Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3lmuz3nr62k26
Email from Bluesky in the screenshot:
Hi there,
We are writing to inform you that we have received a formal request from a legal authority in Turkey regarding the removal of your account associated with the following handle (@carekavga.bsky.social) on Bluesky.
The legal authority has claimed that this content violates local laws in Turkey. As a result, we are required to review the request in accordance with local regulations and Bluesky’s policies.
Following a thorough review, we have determined that the content in question violates local laws in Turkey, as outlined in the legal request. In compliance with these legal provisions, we have restricted access to your account for users.
Bluesky is a for-profit company that is capitalizing on the Xodus. They may be better for the time being, but the march for more and more profit will end the same as it always does. Enshittification. They are not the good guys, the fediverse is.
It was an obvious op from the beginning. You could tell by the people they were trotting out to sell it. Lots of liberal pro-authority types.
They are not the good guys, the fediverse is.
I think you’re overselling the Fediverse here. The Fediverse also absolutely has censorship, it’s just by individual instance admins instead of a for-profit company. If large, influential instances shut down or defederate, a lot of content goes with it.
Yeah, federated instances technically cache that data, but those communities are effectively dead, links are broken, etc. Users can jump to other services, sure, but the service isn’t the same.
We’ve seen this here on Lemmy. Beehaw was a cool instance, but they defederated fairly early on. Lemmy.ml was super impactful, but their admins are super aggressive with moderation to the point that many avoid their communities. And so on.
Whether “the Fediverse” is good depends on your instance and the mods and admins of the various communities you are part of. That kind of sucks.
Maybe it sucks less than whatever major social media network you’re comparing to, but I hesitate to call it “good,” just different.
There’s always gonna be an admin of some kind unless we all run our own instances, but that ends up with everyone just in large echo chambers again, as they federate only with people they agree with, or to scream at people they don’t.
That’s not necessarily true. Is there an admin of BitTorrent? Not really, people just contribute resources and the network keeps on trucking.
I’d like to see more exploration of P2P networks like BitTorrent. It should be that a single person leaving the network doesn’t impact anyone, data just gets shuffled so it stays available. The tricky part is moderation, but surely that’s a solvable problem.
For sure. Not that we don’t have problems, but corporate overlords mining our data or censoring us for political back scratching aren’t among them. That’s all imma trying to say.
Nothing is really stopping them from mining your data on Lemmy, all they need is to create an instance and federate, and then get can hoover up whatever they want.
Censorship is more difficult, sure. But we’re still subject to whatever arbitrary censorship the mods and admins want.
I think the Fediverse is on net better, but I do think the model has many other problems, and that it’s more of a stepping stone to something better. But being “better” doesn’t mean we’re “good” and the other options are “bad,” it just means we make different tradeoffs. There’s a very real risk of large instances shutting down because the admins lost interest, for example, and that’s less of a concern for a for-profit operation.
I guess my point is to not oversell the Fediverse. It’s cool, hence why I’m here, but it’s far from perfect.
But but but… Bluesky pwomised they would join the fediverse someday! A super duper pinky pwomise!
When did they do that?
I should’ve been on here instead. I legitimately thought that Anarchists, Communists, &c could make a difference being on there. Now I get people deliberately blocking accounts that aren’t even fascist, and being concerned with “bullying” instead of actually solving real problems. BSky has upper-class liberals talking about D&D, whining about how laws aren’t being followed correctly, cheerleading American imperialism, making unfunny jokes, and claiming that radical politics came from 4chan rather than legitimate political grieviances. All sorts of suburban slime. I really should’ve been elsewhere.
And now you know why corporations and politicians don’t use mastodon
Funny as I got downvoted to oblivion for saying Bluesky was not really decentralized.
A decentralized service like Mastodon will have the same issues when governments are knocking on the door. The turkish government totally can force all those small turkish instance admins to defederate instances who are not reacting to legal threats. And all those small admins don’t have the resources to fight a lengthy legal battle against their own government
The flip side of that is that instances large and small outside of the influence of the government can do as they please and people can use other means, like VPNs, to access them.
But they can use some other instance. With centralized platforms the issue is that they want to do business everywhere. Russia threatened to arrest Google employees in Moscow, for instance. Even without such threats, they want to have access to local markets. That isn’t a concern for some instance in Ireland that is supported by donations.
