duct tape around your mouth made it difficult.

“I’m going to enjoy this,” he came closer, into the light. You could see his face. He was a white male, between the ages of 35-40, dad-build, and a sick smirk. 

You didn’t fight back, you couldn’t. You didn’t even notice the camera in the corner. You didn’t know that this was being recorded, or live-streamed directly to Penelope. Penelope, who showed it to the team. To your boyfriend. 

They were watching the worst moment of your life unfold. 

And you had no idea. 

-------------------------------

“Guys,” Penelope squeaked. “This j-just came through,” she showed them her laptop and looked away, tears clouding her vision. 

“Is that-” Derek started

“Y/n,” Aaron finished for him. 

“What about her? Did you find her?” Spencer asked, staring at the group from behind Penelope. “Is she ok?”

The team’s eyes were glued to the screen as Spencer stood there, demanding an answer. 

“Guys what?!” he shouted. “Someone answer me!”

“Come here,” Seaver sighed. Spencer stood beside her and watched in horror as the unsub hurt you. 

“We have to find her,” he stated. “Now.”

-------------------------------

“Please, please just kill me,” you begged. He’d taken the tape off a while ago. “Please kill me.”

“I’m not a necrophiliac,” he laughed in your face. “I like my girls alive.”

“Fuck you,” you sobbed. Blood, dirt, tears, and sweat coating your skin. “Fuck you!”

“I’m actively trying to fuck you,” he laughed again. You hated him. You hated this. You hated everything.  

“Just kill me,” you sobbed. “Please!”

He hit you on the head and you went out again. 

-------------------------------

“FBI!” Morgan’s voice rang out through the warehouse. Spencer was hot on his heels, walking ahead of him and ignoring proper protocol. “Reid!” He ran after him. 

“FBI! Put the knife down!” Spencer shouted at the unsub holding a knife to your throat. Something had gone wrong. He scanned the room quickly. 

“I-I didn’t mean to- I was just-” The unsub stepped away, dropping the knife. “She wasn’t meant to die.”

Die. Dead. You were dead.

Spencer fired his gun without a second thought. He ran over to you and checked your pulse, there but barely. 

“Hotch I need an ambulance!” He shouted. “Y/n, baby, I need you to wake up,” he begged. “Please, please, wake up, I need you Y/n. Please.” 

“Spencer-” Prentiss started but Spencer silenced her with his own words. 

“We’re dating. We have been for a year and a half, don’t you dare tell me to ‘step away’,” he sighed. 

The paramedics rushed in, starting you on an IV. 

“She’s allergic to opioids,” Spencer rattled off. “She can’t have any opioids.”

“Spencer,” Hotch sighed. “She’s had some already,” Hotch pointed to the vials in the corner of the room and the rusty needle beside them. 

Fuck. 

-------------------------------

“So when were you planning on telling us?” Derek sighed as they all sat in the waiting room.

“I don’t know, soon-maybe?”

“A year and a half is a long time,” Emily smiled. “Congratulations.”

Spencer nodded.

“Dr. Reid?” The nurse asked. Spencer shot up and out of his seat. 

“Yes?” 

“Ms. Y/l/n is stable but she is severely hurt. Physically and... mentally. She endured hours of sexual assault and her body and mind reflect that. I suggest someone non-threatening to see her first. Maybe a woman?”

Spencer gulped and nodded. “Emily?”

“Yeah of course,” she nodded, walking behind the nurse as he led her to your room.

-------------------------------

You wanted Spencer. You needed him.

Emily walked in and tears filled your eyes. “Where’s Spencer? Is he ok?”

“He’s fine, they just thought that you’d want someone non-threatening to come in and see you first-” Emily explained. 

“Can you go grab Spencer please?” you sniffled. She smiled and nodded, then left the room. 

-------------------------------

“Spencer?” Emily called into the hall. “She wants you.”

Spencer had never walked faster in his life. 

There you were. Bruises and scratches littering your body and face. Your beautiful face. Your beautiful smile and teary eyes.

