posts about ICE and Bluesky today illustrate a deep issue about how we design tools…

online, we typically engage with *sources* not specific content - - going to a webpage, shows you whatever content currently is there

- following someone on social media, we see whatever they post

- merely being on a platform with algorithmic content promotion means you see whatever they want you to see, that is, potentially the platform in its entirety is the “active channel”

this makes one’s ability to select and restrict channels the most fundamental design feature there can be:

so it matters whether I can only restrict a specific source or also a *source of sources*…

(blocking a server includes future accounts yet to be created, block lists of individual accounts that I can import do not etc.)

….there are fundamental design choices here that have some relationship to centralization vs. “decentralization” but they’re not fully captured by that distinction, even though they really matter to our experience

the rather reductive way we’ve conducted debate about “decentralization” has obscured that a little, I think