That’s the entire point, right? Just use an instance that’s in a country that’s not closely allied with Turkey. Everyone knows that, right? Right?
Based on the comments, I’m not so sure. Louder for those in the back.
Blue Sky isn’t in a country that is closely allied with turkey. They could have totally ignored these requests but then Blue Sky would have just been banned in Turkey
Which is why we need to get off corpo platforms. A corporation will never care for people or look out for people’s best interests, it only ever cares about finances going up, and will put that before everything. An authoritarian regime wanting to censor their genocide? Absolutely. Fuck the victims, it’s more important that our pockets are well lined.
Bluesky is just twitter. It’s the same bullshit with a different recipe. It’ll never be a good platform for democracy.
The tech needs to be decentralized like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is untouchable as it is just so decentralized. You can go after nodes and miners, but you would have to go after all of them to take down any of its content. It is very resilient and social media could go the same way but people have to want it first.
Not the same problem but it would still be an issue
But it would give consumers control and transparency
Right now we have none. They see you, they realize they don’t like you and they make the algorithm disappear everything you say
That is a problem. And I agree with others, it needs to be decentralized, that is step 1. The other things cannot even be attempted until then
Corporate driven communication will just not work. They are in bed with the fascist Nazi regime
Hard agree. Decentralization itself doesn’t really work against censorship, you need an additional layer of privacy, or, more ideally, anonymity. Is there a way of running a lemmy instance over Tor?
Decentralization isn’t done to hide the author, federating content works because the content is spread beyond a central owner. I don’t know if you ever used a peer-2-peer network like you do when you torrent a movie, but the concept is very similar. It is harder to censor something because you have more places you need to censor.
Imagine you are in a country where a lot of information is censored and you want to spread a message. Would you pick 1 giant billboard in the city center or would you make a bunch of leaflets you secretly hand out to someone you trust, hoping they will give the information along to someone they trust etc? Obviously, one giant billboard is easier to take down by the censoring government. That is why decentralisation does in fact work against censorship.
Anonymity or ‘layers of privacy’ are useful if you don’t want to be caught as the author of the message. In that case it is not about running the instance over Tor, but accessing the instance over Tor. You wouldn’t even need to use tor if you can trust your computer isn’t infected and you acces the instance through a VPN and remove all new data (e.g. cookies) from your pc before you disconnect your vpn.
Running the service itself over Tor is the only way to prevent local governments knocking on the admin’s door, though
Yes totally true, if you want to be safe from all governments. But there are plenty countries you can safely host an instance without fearing censorship. On the one hand you have options in wealthy countries that want to defend their values, and on the other hand you have options in poor countries which do not have the resources to locate the actual server.
I sort of feel like that’s not really relevant. How would being decentralised make any difference, the government would just go after the server owners regardless of who they are. If the server owners didn’t honour the takedown requests turkey would just ban the server IP and no one would be able to access.
Federation isn’t a solution to every problem
How would being decentralised make any difference
You sign up on a server that isn’t in Turkey and doesn’t give a shit to respond to turkish demands.
Now turkey can only control the servers that are within it’s countries, and has to submit requests to ALL of them rather than just one. And even then can’t remove you from the rest of the federation.
Right but my point is they would just submit the request to the host server. If the original is taken down then all the federated service will lose the comments as well.
If the host server just straight up ignores turkey then they’ll block all servers that host Mastodon and say mastered on is a rogue element. Better you just remove the offending comment
Right but my point is they would just submit the request to the host server. If the original is taken down then all the federated service will lose the comments as well.
Not how federation works. Let’s take a lemmy post as an example. If a server is federated with another and a new post is made, all subscribed servers are notified and a copy of the item is sent in that notification. If the original is “taken down” the copies still exist on the other servers and any deletion event is in ALL of their modlogs. ANY instance can “undelete” or revert the removal, or just ignore the deletion request all together (or roll back the database, or any number of operations to revert a change). The items doesn’t just go away. The “origin” doesn’t have all that much power to force other listening servers to do anything.
This also extends to comments. I run my own small instance with me and a few friends. My server never had serious downtime because it’s just us. Our access to larger instances never “vanished” even as their sites went completely down. The local content is effectively cached regardless of the state of the origin server.
