I. We were mailing list subscribers once... and young
In 1999, I was part of a group administering small mailing lists for people writing web servers in ANSI C. Our group was small; about twelve people were regular posters (a few times per day), and another couple dozen were occasional posters (once or twice per month). We had our primary list of ANSI C developers, then secondary lists for sub-groups interested in other topics—one for programming language theory (there were two of us), and another for a Play By EMail (PBEM) Star Trek RPG game.
One day, several groups we were all separately part of announced they were shutting down. As it turned out, some of these mailing lists had been administered by other teenagers who were now leaving for college and/or military service—and despite their best efforts, no one had been willing to take over the administration and hosting duties.
Eventually, my group decided to reach out and take over those mailing lists. There were a lot of people, and we almost backed out—but we had made a commitment to our groups about longevity and stewardship, and we were determined to welcome these new communities into our fold with open (digital) arms. We created a pseudo-social network of people with many overlapping interests. We merged lists, segmented groups, created portals for mailing lists to post banner announcements, and eventually made it so anyone subscribed to any of our lists could register for our other lists.
It was a great way to share and interact with information with like-minded folks... until it wasn't.
II. Birds of a feather get blocked together
The proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan one day after someone had a poor experience in one of our role-playing mailing lists. I never saw any of the actual content—my role in that group was more on the technology side, and I was too young at the time to understand the tight philosophical relationship between 1) the technology that enables community, and 2) the individuals from whom community is derived—but I do remember roughly the order in which things went down:
- In one of our role-playing mailing lists, a player made unwanted and grotesque sexual advances toward another player in direct violation of our community rules;
- The other player, a teenage girl, reported the behavior to the game master;
- The game master—who happened to be one of our mailing list administrators—confirmed what happened then banned the offending player's account;
- The system-wide ban meant that the offending player lost all access to all mailing lists they were subscribed to—which turned out to be a lot.
I remember coming home the next day from school and being unable to access our online portal. The requests kept timing out! Then I saw an email from a fellow admin explaining that there was an active denial of service attack going on, and they were trying to figure out how to block them at the firewall level. (Our entire operation was hosted on a friend and fellow admin's personal desktop computer). I biked over to his house and we spent the rest of the evening setting up automatic firewall rules for requests that appeared abusive.
The cool thing about our system was that inbound messages to any mailing list were archived in a database and then distributed through a separate job. As the messages were distributed, they were marked in the DB as having been successfully sent. That was really helpful when diagnosing why people weren't receiving emails—and it was really unhelpful when we got our systems back online and our code did exactly what we programmed it to do: for every unsent email in the database, go through and send them all.
So we got the server running again, and our inboxes got bombarded with emails. No worries, we thought. It's just the backlog of unsent emails from our mailing lists. But when we looked through them, we saw that it wasn't just normal traffic. Instead, a handful of people had sent several hundred emails to every single mailing list we had, leading to different administrative problems because now our database had grown to the point where the server was running out of disk space and memory.
The blocked user had many friends spread throughout the mailing lists we had taken over. Those people got together and decided that the best response to us enforcing community behavior guidelines was to flood our mailing lists with vitriol and right-wing propaganda talking points.
Once we got our server back online and database running again, I helped write a script that would automatically "jail" someone's account if they posted more than three posts to any mailing list within a minute. Jailed accounts had to be manually approved by at least two admins. Later we bumped it to three, then four. Unable to keep up with requests for customizations, we ended up writing a configuration language for anyone hosting the service to fine-tune how they wanted to enable account invites, signup, probationary conditions, jail conditions, and quorum voting among admins.
Then we banned the IP addresses and emails of every person who participated in the mass mailing list spam, which wasn't a large chunk of the community. We thought that would be the end of that, but that turned out to be the mildest community backlash I've experienced so far.
III. The Evolution of Digital Boundaries
Digital community spaces have a lot in common with in-person community spaces because they're both occupied by humans. As humans, we have certain expectations about how people will conduct themselves in public. Conduct, in this case, means to pilot—we are piloting our bodies, making conscious decisions about what to do with the information our senses receive.
As creatures capable of reading and comprehending this text, you are probably aware of how biological impulses can sometimes override our cognition. We have spent a great deal of time and energy as creatures inside multi-generational civilization experiments trying to articulate what parts of each other's biological experiences should have legal and social consequences. While we have had thousands of years to develop cultures of agreement around in-person behavior, the entire concept of online community is still, for the vast majority of people, a disconnected group of mini-identities across disparate systems.
