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?
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 :\
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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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 can’t believe it! Someone who chose to use a centralized platform instead of Nostr was banned?! It’s so shocking!
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.
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.
This seems like a good place to put this meme I made a couple months ago
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.
For some reason people expect things from Bluesky but people forget Bluesky is basicly just new Twitter. There’s really no reason to expect “better” from this new platform.
What’s the point of Bluesky if they’re just going to bow before authoritarianism?
Its a vc funded for profit. They have no choice.
This has been a major red flag that everyone on bsky is just ignoring.
Is anyone surprised?
That didn’t take long
Clear from the beginning.
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.
So back to Mastadon then. I was not using BSKY much anyway to be fair.
What the fuck? Is bsky hosted there? Why do they fucking care?
If I understand this correctly, then this restriction only applies to Turkey. Which is exactly what you’d expect. If you violate local laws, then there are local restrictions. On a global level, everyone else can still interact with you.
Have I understood this correctly?
Funny. Thats what the turks voted for.
But thats none of my business.
