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.
And now you know why corporations and politicians don’t use mastodon
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.
Well it is fundamentally better because it does not only have a single party that makes all the calls thanks to the real decentralization. I wouldn’t call all of fediverse “the good guys” but I would call it “good”.
Sure. It’s like comparing having one tyrant, which can be good or bad (but at least isn’t going anywhere) vs a lot of tyrants whose power is limited to their little area, and who will come and go. I guess that’s better, but I don’t think anyone would say it’s “good,” just a bit better.
I like the Fediverse, I just think it only went halfway to solving the problem.
Do you have a proposal for how you’d solve the other half then or just think it isn’t enough?
Yeah, I’m working on something that I think should improve on things, but I keep bringing it up in the hopes that someone beats me to it. Here are some notes:
- P2P network based on something like IPFS or Iroh (I picked Iroh)
- a “community” is a distributed hash table, with posts, comments, etc as structured keys
- everything is cryptographically signed by the author, so you can check for tampering (built-in feature of Iroh)
- moderation is also distributed, based on “trust”; everyone is a moderator, and you “trust” others’ moderation either explicitly or by happening to moderate similarly; options are “like,” “dislike,” “relevant,” “report” (spam, CSAM, etc)
- everyone contributes a little storage to the network, and you can adjust your storage quota
Some interesting side effects of this design:
- single namespace - no “instances” since hosting is distributed (so just “Technology” instead of “Technology@lemmy.world”)
- everyone will see a different feed due to differences in moderation choices
- no concept of “all” since you wouldn’t sync communities you don’t care about - I would add a discovery mechanism to help here
- could be “sneakernetted” if countries block this service, provided you have a way to discover other users in each closed region
- nobody can censor you since moderation is opt-in, so I literally cannot respond to takedown requests by governments
- there’s a very real risk of echo chambers, but that’s on the user not centralized mods
When launching, I’d have a default set of mods that automatically “block” things like CSAM, but users can choose to remove those and/or adjust weights. The idea is for moderation to be transparent, but also something users aren’t expected to change.
The only hosting needs would be:
- relay servers to connect people - relay servers would be federated and incredibly lightweight
- storage instances - only needed in the early days until enough people join the network
- website for documentation and whatnot
It’s very early days (still working on the P2P part, but have a POC for the moderation algorithm). I’ll probably post once I feel like it’s actually useful, which won’t be for a while.
Sounds like you’re mistaking filters for moderation.
They’re essentially the same thing no? The main difference is in how they’re applied:
- filter - selected by the user, may change multiple times in a given session (hashtags, title text, etc)
- moderation - set by others or through moderation interaction, won’t likely change in a given session
With Reddit/Lemmy, moderators are chosen by other moderators/admins, or are the people who create the community. It’s arbitrary and frequently leads to people mass-leaving the community if the moderation is poor. Other social media sites are moderated by algorithms or employees, which can also lead to people mass-leaving if the moderation is poor.
This approach preserves the distinction, but leaves the control in the hands of the user. If moderation is poor, it’s something you can fix using features like:
- moderation review - look at stuff that’s hidden, which impacts future moderation (with filters to show/hide based on confidence)
- view/tweak moderation numbers - select from moderation “styles” (i.e. disregard votes, prefer votes, strict/loose, etc), or set coefficients yourself (advanced, would have a warning)
Hopefully that’s an improvement. Maybe it’s not, idk, but I like the idea of removing centralized moderation.
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.
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.
But but but… Bluesky pwomised they would join the fediverse someday! A super duper pinky pwomise!
When did they do that?
Funny as I got downvoted to oblivion for saying Bluesky was not really decentralized.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Whether anything about it is for a good reason is very much a contested point. There are significant issues they introduced with the design while trying to address some that exist in ActivityPub.
its just a clone of early twitter, basically.
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.
Where is bluesky based? As far as I know you have to follow the laws of where you are based. Otherwisse we’d have to follow the lowest common denominator, like north korea, or afghanistan or the like
it doesn’t matter where you’re based; if you’re operating in a country, you follow the laws of that country.
Or you play a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities in that country as they try to block access to your servers. Depending on your moral values this might be preferable to blindly following the laws of authoritarian regimes.
It’s really the country you’re based in that matters the most.
It doesn’t matter all that much, if your service can be accessed in a country, you have to bend to their rules, or get blocked, and Turkish users will no longer be able to access Bluesky.
If you want your site reachable that’s fine, but if you want to operate as a legal business with a local operation and all that entails, you need to follow local laws.
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:
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
Not really much “American terror” on 4-20 except for the columbine massacre.
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.
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.
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?
10 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD
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…
- not commercially owned
- has a proven federation capability
- Running a pretty large number of instances right now
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.
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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).
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.
Very much same
I feel like this is probably the biggest problem with mastodon after the on-boarding. Not only does someone actually need to understand instances and put in more effort to sign up, when they do there’s like absolutely no good way to find new stuff, it’s all just basically random
I understand the “no algorithm” stance on things but jesus would it be too much to let me sort by top of the day? I want to see what people are talking about, what’s going on, not just what ever happened to be posted in the latest minute.
This is a problem I have with a bunch of other fediverse app (Pixelfed & Loops primarily) and it seriously bothers me that there isn’t any real option to sort anything except reverse chronologically, and the ability to do so is the only reason I keep coming back to Lemmy over all of the rest of fediverse fr
Same experience
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.
As a mastodon server operator you have my word that I will wipe my ass with any takedown requests from the Turkish government, and encourage any Turkish users to get a fucking VPN.
We will see, lol.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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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I can’t believe it! Someone who chose to use a centralized platform instead of Nostr was banned?! It’s so shocking!
Who could’ve ever predicted this?!?
I will share the same shock the day I see that 16 out of 15 posts on Nostr are not related to Bitcoin or using Nostr.
I wish the tooling around Secure Scuttlebutt wasn’t so annoying to use, more attention might have had some of the rough edges filed off.
On one hand you can have an offline first replication method (Phones syncing messages over bluetooth, etc.), but then you can’t post from multiple devices without moving your account between them.
Oh, so NOSTR is not hated here anymore. Good Anakin good.
Seriously, an amazingly successful platform.
People always want to try subtler and subtler tech, and NOSTR’s dumb architecture with relays is something that could only be conceived by people not that fond of tech brilliance. And that’s good and right! And if those people are cryptobros, then so be it, they found the right way and this is what matters.
They had a task one can’t solve with classic P2P, because mobile devices and energy consumption and uptime. They solved it the old-fashioned way which is still right, kinda like Usenet, except reducing news servers to asynchronous relays.
NOSTR already has some standard extensions for moderated communities, I’m just not sure if there are any clients supporting that.