If the host server just straight up ignores turkey then they’ll block all servers that host Mastodon
Good luck with that… There’s a lot of servers that can talk the same federation protocol. You’re not going to get them all. Forget all the normal means of bypassing blocks… you have so many fediverse and threadiverse servers to attach to in order to access largely similar content.
they’ll block all servers that host Mastodon
This will be a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.
Like how China tries to block VPNs that get around their firewall. There’s always another VPN that China hasn’t blocked yet, and there’ll always be another fediverse server that any other authoritarian regime hasn’t blocked yet.
You get it, they’ll just do what they did with torrents and p2p networks. /s
This is easily solved with the god damn onion address support which is in lemmys own documents.
But Turkey blocking acces to certain content is not the same as removing the content (which is what Bluesky does when they honour a request).
If it was truly decentralized it would be like Bitcoin that has not been brought down by any government or organization yet they sure have tried.
The content is still accessible, just not via the official Bluesky servers from that region, with content addressing and signatures you can even be certain that mirror sites haven’t modified any content.
Where are those alternative servers?
Currently, you have stuff like Clearsky (it’s basically an archive.org for bluesky)
Which is not part of Bluesky, only proving the point having a central system controlling the data makes the data vulnerable.
Sorry what, an example of a 3rd party service proving 3rd party mirrors exists proves it’s vulnerable to what? It’s content addressed and as open as it gets, it’s literally designed to survive if the company goes down
Yes, but in comparison to a federation only the information will survive because it was copied out of the central system, but the system will fail as soon as the company folds. I mean the reason the fact that you need a 3rd party mirror to save the data proves the flaws of the 1st party. This instance for example doesn’t need to be mirrored because it is built on a foundation that already has redundancy built in.
I’m not sure you know what content addressing is.
So, just like Twitter, then? When the official servers don’t show whatever the government tells them not to show?
Yup
I know it sounds insane but I swear to god BlueSky has astroturfing accounts on Lemmy. Every conversation (including yours here) about BlueSky is met with countless Sealions either saying it “will be federated soon” or asking “Why does federation matter?”
Centralization is going to do what centralization does best.
I hope those downvotes were not from here.
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The only thing i did was follow anime artists(same popular ones i follow on twitter that started switching to bsky)and block weird accounts that had furry/beastalility(idk why they kept showing up) coz i selected the art tag as interest . but after a few weeks of banning furry shit my account got banned… No reason why . but maybe an admin/staff saw i blocked them and retaliated ? This was last year when bsky was new. Fuck it. At least mastodon is still used
Wow, all the bsky lovers are now facing the reality. None of the corpos have user’s interest in mind. They only care about numbers: number of active users’ data that they can sell to the highest bidder.
Any service provider, private or corporate, must comply with the law. Otherwise the service provider will face the consequences.
I agree with that part. What I don’t agree with is corpos posing as holders of truth and bastions of morality.
Fake Fediverse is fake.
Fuck Turkey and fuck however they want it spelt.
Re: “(…) fuck however they want it spelt.”
As a Turkish person, I’m with you on this.
If the Turkish government wants you to refer to Turkey as Türkiye, then they shouldn’t be allowed to call the US “Amerika Birleşik Devletleri”: they should be required to pronounce it United States of America.
Let’s see how they like it then, lol. “Yunayıted Sıtets af Amerika”, hah.
It’s also quite awkward requiring others to spell the country with letters that don’t exist in most alphabets, and therefore not on commonly used keyboards.
Sure you can make use of ü and others with some international layouts, but for laypeople it’s rather cumbersome.
Imagine China would suddenly require everyone spelling it as 中国， nobody would even be able pronounce it, let alone write.
Agreed.
The bird was named after the country. So if they want to be called Türkiye, that means we’ll be having türkiye for Thanksgiving from now on.
I don’t think bluesky was federated. Not in the sense that anybody can start making bluesky servers in their room
“Bluesky” itself is trademarked and all the rest, but it uses AtProtocol which is a completely open federation protocol. AtProtocol doesn’t have the support of ActivityPub because it’s much newer and also more complicated (for good reason, but still).
its just a clone of early twitter, basically.