“Come here, please,” you whispered. Spencer sat at your side, your hand in his. “Thank you.”

He chuckled sadly. “For what?”

“Saving me. All the time,” you smiled softly.

-------------------------------

criminal minds masterlist :)

navigation for my blog :) (criminal minds, marvel, top gun, challengers, the bear, the hunger games, obx+)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes

Of course you should do everything you can to prevent fires – and also, you should build fire exits, because no matter how hard you try, stuff burns. That includes social media sites.

Social media has its own special form of lock-in: we use social media sites to connect with friends, family members, community members, audiences, comrades, customers…people we love, depend on, and care for. Gathering people together is a profoundly powerful activity, because once people are in one place, they can do things: plan demonstrations, raise funds, organize outings, start movements. Social media systems that attract people then attract more people – the more people there are on a service, the more reasons there are to join that service, and once you join the service, you become a reason for other people to join.

Economists call this the "network effect." Services that increase in value as more people use them are said to enjoy "network effects." But network effects are a trap, because services that grow by connecting people get harder and harder to escape.

That's thanks to something called the "collective action problem." You experience the collective action problems all the time, whenever you try and get your friends together to do something. I mean, you love your friends but goddamn are they a pain in the ass: whether it's deciding what board game to play, what movie to see, or where to go for a drink afterwards, hell is truly other people. Specifically, people that you love but who stubbornly insist on not agreeing to do what you want to do.

You join a social media site because of network effects. You stay because of the collective action problem. And if you leave anyway, you will experience "switching costs." Switching costs are all the things you give up when you leave one product or service and join another. If you leave a social media service, you lose contact with all the people you rely on there.

Social media bosses know all this. They play a game where they try to enshittify things right up to the point where the costs they're imposing on you (with ads, boosted content, undermoderation, overmoderation, AI slop, etc) is just a little less than the switching costs you'd have to bear if you left. That's the revenue maximization strategy of social media: make things shittier for you to make things better for the company, but not so shitty that you go.

The more you love and need the people on the site, the harder it is for you to leave, and the shittier the service can make things for you.

How cursed is that?

But digital technology has an answer. Because computers are so marvelously, miraculously flexible, we can create emergency exits between services so when they turn into raging dumpster fires, you can hit the crash-bar and escape to a better service.

For example, in 2006, when Facebook decided to open its doors to the public – not just college kids with .edu addresses – they understood that most people interested in social media already had accounts on Myspace, a service that had sold to master enshittifier Rupert Murdoch the year before. Myspace users were champing at the bit to leave, but they were holding each other hostage.

To resolve this hostage situation, Facebook gave prospective Myspace users a bot that would take their Myspace login and password and impersonate them on Myspace, scraping all the messages their stay-behind friends had posted for them. These would show up in your Facebook inbox, and when you replied to them, the bot would log back into Myspace as you and autopilot those messages into your outbox, so they'd be delivered to your friends there.

No switching costs, in other words: you could use Facebook and still talk to your Myspace friends, without using Myspace. Without switching costs, there was no collective action problem, because you didn't all have to leave at once. You could trickle from Myspace to Facebook in ones and twos, and stay connected to each other.

Of course, that trickle quickly became a flood. Network effects are a double-edged sword: if you're only stuck to a service because of the people there, then if those people go, there's no reason for you to stick around. The anthropologist danah boyd was able to watch this from the inside, watching Myspace's back-end as whole groups departed en masse:

When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/12/05/what-if-failure-is-the-plan.html

Social media bosses hate the idea of fire exits. For social media enshittifiers, the dumpster fire is a feature, not a bug. If users can escape the minute you turn up the heat, how will you cook them alive?

