Delete the social networks, work with real people and all of a sudden things become a lot less extreme.

Elaborate. Because to my eyes Bluesky’s solution seems like it fits exactly in that design space in the middle you’re talking about.

De-amplify rather than block, your responses end up at the bottom of the list, if you care to scroll down that far

1. this seems orthogonal to configurable blocking lists. You can have configurable "de-amplify" lists, for instance.

2. Isn't this still effectively censorship?

In this case it sounds like it wouldn’t be censorship because it’s individual users that choose that particular moderation layer to, for instance, de prioritize certain voices. For others these voices are still loud. Just not for those that turn on that particular moderation layer. That’s how I understand it.

Just being louder than someone else is a kind of censorship. Problem is you can't listen to all 8 billion people effectively, and that's before half of them bring bots

It's not censorship if it's controlled by personal preference. If I ignore a certain subreddit and subsequently don't see it on /r/popular anymore, that isn't censorship. Isn't this here the same?

I'm thinking more of having 1000 extremists replying to your message, drowning out any useful replies

That's a problem for infinite scrolling feed type of apps, there is no bottom.

There's a bottom of the reply thread though

Very true, I was thinking mainly about the home feed. I don't use Twitter or Bluesky personally, I would have assumed reply chains are less of an issue since the person already drilled into the thread, maybe that's jot a good assumption!

And what would be an example of that?