Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3lmuz3nr62k26
Email from Bluesky in the screenshot:
Hi there,
We are writing to inform you that we have received a formal request from a legal authority in Turkey regarding the removal of your account associated with the following handle (@carekavga.bsky.social) on Bluesky.
The legal authority has claimed that this content violates local laws in Turkey. As a result, we are required to review the request in accordance with local regulations and Bluesky’s policies.
Following a thorough review, we have determined that the content in question violates local laws in Turkey, as outlined in the legal request. In compliance with these legal provisions, we have restricted access to your account for users.
pardon my ignorance, but how is a de-centralized and de-federated online community bound to such annoyances?
They’re still a corporate entity, and they still want access to markets to make money.
i think i’m conflating lemmy with bluesky. can’t anyone just host an instance? is it open-source? sorry, i should probably just look into this myself.
I think Mastodon is closer to Lemmy as a Twitter alternative over Bluesky.
However, this does a good job explaining the differences:
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.
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.
Claims of Bsky’s federatedness and decentralizedness were greatly exaggerated.
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.
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.
Why rent? If you have fiber and aren’t behind CGNAT you can host from your home
I rent because of government surveillance; I want my server in a different country.
So rent a budget VPS and tunnel your home server through it?
I mean it also means I inherently have an off-site backup, which is important given that my home occasionally gets raided by the police. I’m not worried about data access since I use FDE on everything, but data loss is a real concern.
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.
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.
there’s still not really sd cards or flash drives bigger than 1tb
There are actually 2tb microSD cards now, and 4tb flash drives
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.
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
Assuming you are serious:
Bluesky is … arguably ‘federated’, but it is centralized, not decentralized.
https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20241128-bluesky-decentralization
Their model (AT Protocol) relies on a central, authoritative … ‘Relay’, that all ‘federated’ users and posts on federated PDS (personal data servers) must go through, to actually reach the ‘AppView’, ie, what all other people/users can actually see.
So, this is not a many to many, tangled spider web of connections, the way lemmy, and other parts of the actual fediverse are.
It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.
And Bluesky runs the Relay, the chokepoint.
If Bluesky cuts off the PDS your account is on, everyone on it is now gone.
The actual fediverse, Mastadon, Lemmy, etc, runs on ActivityPub.
In that model… every instance is essentially self contained, and every instance that is federated communicates with every other instance that is federated.
Each instance can decide what other instances they want to federate with… and users on each instance can personally block even more other users, communities, or entire instances if they choose to, but that only effects what that particular user sees.
That is what you call decentralized, approaching, or also having elements of being ‘distributed’.
To bring up an example without getting into the drama that led to it:
The ‘Tankie Triad’ of ml, lemmygrad and hexbear have had a number of other instances defederate from them.
But, there are also a good number of instances that have not done so.
So that means if your account is on hexbear… you can’t see or post on an instamce that has blocked your instance.
But, if you (a hexbear…ian?), post on a neutral instance… users on that neutral instance will see the post.
But but, if a user from an instance that has defederated from hexbear goes to to the neutral instance… they will not see the hexbearian’s post.
This sounds complicated, and it is, but … thats the whole point of a decentralized system. It is more complex in the abstract… but the entire system ends up being more robust, more adaptable, more customizable… without a central authority in direct control of the entire system.
So the decentralized version makes sense to me. The blue sky model you describe sounds like just farming out the server load. What am I missing?
That is literally how I read it as well, BlueSky is farming out server load to enthusiastic and dedicated users, while also just going ham on the PR / propoganda / marketing making themselves appear to be something they are not.
Unless I missed something and BlueSky is actually letting people run and custom configure their own relays at least semi independently… yeah, they’re basically being quite shady and misleading.
People are allowed to run their own relays, but it’s really expensive and nobody wants to.
That there are actually multiple relays. There’s no hard coded single relay, that would be ridiculous and idk why people keep repeating it
There is a hard coded relay in the official bluesky app, just like it has a hard coded moderation service. But both of those are changeable with third party appviews/clients
I was oversimplifying a bit such that it wouldn’t be overwhelming to a self-described uninformed person asking for an explanation.
Yes, there are multiple actual relays but they functionally constitute a single layer or class of components in a birds eye view of the whole system.
As far as I am aware, no one other than BlueSky runs the relays, or has the code to do so.
If I am wrong about that, I would appreciate a source indicating such.
Does anyone other than BlueSky actually run a relay?
Several people have self hosted relays. Afaik nothing that anyone has used in “production”, everyone just uses the default one. I expect that will change as people figure it out, and trust in bsky pbc drops with things like the current Turkish censorship incident
Example of self hosting https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3lkwg2djrfk23
The code to run a relay is here https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo
It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.
It’s not a pyramid, it’s a reverse funnel system.
Like a toilet bowl, mounted to the ceiling.
What is the advantage of Bluesky’s model over Xitter? Are they just outsourcing servers while still holding censorship and manipulation power?
As I see it the only advantage is that it is not run by Elon Musk.