Facebook nonconsensually hacked fire exits into Myspace and freed all of Rupert Murdoch's hostages. Fire exits represents a huge opportunity for competitors – or at least they did, until the motley collection of rules we call "IP" was cultivated into a thicket that made doing unto Facebook as Facebook did unto Myspace a felony:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

When Elon Musk set fire to Twitter, people bolted for the exits. The safe harbor they sought out at first was Mastodon, and a wide variety of third party friend-finder services popped up to help Twitter refugees reassemble their networks on Mastodon. All departing Twitter users had to do was put their Mastodon usernames in their bios. The friend-finder services would use the Twitter API to pull the bios of everyone you followed and then automatically follow their Mastodon handles for you. For a couple weeks there, I re-ran a friend-finder service every couple days, discovering dozens and sometimes hundreds of friends in the Fediverse.

Then, Elon Musk shut down the API – bricking up the fire exit. For a time there, Musk even suspended the accounts of Twitter users who mentioned the existence of their Mastodon handles on the platform – the "free speech absolutist" banned millions of his hostages from shouting "fire exit" in a burning theater:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/martineparis/2022/12/17/elon-musk-bans-journalists-on-twitter-as-more-flee-to-mastodon-heres-who-to-follow/

Mastodon is a nonprofit, federated service built on a open standards. Anyone can run a Mastodon server, and the servers all talk to each other. This is like email – you can use your Gmail account to communicate with friends who have Outlook accounts. But when you change email servers, you have to manually email everyone in your contact list to get them to switch over, while Mastodon has an automatic forwarding service that switches everyone you follow, and everyone who follows you, onto a new server. This is more like cellular number-porting, where you can switch from Verizon to T-Mobile and keep your phone number, so your friends don't have to care about which network your phone is on, they just call you and reach you.

This federation with automatic portability is the fire exit of all fire exits. It means that when your server turns into a dumpster fire, you can quit it and go somewhere else and lose none of your social connections – just a couple clicks gets you set up on a server run by someone you trust more or like better than the boss on your old server. And just as with real-world fire exits, you can use this fire exit in non-emergency ways, too – like maybe you just want to hang out on a server that runs faster, or whose users you like more, or that has a cooler name. Click-click-click, and you're in the new place. Change your mind? No problem – click-click-click, and you're back where you started.

This doesn't just protect you from dumpster fires, it's also a flame-retardant, reducing the likelihood of conflagration. A server admin who is going through some kind of enraging event (whomst amongst us etc etc) knows that if they do something stupid and gross to their users, the users can bolt for the exits. That knowledge increases the volume on the quiet voice of sober second thought that keeps us from flying off the handle. And if the admin doesn't listen to that voice? No problem: the fire exit works as an exit – not just as a admin-pacifying measure.

Any public facility should be built with fire exits. Long before fire exits were a legal duty, they were still a widely recognized good idea, and lots of people installed them voluntarily. But after horrorshows like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, fire exits became a legal obligation. Today, the EU's Digital Markets Act imposes a requirement on large platforms to stand up interoperable APIs so that users can quit their services and go to a rival without losing contact with the people they leave behind – it's the world's first fire exit regulation for online platforms.

It won't be the last. Existing data protection laws like California's CCPA, which give users a right to demand copies of their data, arguably impose a duty on Mastodon server hosts to give users the data-files they need to hop from one server to the next. This doesn't just apply to the giant companies that are captured by the EU's DMA (which calls them "very large online platforms," or "VLOPS" – hands-down my favorite weird EU bureaucratic coinage of all time). CCPA would capture pretty much any server hosted in California and possibly and server with Californian users.

Which is OK! It's fine to tell small coffee-shops and offices with three desks that they need a fire exit, provided that installing that fire exit doesn't cost so much to install and maintain that it makes it impossible to run a small business or nonprofit or hobby. A duty to hand over your users' data files isn't a crushing compliance burden – after all, the facility for exporting that file comes built into Mastodon, so all a Mastodon server owner has to do to comply is not turn that facility off. What's more, if there's a dispute about whether a Mastodon server operator has provided a user with the file, we can resolve it by simply asking the server operator to send another copy of the file, or, in extreme cases, to provide a regulator with the file so that they can hand it to the user.

