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.
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.
But but but… Bluesky pwomised they would join the fediverse someday! A super duper pinky pwomise!
When did they do that?
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.
And now you know why corporations and politicians don’t use mastodon
i don’t get why this is shocking; if you do business in a country you have to follow local laws.
Fake Fediverse is fake.
Fuck Turkey and fuck however they want it spelt.
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.
Don’t replace X with Bluesky! Go to Mastodon and other Federalised platforms. That is the only way to escape corporate monopolization.
No offense but I think your effort is wasted on the people (already) here.
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.
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.
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.
It costs money to run and admin servers though
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.
Is Bluesky the next X ??? Kissing the ring of authoritarian leaders?
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.
This seems like a good place to put this meme I made a couple months ago
From the wording, it looks like they’re just going to georestrict their content to places that are not Turkey.
Far from a problem, unless of course, your primary following is from Turkey; or that’s where you live.
I don’t blame bluesky here, they operate internationally, and they have to obey the laws of the locations they operate in. Personally I’m wondering what kind of Internet posts are restricted in Turkey? Who has laws to say you can, or cannot say things on the Internet? Besides… I guess, China, and obviously illegal things like CP…
Were they posting CP?
IDK, I’ve never used bluesky. I barely used xitter, back when it was relevant, if I were to use anything as a replacement it would be Mastodon.
Anyways.
You might consider reading some news about what is happening in Turkey right now or the last days/weeks/years.
Some Keywords that might help: Erdogan, autocracy, opposition, major of Istanbul, imprisoned journalists, …
I just looked up all of those terms on Bluesky and found nothing, so I am going to very reasonably conclude that you’re making things up and there’s definitely nothing else going on here
Many countries have restrictions on what you can and cannot post (hate speech being a common one). Turkey in particular has been moving towards autocracy over the last decade or so, so I wouldn’t be surprised (to be clear this is speculation feel free to correct me) if it had restrictions on lgbt issues or political dissent or something.
USA are searching people’s phones for signs of criticism of government policy. They are detaining and deporting people (even citizens). China is not the sole bogeyman you think it is.
If they were posting CP it wouldn’t be Turkey calling for a banning, it would be forwarded quietly by the company to local law enforcement.
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.
And so it begins…
@boramalper What a surprise. /s
Don’t bet on shitty protocolos backed by corpos, does not end well.
What the fuck? Is bsky hosted there? Why do they fucking care?
