Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government

Funny as I got downvoted to oblivion for saying Bluesky was not really decentralized.

I believe there are laws in the EU that would be violated by many rightwing posts (such as glorifying nazis in Germany). The litmus test would be if a complaint about these violations would cause an account to be banned.

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.

Well as a company bluesky, would need to abide by the laws of where it is offering it's services.
They can't just ignore the request of the country's government. They could either challenge it in court or stop offering their services altogether.

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!

That didn't take long
- Clear from the beginning.

Is anyone surprised?

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.

Ahem. Fuck Thanksgiving bird country. That's all.

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?
- There isn’t one as far as I’m concerned. People moved from one corpo social media platform to another corpo social media platform thinking that the person running the former platform was the problem, when the entire model is designed to prioritise profit over human expression.
- Its a vc funded for profit. They have no choice.
  This has been a major red flag that everyone on bsky is just ignoring.
- For a company like blue sky, you bow to all governments, or you bow to none. One way you become so milquetoast nobody wants to use you because nothing interesting is ever said. The other way you become 4chan.

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

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.

I don't get why they listened to the Turkish government. There not (to my understanding) registered there or have any kind of assests there.
- My naive guess is that if the Turkish government ban access to BlueSky for not complying, that cuts into user count and therefore profitability.
- let's hope they stop at that and don't give out their info like yahoo did before for china and other oppressive governments

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?!?
- 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.

What was the post
- Probably said something bad about their current dictator.
  
  Probably, but it could also have been incredibly racist and whats worse.
  This guy really needs to show what he posted. Why hide that.
  
  Or maby he was selling some grass
  
  He isn’t a dictator, he actually survived a military coup, and unlike his nationalist opponents he has welcomed refugees.

I've been on the fence about joining Bluesky but I think I am not going to bother.

pardon my ignorance, but how is a de-centralized and de-federated online community bound to such annoyances?
- You're right that Bluesky isn't federated, but it most definitely is centralized.
- 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.
  
  That Relay chokepoint is a serious architecture flaw, even for the central company running it (Bluesky). They might fix it in the future, but I doubt it's high priority for them.
  In July 2024, running a Relay on ATProto already required 1 terabyte of storage. But more alarmingly, just a four months later in November 2024, running a relay now requires approximately 5 terabytes of storage https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
  The cost of running a full-network, fully archiving relay has increased over time. After recent growth, our out-of-box relay implementation (bigsky) requires on the order of 16 TBytes of fast NVMe disk, and that will grow proportional to content in the network. We have plans and paths forward to reducing costs (including Jetstream and other tooling). https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t
  
  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/
  
  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?
  
  What is the advantage of Bluesky's model over Xitter? Are they just outsourcing servers while still holding censorship and manipulation power?
  
  It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.
  It's not a pyramid, it's a reverse funnel system.
- 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).
  
  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
  
  Also DMs always go through Bluesky themselves.
  
  That’s not an outlandish amount of storage. You can get more than that for $200.
- 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.
- Bluesky and ATProto are not meaningfully decentralized, and are not federated either.
- 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 :\
- 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.

- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  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
  
  Ya, the marketing blitz here and on Reddit was nuts. Thankfully the PR-bullshit has calmed down some.
- https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/
- 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

But it's a decentralized service! /s

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?
- The account is still up and viewable for me. US.

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.

And so it begins
- everything dies
  
  Usually not that fast.

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...?
- Money
- They don't want to get blocked from Turkish market
  
  I guess that's a good reason.
- 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.
- Because they do business in Türkiye.

Jack Dorsey earning those libertarian bona fides.

Oh look, once again, I was right.
Be shocked if it wasn't so common.

So, is your account just restricted in Turkey? Or everywhere, based on local Turkish law?

it looks like they are restricted only from turkey. the account in question looks fine from other countries, or through VPN.

Do we have any information as to what kind of stuff was in there that got censored? I see alot of people here claiming its some political move towards censorship. Do we know this person was not using their account to trade grass and other nono products openly?
- Baby. You are and will always be controlled. Understand that.

How do we know the person behind this account was not selling grass?