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.
I’ve been on the fence about joining Bluesky but I think I am not going to bother.
Funny as I got downvoted to oblivion for saying Bluesky was not really decentralized.
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
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?”
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.
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
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 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.
So, just like Twitter, then? When the official servers don’t show whatever the government tells them not to show?
Yup
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 hope those downvotes were not from here.
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
Despite the failures (or needs-of-improvement) of the current federation model, it is absolutely safe against that. Federation is copies, not links.
lol how is capitulation the answer to authoritarianism but decentralization isn’t? I feel like I’m missing something from your arguments because it just seems circular and all the while condemning the very infrastructure you’re currently using on Lemmy (with obvious benefits) over centralized social-media.
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
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.
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.
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).
The site/system made by the guy who enabled Trump and Neo-Nazis to be platformed is bowing down to authoritarians? I’m shocked, shocked to find out that the rich person obeys the other rich people!
Jack Dorsey only provided funding to bluesky while the old plan to make Twitter run on an open protocol was still in place (ironically he wanted to avoid responsibility for moderation by doing that).
He then left Bluesky completely, and never had any major influence after the initial funding.
He also said bluesky’s shift toward a traditional corporate structure and the introduction of centralized moderation tools were major factors behind his leaving the company, and he vouched for alternatives like nostr.
It seems a bit more challenging to pull shit like this on nostr.
Yeah, any business would have to either accept this request or leave the market. Jack Dorsey has no relation to that.
Well as a company bluesky, would need to abide by the laws of where it is offering it’s services.
They can’t just ignore the request of the country’s government. They could either challenge it in court or stop offering their services altogether.
They’re based in the United States.
Yes but they need to obey Turkish law if they want to offer their services there. Like how US websites have to show a “cookies” disclaimer within the EU due to EU privacy laws.
Funny. Thats what the turks voted for.
But thats none of my business.
No, you can’t go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Considering you say that I don’t think you’re up to date as to how voting ‘works’ in Turkey nowadays.
Yeah, it was widely reported on. Religious people voted for religious nutcase. Tale as old as time.
I know that old tale, bunch of religious people voting for the religious nutcase but when you say ‘the turks’ you imply it’s at least the majority of people but that’s not the case here. Don’t put the blame on the people, if they haven’t been given the chance to vote for their leader in fair and free elections.
That didn’t take long
Clear from the beginning.
How could they follow the pied piper rasputin a SECOND TIME??? There’s a saying in Texas, maybe it’s in Tennessee, fool me once shame, shame on you, fool me twice eh… Can’t get fooled again!
God damn it. People on the Turkey subreddit were running a campaign to move from X to Bluesky because X was honoring the requests of the Turkish Government to take down footage of police brutality and shit.
I and many others have told people to NOT go to Bluesky because it was “owned” by Jack Dorsey and could get bad as Twitter did.
Of course, absolutely nobody listened. Some celebrities also even moved to Bluesky (including the comedian and actor Cem Yılmaz, one of the most known amongst the people. Basically the Jim Carrey of Turkey.) And now THIS happens. Bravo.
I remember seeing some telling others to use OperaGX because a Turkish PARODY ACCOUNT of the official X account posted a meme that supports the protests. I said it’s stupid to support OperaGX because of who is behind it and one of them had the balls to say “Bruh like a browser changes anything your info is everywhere”
So mind boggling.
Governments are more powerful than companies, if there is resistance it is because the government does not have all the power and if there is no resistance it is because the government has all the power
I wouldn’t be surprised if he held some share of it but Dorsey probably doesn’t have much to do with Bluesky anymore, at least in an official capacity. The more salient point is about not really trusting any single party that asserts centralized control over a platform.
People on the Turkey subreddit were running a campaign to move from X to Bluesky
I see so much astroturfing for Bluesky. They have good PR people who know what buttons to push, clearly.
Ya, the marketing blitz here and on Reddit was nuts. Thankfully the PR-bullshit has calmed down some.
I am functionally a pr dude for atproto (bluesky) on here because people repeat so much disinfo, and I have “someone is wrong on the internet syndrome” 😭
However, atproto and bluesky are still distinct and I am pretty appalled at a fair amount of bluesky’s recent decisions, esp this one
My experience as a person who has a lot of experience working with computer is basically thus:
When you solve a problem for someone, you are a magician.
When you can’t, you are completely full of shit and know nothing about tech and your entire life is a lie.
When you tell someone ‘hey I wouldn’t do that’, your experience and expertise means nothing if what you are suggesting would mildly inconvenience them for 10 minutes, or takes more than 30 seconds to explain why it is a bad idea.
When you tell them ‘hey have you tried this?’ your experience and expertise also means nothing if you cannot do it for them and also make it so it never breaks again, and also they will keep doing the thing that makes it break even though you explained to them how to not do that thing that makes it break.
… I may as well just start an IT flavored Rodney Dangerfield comedy routine, it would be much more fun and less stressful than always being a db admin/data analyst/backend dev/frontend dev/whatever else my job title now apparently includes.
And so it begins
everything dies
Usually not that fast.
Is anyone surprised?
Yeah there’s that one guy that appears in every thread about bluesky saying that it really is an open and decentralised protocol even if only one corporation uses it in a centralised way.
Fake Fediverse is fake.
Fuck Turkey and fuck however they want it spelt.
Jack Dorsey earning those libertarian bona fides.
What the fuck? Is bsky hosted there? Why do they fucking care?
And now you know why corporations and politicians don’t use mastodon
Just yesterday I saw a post on lemmy that said that turkish xitter users were migrating to bluesky. Didn’t bother opening to see the comments or read it. Seeing this now, all I can think is “well, what did they expect?”