So. When ever I post my families genocide story as Armenians in The Ottoman empire. There’s always a Turk to call me a liar online. Then they get you banned from the sub because they have people injected into mod teams. Pretty disgusting experience. Also happened with Azerbaijani posters to. Interesting how deep they injected themselves in Reddit.
On the one hand it is crazy, on the other hand I suppose you don’t even need that many ‘policemen’ on the interwebs to clean it up compared to the amount of (secret) policemen you need to keep the physical country ‘clean’.
Don’t replace X with Bluesky! Go to Mastodon and other Federalised platforms. That is the only way to escape corporate-sponsored fascism.
But I don’t want to sit alone in a room.
Not sure if you were joking but Mastodon has substantially more users than Lemmy.
Averaging 1 million users/month versus Lemmy’s 50k.
And yet, I feel like I struggle to find relevant content more on Mastodon than on Lemmy. Maybe I just still don’t know how to Mastodon.
It’s not just you, there’s been a lot of threads on let me talking about it but the problem with Mastodon is the fact that there is no content recommendation algorithm. You basically just get shown stuff from your local instance and maybe stuff it’s Federated with. Which is pretty much guaranteed to be a bunch of useless garbage nobody is interested in and random cat pictures.
Bluesky is not perfect, but it’s better than X and i can actually find content i want. I’ve tried so many times to Mastodon and it’s just not worth it. Finding content is a huge effort and i don’t want to put that effort in.
Blue Sky learned very quickly that I’m interested in artists content and now when I open it I find at least one new artist to follow each day so I can just open it scroll through the people I’m following look at the Discover tab to find a new one whose art I like and feel better that’s just not going to happen on Mastodon
Totally agree. I like the Fediverse (that’s why I’m here), but it is just too hard to find interesting content on mastodon. This way it will never attract a large crowd.
Same experience
I though Mastodon had a search engine.
It does! It’s worthless! (งツ)ว
Have to agree sadly. I searched and followed many people, still my feed is completely devoid of anything useful or interesting. I can keep digging but I feel like a 1% incremental gain from weeks of trying to set the network/profile up and giving zero results feels like a lost cause to some extent. I periodically check back, and it’s more of the same unfortunately.
But don’t you already when you peepee or poopoo and post from the bathroom. *replies it as I poopooing
No offense but I think your effort is wasted on the people (already) here.
You’re right. The effort of writing 2 sentences to promote a platform some people may not have checked out in some time, if at all, was definitely wasted. I’ll remember that next time.
should’ve put an /s there maybe, don’t want to curb your enthusiasm of writing 2 sentences to promote a platform some people may not have checked out in some time, if at all. Do your thing lol
If Fedi server owners will start getting legal requests from the Turkish government, they will start banning people too. Or will be forced to close their operations in Turkey.
It will take way longer for them to shut down all individual servers than it takes them to ask 1 company to shut down all posts.
Not to mention the dissent that arrises from one server being asked to shut down, how many others would suddenly start hosting anti-turkey regime stuff.
Its like piracy: you can’t really shut it down. Even if Turkey would make accessing the fediverse illegal, people would still use VPNs.
It costs money to run and admin servers though
Same on lemmy… Yet, here we are? I’d call that a win.
I’d rather have a bunch of smaller dudes hosting servers than yet another US multinational that will use their money to destroy democracies around the world.
Serious question: what is a US multinational?
probably meant US conglemerate
i don’t get why this is shocking; if you do business in a country you have to follow local laws.
Honestly at this point I want to host a distributed Lemmy instance and completely ignore all country laws in favor of complete and absolute freedom of speech.
It might sound extreme, but pretty sure at this point I’d be willing to die for it given the state of global politics.
Sorry, man. I don’t think Kiddie Pornhub is a good idea.
Who the fuck said anything about porn of any kind? People always use protecting kids as a way to censor the Internet and it’s almost always in bad faith.
You did.
completely ignore all country laws in favor of complete and absolute freedom of speech.
If you didn’t realize what you said, hopefully you’ll rethink your goals to include the obvious end results. I suppose you could disallow images of you’re not serious about “complete freedom”, then you just have NeoNazis instead of pedophiles.
Your comment is so mired in ignorance, to think you would oppose free speech over how it would be abused and ignore the net positive is exactly how we’re losing freedoms each and every day.
