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.
pardon my ignorance, but how is a de-centralized and de-federated online community bound to such annoyances?
They’re still a corporate entity, and they still want access to markets to make money.
i think i’m conflating lemmy with bluesky. can’t anyone just host an instance? is it open-source? sorry, i should probably just look into this myself.
I think Mastodon is closer to Lemmy as a Twitter alternative over Bluesky.
However, this does a good job explaining the differences:
https://socialbee.com/blog/mastodon-vs-bluesky/
thanks - you’ve got it. i forgot about mastadon. ironic, really, since it’s the resource that everyone will be scrambling for in a few days. mark my words: something horrible is going to happen this weekend, and it will change your life forever.
What makes you think that? Genuinely curious.
someone cited a snopes article, and i don’t think that’s what i’m talking about.
april 20 (or thereabouts) has been a pretty infamous date in american terror.
everyone else is talking about it like the government is going to do something. i’m saying the other. or at least it’ll look that way.
i’m just some asshole on the internet. i’m just taking all the time i’ve lived and all the things i’ve seen, and i’m projecting them forward to the weekend. and your lucky numbers are 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42
Godamnit those are all 6 of my lucky numbers
We have to go back!!!
Not really much “American terror” on 4-20 except for the columbine massacre.
Don’t forget the terrible munchies many Americans are about to get.
just off the top of my head:
deleted by creator
Probably referring to this, but don’t know for sure:
https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/04/09/trump-martial-law-insurrection-act/
Interesting, April 20 is also Hitlers birthday so it has symbolic significance to all the neo nazis.
It’s also Easter this year. I’m picturing a stoned Hitler with bunny ears.
Perhaps it would be interesting to chat April 21
we shall meet again under trump’s new “marshall law”
Bluesky claims to support federation while being designed to make it entirely impractical and is currently entirely centralized.
My understanding is that it is technically a “federated” standard, but I think there is a lot of technical hurdles to implementing and hosting a compatible server. So no one actually does it, and I’m not sure they’d federate even if someone went through the trouble of getting it up and running.
someone else said something that made me think i’m conflating Bluesky with Mastadon. and apparently “conflating” is my word of the day.
hell yeah i love learning new words
i learned it a while ago, but i just can’t stop saying it today.
For those who don’t know, Bluesky isn’t really federated. The only way to host a non-Bluesky instance required 1TB of storage in July 2024, and 5 TB of storage in Nov 2024. Could be way more than that now.
You basically have to be a company to federate into the ATProto (Bluesky) ecosystem. You can’t just “stand up an instance”.
Lots of detail: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
(I know you’ve already realized that you were conflating Mastodon with Bluesky, I’m putting this here for others who come along so they can get the facts).
Also DMs always go through Bluesky themselves.
yeah the DM system is something completely exclusive to their official servers and that they just rolled up without caring at all about trying to keep up the pretense of wanting to build something decentralized.
They’re planning on migrating to the new MLS group messaging encryption standard, which is built to support federated messaging encryption (more efficient than the current Matrix protocol)
(also, Matrix are also planning on adopting it, and the RCS spec is getting it too)
It’s long to take a while though. The standard is very recent and nobody has a complete implementation yet.
That’s not an outlandish amount of storage. You can get more than that for $200.
At the rate it’s growing, it’s going to get outlandish very quickly.
It’s not an outlandish amount, but for instance I have my own VPS where I host a variety of services, and it still has under 1TB storage. Most hobbyists who rent a VPS would have less storage than that.
Yeah anyone who runs a node is laughing at those numbers
My Jellyfin server is 6 times that… And my gaming PC is double that… Seriously, this person thinks 5TB is a lot? Don’t we have SD Cards/Flash Drives this big now? I’d be WAY more concerned about the bandwidth requirements.
Edit: laughing my ass off at the downvotes. Yes, my server has 30TB. Yes my PC has around 12TB. It wasn’t expensive or hard. The hard drives in my Jellyfin are NAS drives… Bunch of people acting like you need quantum computers to run a node lmfao. Storage space is easy. It’s the networking and bandwidth part that’s hard. So yeah, complaining that 5TB of storage puts it out of reach of the average person when one 12tb NAS drive cost $200? Just bitching. Plain and simple.
its still not a small amount of storage. and no, there’s still not really sd cards or flash drives bigger than 1tb, but obviously even if there were and they were super cheap, that would still never suffice as server storage. plus, if you’re hosting a node you’d want at least 4 or 5 times that storage to use a raid 5 or 6 array + at least one onsite backup, and one off-site backup.
now we’re talking thousands of dollars in equipment just for storage, not the actual server itself, internet connection, etc.