This is a great fire exit design. Fire exits aren't a substitute for making buildings less flammable, but they're a necessity, no matter how diligent the building's owner is about fire suppression. People are right to be pissed off about platform content moderation and content moderation at scale is effectively impossible:

https://www.techdirt.com/2019/11/20/masnicks-impossibility-theorem-content-moderation-scale-is-impossible-to-do-well/

The pain of bad content moderation is not evenly distributed. Typically, the people who get it worst are disfavored minorities with little social power and large cadres of organized bad actors who engage in coordinated harassment campaigns. Ironically, these people also rely more on one another for support (because they are disfavored, disadvantaged, and targeted) than the median user, which means they pay higher switching costs when they leave a platform and lose one another. That means that the people who suffer the worst from content moderation failures are also the people whom a platform can afford to fail most egregiously without losing their business.

It's the "Fiddler on the Roof" problem: sure, the villagers of Anatevka get six kinds of shit kicked out of them by cossacks every 15 minutes, but if they leave the shtetl, they'll lose everything they have. Their wealth isn't material. Anatekvans are peasants with little more than the clothes on their back and a storehouse of banging musical numbers. The wealth of Anatevka is social, it's one another. The only thing worse than living in Anatevka is leaving Anatevka, because the collective action problem dictates that once you leave Anatevka, you lose everyone you love:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

Twitter's exodus remains a trickle, albeit one punctuated by the occasional surge when Musk does something particularly odious and the costs of staying come into sharp relief, pushing users to depart. These days, most of these departures are for Bluesky, not Mastodon.

Bluesky, like Mastodon, was conceived of as a federated social service with easy portability between servers that would let users hop from one server to another. The Bluesky codebase and architecture frames out a really ambitious fire-suppression program, with composable, stackable moderation tools and group follow/block lists that make it harder for dumpster fires to break out. I love this stuff: it's innovative in the good sense of "something that makes life better for technology users" (as opposed to the colloquial meaning of "innovative," which is "something that torments locked-in users to make shareholders richer).

But as I said when I opened this essay, "you should do everything you can to prevent fires – and also, you should build fire exits, because no matter how hard to you try, stuff burns."

Bluesky's managers claim they've framed in everything they need to install the fire exits that would let you leave Bluesky and go to a rival server without losing the people you follow and the people who follow you. They've got personal data servers that let you move all your posts. They've got stable, user-controlled identifiers that could maintain connections across federated servers.

But, despite all this, there's no actual fire exits for Bluesky. No Bluesky user has severed all connections with the Bluesky business entity, renounced its terms of service and abandoned their accounts on Bluesky-managed servers without losing their personal connections to the people they left behind.

Those live, ongoing connections to people – not your old posts or your identifiers – impose the highest switching costs for any social media service. Myspace users who were reluctant to leave for the superior lands of Facebook (where, Mark Zuckerberg assured them, they would never face any surveillance – no, really!) were stuck on Rupert Murdoch's sinking ship by their love of one another, not by their old Myspace posts. Giving users who left Myspace the power to continue talking to the users who stayed was what broke the floodgates, leading to the "unraveling" that boyd observed.

Bluesky management has evinced an admirable and (I believe) sincere devotion to their users' wellbeing, and they've amply demonstrated that commitment with capital expenditures on content moderators and tools to allow users to control their own content moderation. They've invested heavily in fire suppression.

But there's still no fire exits on Bluesky. The exits are on the blueprints, they're roughed into the walls, but no one's installed them. Bluesky users' only defense against a dumpster fire is the ongoing goodwill and wisdom of Bluesky management. That's not enough. As I wrote earlier, every social media service where I'm currently locked in by my social connections was founded by someone I knew personally, respected, and liked and respected (and often still like and respect):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

I would love to use Bluesky, not least because I am fast approaching the point where the costs of using Twitter will exceed the benefits. I'm pretty sure that an account on Bluesky would substitute well for the residual value that keeps me glued to Twitter. But the fact that Twitter is such a dumpster fire is why I'm not going to join Bluesky until they install those fire exits. I've learned my lesson: you should never, ever, ever join another service unless they've got working fire exits.