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.
@boramalper What a surprise. /s
Don’t bet on shitty protocolos backed by corpos, does not end well.
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.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
What the fuck? Is bsky hosted there? Why do they fucking care?
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
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).
This is easily solved with the god damn onion address support which is in lemmys own documents.
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
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.
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.
You get it, they’ll just do what they did with torrents and p2p networks. /s
Despite the failures (or needs-of-improvement) of the current federation model, it is absolutely safe against that. Federation is copies, not links.
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 hope those downvotes were not from here.
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.
So, just like Twitter, then? When the official servers don’t show whatever the government tells them not to show?
Yup
I know it sounds insane but I swear to god BlueSky has astroturfing accounts on Lemmy. Every conversation (including yours here) about BlueSky is met with countless Sealions either saying it “will be federated soon” or asking “Why does federation matter?”
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
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?
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.
Based on the comments, I’m not so sure. Louder for those in the back.
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
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.
Can Turkey ask for any account/post to be banned regardless of where a post was written? For example, if I were to register than and called Erdogan a dictator who suppresses the Turks by breaking down the media and justice system and 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.
And now you know why corporations and politicians don’t use mastodon
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.
Because they are a company and a board of ethical leaders to ensure it doesn’t turn to shit is no guarantee it doesn’t turn to shit. BlueSky is something a corporate mindset person creates because that’s the only thing they know. Have a problem to solve? Needs company + board.
BSKY is full of cam girls. I started getting random follows from people with no posts, and nothing on their profiles except links to the pages where they sell videos of themselves. Went straight to mastadon.
How much you wanna bet the trump regime will force them to start removing people too ?
The odds are 1000:0 that they won’t, and I still wouldn’t take that bet.
So now we’ll have a whole plethora of social networks for everyone to isolate into their own bubbles essentially because our global leadership is comprised of children who can’t play nicely with each other. Sounds good, sign me up for TurkmeniNet.
