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’m not even surprised lol. Just another reason why communities like Lemmy and forums are better than any social media platform. Man I hope the Fediverse keeps growing, the more people that see through this bs and jump ship and find us over here in the Fediverse the better.
i don’t get why this is shocking; if you do business in a country you have to follow local laws.
Is Bluesky the next X ??? Kissing the ring of authoritarian leaders?
And now you know why corporations and politicians don’t use mastodon
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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
Funny as I got downvoted to oblivion for saying Bluesky was not really decentralized.
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
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.
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).
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.
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 hope those downvotes were not from here.
deleted by creator
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
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.
Can Turkey ask for any account/post to be banned regardless of where a post was written? For example, if I were to register there and called Erdogan a dictator who suppresses the Turks by breaking down the media and justice system and he is taking political prisoners; could he then ask BlueSky to get my account removed because i’m breaking a law in Turkey even though I am not in Turkey? That sounds totally crazy. Like from now on you can make laws on your citizens, your lands and all of the internet? What the fu. e: typo
This seems like a good place to put this meme I made a couple months ago
What the fuck? Is bsky hosted there? Why do they fucking care?
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.
It’s old internet sarcasm, I seent it many times in my life. Yeah, pretty sure it was harmless satire :) the emoticon at the end is a dead giveaway maybe—that there looks like a millennial or zillenial calling card
Damn…I’ve been discovered
I’m just used to the “/s” for when something is written sarcastically.
Fun fact, we didn’t use to need that. Which is why millennials typically don’t use /s outside Reddit. 90’s and early 2000s forum culture required everyone to use common sense, a concept now entirely ethereal to zoomers. Back in my day…
Yeah that’s new 2014+ Reddit technology, back in the early days of the internet sarcasm was a lot harder to detect and you were expected to figure it out with context haha
lots of us don’t know people expect /s and still try to be sarcastic without /s
instead we used clues like emojis to denote it’s not serious like “lol” or “haha” when it’s sarcastic and funny or ;-; or T-T when it’s sarcasm and expressing frustration
I will be dead in the cold cold ground before I ever type “/s”
Same, but I feel like a steward of the web, I’ve been using it for so long lol
You don’t need to explain, they are clearly retarded. Literally made a sarcastic joke without using /s, then got confused because an obviously sarcastic reply that was riffing off their joke didn’t use /s.
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.
deleted by creator