You literally just described my Jellyfin, minus the raid because I don’t feel like setting it up. Think all in all I’m down about $1200 for it. Not thousands. You do realized a 12TB NAS drive is $200, right? Only reason my build cost as much is because I have a few 2TB ssds in there which were just leftovers from the PC anyways. I could’ve done it all for $500.
Off-site backup isn’t required. Nice, but not required at all. In the literal sense, you don’t need it. It’s good to have, but an extra.
So yeah, 5TB, literally the only metric I was discussing, isn’t much. Maybe in the future the person should say all the nuance and not “5TB is unreasonable for the average person”. It’s not. Plain and simple.
maybe your hobbiest server doesn’t need a off-site backup but an instance of a massive social media network expected to be used by many users absolutely will. and sorry, but your nas simply will not cut it as far as throughput goes. it’s just not designed for that much activity.
You keep missing the point so hard I think it’s intentional.
First off, necessary and recommended are two very different things. 4chan running for the last decade on outdated software with no backups is proof that you absolutely can run things without a backup. It’s not wise, but not REQUIRED.
Secondly, OP was up there acting like 5Tb is prohibitively expensive and is gonna keep instances from being made. As me and other hobbyist have pointed out, 5tb is a joke. Those of us running little bullshit servers have WAY more. So asking someone trying to set up a social media server to have 5TB is nothing. If that seems like a lot to you, then you shouldn’t even try because it’s clearly way beyond your depth.
your home computers would probably not have the reliability or the disk performance required to run it.
it keeps constantly growing by terabytes and needs to be fast too though. Means you’re going to pay more than most private individuals are able to long-term just for the privilege of running that one component.
That’s just if you want a complete copy. You can choose to store only parts of it, and retrieve what’s missing from other relay servers when you need it.
seems to be a fairly recent development that isn’t really documented much for now (not that running relays and some other components of the network is that well documented in general). Of course doing it that way also doesn’t help with how centralized the whole thing is…
It’s always been possible with the use of content addressing, it’s just that they’ve been spending most time building out core services and are now focusing on making it cheaper to run.
Yeah, one of my main gripes with them is how much they talk about decentralization and how much it stays as vaporware while they focus on the more pressing issue of the moment.
That’s only if you want to maintain a full archive. You don’t actually have to store a full archive to run a relay
source for that?
https://bsky.app/profile/bnewbold.net/post/3lkpdjgj5pk2i
That doesn’t sound cheap though and it would become more expensive over time, right?
Those specs can be handled by a medium range laptop
A medium ranged laptop can be rather expensive and how would you deal with upgrades or a dead drive?
@egerlach @toy_boat_toy_boat Yeah, ATProto is a joke and it is surprising how many computer-toucher folks have fallen for it.
You’re right that Bluesky isn’t federated, but it most definitely is centralized.
The answer it’s, they’re neither thing right now. And the claim has been made that in order to run your own instance that forwarded all traffic generated by the primary instance, you would need equivalent hardware to what BlueSky currently has. Vs Mastdon, which is…
interesting! so i’m probably conflating my expectations for bluesky with lemmy, when all the while i should actually be on mastadon. i was starting to wonder if bluesky was just a new us dem party project :\
Calling it not federated is silly. It’s not like-for-like federated like Mastodon where you have a single server doing all roles, federating to other servers of the same role.
Instead it’s cross-layer federation. You can use any app, talk to any appview, use feeds hosted by anybody, use moderation services hosted by anybody, host your account on any PDS service including self hosting, and any appview can talk to any relay. It’s fully mix-and-match.
Two people on entirely disparate sets of servers & services using atproto can talk to each other as long as their appviews/relays mutually retrieve content from the other.
That’s federation.
Are you saying that some functionality is not federated but some functionality is?