And by ‘advantage’ I mean the ‘advantage’ of using a corporate product that, so far, is doing its best to drive people away from an actually censorship resistant Fediverse, using inclusive rainbow capitalist language to lure in the large majority of people who are not tech savvy enough to realize they are basically lying to / misleading them.
Twitter could not be federated, Bluesky could be but only at massive cost, so it probably won’t be
i was asking in good faith, and i can’t thank you enough for providing such a thorough and effective answer.
it almost sounds like bluesky is just a baby twitter in the making, and it’ll probably end up the same way. i’m really digging the actual fediverse thing, mainly because it seems to be one of the only places that money and vc bs hasn’t been able to touch.
This is anarchist propaganda, by the way. Hexbear users (also known as pig poopers to those of us inside the community) know that centralised authority is the only way to run things fairly. Look at what the anarchist Fediverse has done to our movement - dozens of large instances have defederated us pig poopers and our friends in the rest of the Only True Socialist Triad. It’s a disgrace. Our admins are currently in the process of setting up a BlueSky relay on https://pigpoop.balls/
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 :\
You’re right that Bluesky isn’t federated, but it most definitely is centralized.
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.
I’m saying that if your home server (mastodon.social) 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, 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.
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).
How could they follow the pied piper rasputin a SECOND TIME??? There’s a saying in Texas, maybe it’s in Tennessee, fool me once shame, shame on you, fool me twice eh… Can’t get fooled again!
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
My experience as a person who has a lot of experience working with computer is basically thus:
When you solve a problem for someone, you are a magician.
When you can’t, you are completely full of shit and know nothing about tech and your entire life is a lie.
When you tell someone ‘hey I wouldn’t do that’, your experience and expertise means nothing if what you are suggesting would mildly inconvenience them for 10 minutes, or takes more than 30 seconds to explain why it is a bad idea.
When you tell them ‘hey have you tried this?’ your experience and expertise also means nothing if you cannot do it for them and also make it so it never breaks again, and also they will keep doing the thing that makes it break even though you explained to them how to not do that thing that makes it break.
… I may as well just start an IT flavored Rodney Dangerfield comedy routine, it would be much more fun and less stressful than always being a db admin/data analyst/backend dev/frontend dev/whatever else my job title now apparently includes.
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
The relevant question here is if you are in Turkey because if you aren’t this is a much bigger deal than if you are.
Also, does “restricted access to your account for users” mean for all users or just for those in Turkey?
Even if it’s a Turkey-specific restriction for users based in the country, it nonetheless shows that Bluesky is willing to comply with government requests.
Do they have the choice?
Always, if they can deal with the consequences. But if the consequence is being blocked by a country they could make money from, chances are slim.
Let’s imagine BlueSky is absolutely decentralized and does not need to make money, would it have done the same? The answer is unfortunately yes. The other option is to get completely blocked in the country, which after all, does not help.
I’m in favor of decentralization but let’s not pretend that dealing with authorities is not a problem for decentralized services.
The account is still up and viewable for me. US.
But it’s a decentralized service! /s
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’ve been on the fence about joining Bluesky but I think I am not going to bother.
And so it begins
everything dies
Usually not that fast.
What was the post
Probably said something bad about their current dictator.
He isn’t a dictator, he actually survived a military coup, and unlike his nationalist opponents he has welcomed refugees.
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.
As a result, we are required to review the request in accordance with local regulations and Bluesky’s policies.
Why the fuck is BlueSky, an American company, required to comply with Turkish demands…?
They don’t want to get blocked from Turkish market
I guess that’s a good reason.
Hell nah
Because they display (or even host, potentially) content that’s “illegal” in Turkey.
What they should probably be doing is just hiding said content from users in Turkey…and encouraging users in Turkey to use VPNs, lol
Sounds like that is what they’re doing
In compliance with these legal provisions, we have restricted access to your account for [Turkish] users.
They don’t specify though, and it should be at the content level, not the account level
You…just added that in. It didn’t say that.
Because they do business in Türkiye.
Money
deleted by creator
Oh look, once again, I was right.
Be shocked if it wasn’t so common.
How shocking, Mastodon remains the best option
It always was. The “problem” is that there’s not 10% of what you can find on Bluesky (well, at least for my interests), sadly. It’s less worse than say, Peertube vs YouTube but still, last time I tried to dig I didn’t find much. i still use it tho, but I’m following like 3 accounts is a hundred on BS. I’ll try and dig a bit more again today.
A lack of any real recommendations kinda does Mastodon in, in my opinion
Though it’s a great place to follow your favourites from elsewhere, but this will never really lead to it recommending ‘similar’ stuff
Maybe it’s possible to build something like recommendations into Mastodon? I wouldn’t know. Wouldn’t be official though.
Maybe we could have a Lemmy community specifically for this? List out your favourite creators in Mastodon, maybe a few will stick out.
it looks like they are restricted only from turkey. the account in question looks fine from other countries, or through VPN.
So, is your account just restricted in Turkey? Or everywhere, based on local Turkish law?