People like you are ruining the world while telling people you’re fixing it.
When someone says they want to create a haven for NeoNazis and pedophiles, I just want to check in and see if they’ve thought things through. It’s hilarious how you’re calling me names for pointing out the obious problem instead of trying to come up with any way to mitigate the harm.
I don’t think you’ll be doing enough good to make a net positive from your child pornography and Nazi haven. Have fun though.
You are the only one talking about Nazis and Porn. Your argument reeks of strawman, attacking the concept for something it isn’t even.
You know who it does protect? Minorities, freedom fighters, people trying to get in and out of bad situations with fascist governments and restrictions on what they can say and who they can speak out against.
People like you, you specifically, you are exactly the problem.
https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3lmvrdmkdnc2d
Censorship requests from the Turkish government are only being applied in the official bluesky app. Third-party apps continue to show censored posts. Feels like that might be relevant
Did anyone actually expect Bluesky to be different to any other corporate-run social media platform? What was the point of jumping from one to another?
Just more proof that FOSS and proper decentralisation (yes I know that Bluesky is technically federated but this halfway house shit they’re doing is not proper decentralisation) that are the only things that will save us.
Well, I listened to an interview with the CEO of Bluesky. The thing of it is, they bought into the idea of creating a social media communication protocol instead of a website, like there’s all these different email protocols, and you can access all your emails across different protocols regardless of what email service you use. Facebook doesn’t have that. I leave Facebook, I lose access to all of the contacts I’ve made over the years. I can’t migrate my friends list to another service. I’d have to do it the old-fashioned way, where I tell people I plan to delete my account and then tell them how they can get a hold of me.
Right, but ActivityPub was right there. The AT Protocol is an open standard, but in its current form it effectively turns Bluesky’s nodes into gatekeepers for the rest of the network. If you want to talk about Meta platforms, even Threads implements ActivityPub.
If only there was a decentralised alternative, that was more or less immune to this… LOL
I’m afraid a federated micro-blogging website using ActivityPub doesn’t/can’t exist ;_;
/s?
There’s Mastodon and a ton of others.
I don’t know why people don’t mention Pleroma/Akkoma ?
“Why doesn’t anyone ever mention Grungus/Flible?”
How do people keep up with all this shit?
We have a list
I’ve heard people complain a lot about its resource usage on the server side, that the advantages of it running on elixir are moot unless the instance has over 1k people. The web UI leaves a lot to be desired, true, but at least it’s not such a client-side resource hog/browser crasher as misskey/sharkey
How would decentralized alternatives be immune to this?
Bluesky doesn’t work if the IP gets blocked in Turkey, but with Mastodon, you would have to ban every single IP from every Mastodon instance and potentially all other IPs on the Fediverse.
Let’s say Turkey blocks mastodon.social. Now people in Turkey can’t access Mastodon.social under normal circumstances, but they can still access fosstodon.org, mstdn.social etc. and access the content from Mastodon.social through those other sites.
Only issue could be media uploaded to Mastodon.social, that’s blocked, unless it has been cached by the website you use.
Thought this way yes.
I misread and saw that it was some kind of DMCA, and an instance owner would probably not want to play around with that. Not respecting local laws on specific things is not likely to have serious repercussions
It’s pretty trivial for them to block all major instances though, or even all instances federated with all major instances
That would just be an endless game of whack-a-mole given just how many instances there are, and how easy it is to just set up another instance immediately.
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Watching how quickly all these companies crumble, it really is astonishing the Obama and Clinton didn’t take on Fox News for all it’s bullshit.
Corpos aren’t afraid of the Democrats. They own them.
Empowered career democrats don’t care. They are complicit with the schemes.
Obama called out Fox News before, I remember something like all the other news organizations backed Fox News. They claimed an attack on any one of them was an attack of all of them or something.
Is Bluesky the next X ??? Kissing the ring of authoritarian leaders?
Remove one Turk from the service or remove the entire service from Turkey?
Essentially the question Bluesky executives had to make here.
This seems like a good place to put this meme I made a couple months ago
Because they are a company and a board of ethical leaders to ensure it doesn’t turn to shit is no guarantee it doesn’t turn to shit. BlueSky is something a corporate mindset person creates because that’s the only thing they know. Have a problem to solve? Needs company + board.