We are still as a society figuring out how to set and enforce boundaries in online spaces. That includes defining what an online community boundary is, how it relates to in-person boundaries for conduct, and what it means when someone violates community guidelines. Codes of conduct and terms of use are some of the ways we've come to understand this from the outside, and for people who regularly engage through social platforms, community guidelines are something we're very familiar with.
After sharing what happened with folks, people who administered other mailing lists outside of our community asked if we would share the list of emails and IPs we had blocked. We had them all in a text file so we emailed it out, and then we got back another text file that was someone else's blocklist.
We ended up creating a single PHP file where any admin could upload bulk IP or email addresses to block, and then had a public endpoint where anyone could grab a list of just the IPs, just the emails, or both. Any admin could "vouch" for a new account, so every admin account was tied to another admin account in some way. It was a neat way for a bunch of decentralized introverted teenagers to manage communities. But it only worked because the internet was simpler back then than it is today.
Nowadays we're fully entrenched in corporate social media. Our expressions, our moderation tools, our ability to curate information for ourselves and others are all limited by what corporate project managers deem necessary to meet quarterly objectives. If my old mailing lists were a Facebook group, for example, my ability to "remove" accounts from a network of groups would be sorely limited. And don't get me started on the last decade of turning social identity conformance into a commodity, something very alive on TikTok where people who go viral for saying something will be selling that phrase on t-shirts faster than you can swipe between videos.
Blocking people on social media has become a sort of "taboo" for people who feel entitled to others' attention. This is especially true for people who are unable to function in public because their behaviors have long been deemed inappropriate in society. While more people are seeking social connectedness online than ever before, the internet has always been home to two kinds of people: those like me, who spend time thinking about how to cultivate healthy digital spaces where we can freely exchange ideas, and those who are only chronically online because their ideas and values are incongruent with healthy spaces.
IV. Bluer skies for digital spaces
What makes the AT Protocol that BlueSky has built fascinating isn't just its technical sophistication—it's how it mirrors processes we observe throughout human nature. Just as structure in the universe emerges from the delicate balance between attractive and repulsive forces, the AT Protocol creates what we might call "social surface tension"—the ability for communities to maintain their shape while remaining permeable to meaningful interaction.
The keyword is meaningful. Not every platform empowers people and groups to validate their own definition of meaningful through user experience itself. BlueSky, however, has created a protocol that is more like a second internet, with much of the information-sharing utility of the old internet—but with the ability to deny individuals and groups from interacting with you completely.
Yes, people can still see your content since all content is public, but the same can be said about webpages. You can block individual IP addresses at the firewall level, but someone could change computers. The same trade-off happens with AT Protocol through BlueSky, only now we control what information is curated to us, with a network of millions of people (and growing!), with tools to cull and trim out any information producers that we personally or collectively have decided are "spam" according to how we conduct ourselves and our communities.
The loudest complaints about digital boundaries often come from those who've never had to seriously think about physical ones. It's what I call the Boundary Paradox; the same people who wouldn't think twice about locking their doors argue that digital spaces should remain perpetually open to all. But not all of us have had such opportunity to go through life challenging people who live differently to lively debate. Some of us are emotionally and physically threatened when we act like "ourselves", and digital social spaces are, for many of us, the one area in our social lives where we can just be ourselves.
The "echo chamber" criticism about BlueSky misses something fundamental about human connection. Consider this: in the physical universe, structure and complexity emerge not from uniform mixing, but from the establishment of boundaries that allow unique environments to develop. We would be remiss not to recognize that the same is true in digital spaces.
When critics label boundary-setting tools as "echo chambers," they're missing the profound implications of what BlueSky and a growing open-source community of developers are building. These aren't walls; they're membranes. They're not destroying discourse; they're creating the protected spaces where genuine dialogue can flourish.
We are expanding the possibilities of human interaction itself. The AT Protocol and platforms like BlueSky aren't simply social networks; they're experiments in digital physics, creating new rules for how humans can connect and protect themselves in cyberspace.
Anyone who has worked in community trust and safety knows one thing about human actors in digital communities: people who feel genuinely secure in their ability to set boundaries are often more willing to explore beyond them. Just as the development of cell membranes enabled the evolution of complex life, strong digital boundaries might be exactly what we need to evolve more sophisticated forms of online discourse.