I suppose my main problem is lack of meaningful decentralization. I prefer to use networks that allow me to contact people using a local public Wi-Fi service or someone’s home internet connection, and I believe it would be expensive or impossible to do that using ATProto without depending on infrastructure maintained by Bluesky.
Bluesky is federated in terms of that you can swap out arbitrary components and let anything talk to anything. Any app can talk to any appview, that appview can talk to any feed generator and moderation labeler for you, all three of these can talk to any (and multiple!) relays, etc.
This isn’t 1:1 federation, there’s no reason for one feed generator to talk to another, no reason for an appview to talk to another, no reason for two PDS account hosts to talk. Users on different appviews rely on their respective appviews having at least one shared relay to be able to see each other, and that relay can be swapped out. Every other component look at trusted moderation labelers for flagging content and takedowns - and they all choose independently who they trust. Every PDS just wants to talk to one or more relays to make their users’ posts visible.
So you can have a pair of users on the exact same set of infrastructure (most regular bluesky users), but you could also have 2 users sharing nothing but the bluesky relay (or another relay) and still talking to each other.
Since it very heavily relies on domains for readable addresses (using a DID directly is possible but annoying) it’s kinda hard to use in isolated physical networks. Technically you could make an app host its user’s repository and hold a copy of the signing key and publish it locally, but you’d lose a lot of thread visibility unless the app archives everything to republish. Or else you can have a separate offline only lexicon for posting locally, I guess, imitating scuttlebutt.
This affects the view of posts via the bluesky servers, but not via mirrors or other servers
And the use of content addressing means you can be sure it hasn’t been modified
Wouldn’t your “home” server in an activity pub network always be subject to such requests?
The difference is that if your home server is outside of Turkey then you can tell them to kick rocks. Bluesky probably complies because they don’t want to be blocked from Turkey. In a truly decentralized system like activitypub, only the server hosting the account / content in question risks being blocked, which means almost nothing the closer you get to a single account instance. Meanwhile every other server not in Turkey would not notice a difference.
Edit: this was under the assumption that they took it down completely, but it looks like they only geofenced it. Regardless, if they are pressured enough they would be capable of completing hiding an account worldwide, which isn’t possible with activitypub without the legal alignment of every instance’s country since bluesky on the other hand has sole control of the only relay.
I’m not an expert on how activity pub works, but… You’re saying if I had an account on mastodon.social, and if mastodon.social took down a post from my @user@mastodon.social account that, regardless of takedown reason, it would still be visible from other instances?
I’m trying to understand precisely where the resiliency lies.
I’m saying that if your home server (mastodon.social in your example) is outside of Turkey, then there is less reason for them to comply in the first place because they only risk the mastodon.social server being blocked in Turkey. That one is a bad example because they’re one of the largest and they might have a bunch of users in Turkey, so if you want to be extra safe, you’d want to pick a server that isn’t so big so that they are less likely to care about complying with some other county that they might not have any users from.
If the server you use is based inside the country that has a problem with your content, then you’d be screwed - though all the other servers will still mirror and cache your content for a bit even if you get taken down.
The resiliency lies in the fact that you can choose to register in a country that is politically friendly towards your posts or if your home country is friendly but you want to avoid being taken down, you can self host a single user instance and refuse any requests from other countries.
Edit: Now that I think about it, there’s also the fact that as long as the account itself isn’t limited by their home server, the content in question would be accessible through the federated copies, so if the home server isn’t within Turkey / jurisdiction and doesn’t take down the account, the country trying to take down the content would need to send takedown requests or request to geofence the content to each individual server on the entire fediverse - since the home server would be freely federating it to every server with users who follow the content, otherwise they would need to block every fediverse server and every new one every day that more pop up.
deleted by creator
But don’t all other servers host copies of it? So if a server is hosted in Turkey then they could tell that server to block access to that content a least from Turkey or not?
The other servers do cache the content for some time yes, but if your server is based in a country not friendly to your posts then you are vulnerable to takedowns as you say and you could be inconvenienced by having the admins of your server delete your account or something.
The benefit I’m saying we have in the fediverse is that you can pick a server in a politically safe area (ie outside Turkey in this case), so they are less likely to comply, especially if they are small or don’t care about being blocked by that country (that’s usually the only thing they can do unless you have an office or staff there that can be arrested - less likely to be the case if your server is run by some dude in another country).