Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government
Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government
Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government
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?
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.
That’s not an outlandish amount of storage. You can get more than that for $200.
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
@egerlach @toyboattoyboat Yeah, ATProto is a joke and it is surprising how many computer-toucher folks have fallen for it.
5TB requires you to be a company??? My personal NAS already has 92TB
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.
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.
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?
Idk if you made those technical diagrams yourself but I genuinely enjoyed them.
This belongs in Best Of Lemmy or something.
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/
It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.
It's not a pyramid, it's a reverse funnel system.
What is the advantage of Bluesky's model over Xitter? Are they just outsourcing servers while still holding censorship and manipulation power?
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
You're right that Bluesky isn't federated, but it most definitely is centralized.
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…
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 :\
Calling it not federated is silly. It's not like-for-like federated like Mastodon where you have a single server doing all roles, federating to other servers of the same role.
Instead it's cross-layer federation. You can use any app, talk to any appview, use feeds hosted by anybody, use moderation services hosted by anybody, host your account on any PDS service including self hosting, and any appview can talk to any relay. It's fully mix-and-match.
Two people on entirely disparate sets of servers & services using atproto can talk to each other as long as their appviews/relays mutually retrieve content from the other.
That's federation.
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!
Funny as I got downvoted to oblivion for saying Bluesky was not really decentralized.
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
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.
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?
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.
The tech needs to be decentralized like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is untouchable as it is just so decentralized. You can go after nodes and miners, but you would have to go after all of them to take down any of its content. It is very resilient and social media could go the same way but people have to want it first.
Not the same problem but it would still be an issue
But it would give consumers control and transparency
Right now we have none. They see you, they realize they don't like you and they make the algorithm disappear everything you say
That is a problem. And I agree with others, it needs to be decentralized, that is step 1. The other things cannot even be attempted until then
Corporate driven communication will just not work. They are in bed with the fascist Nazi regime
Sure, maybe if that instance is hosted in that specific country. But an instance outside of it doesn't have to do shit. What is Turkey gonna do if they don't like something I post? Come arrest me? Fucking let 'em try.
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?
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.
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
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.
This is easily solved with the god damn onion address support which is in lemmys own documents.
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).
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.
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?"
Centralization is going to do what centralization does best.
I hope those downvotes were not from here.
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
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
But but but... Bluesky pwomised they would join the fediverse someday! A super duper pinky pwomise!
When did they do that?
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.
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.
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
And now you know why corporations and politicians don't use mastodon
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.
Any service provider, private or corporate, must comply with the law. Otherwise the service provider will face the consequences.
I agree with that part. What I don't agree with is corpos posing as holders of truth and bastions of morality.
Fake Fediverse is fake.
Fuck Turkey and fuck however they want it spelt.
Re: "(...) fuck however they want it spelt."
As a Turkish person, I'm with you on this.
If the Turkish government wants you to refer to Turkey as Türkiye, then they shouldn't be allowed to call the US "Amerika Birleşik Devletleri": they should be required to pronounce it United States of America.
Let's see how they like it then, lol. "Yunayıted Sıtets af Amerika", hah.
It's also quite awkward requiring others to spell the country with letters that don't exist in most alphabets, and therefore not on commonly used keyboards.
Sure you can make use of ü and others with some international layouts, but for laypeople it's rather cumbersome.
Imagine China would suddenly require everyone spelling it as 中国， nobody would even be able pronounce it, let alone write.
The bird was named after the country. So if they want to be called Türkiye, that means we'll be having türkiye for Thanksgiving from now on.
I don't think bluesky was federated. Not in the sense that anybody can start making bluesky servers in their room
Don't replace X with Bluesky! Go to Mastodon and other Federalised platforms. That is the only way to escape corporate-sponsored fascism.
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 will take way longer for them to shut down all individual servers than it takes them to ask 1 company to shut down all posts.
Not to mention the dissent that arrises from one server being asked to shut down, how many others would suddenly start hosting anti-turkey regime stuff.
Its like piracy: you can't really shut it down. Even if Turkey would make accessing the fediverse illegal, people would still use VPNs.
As a mastodon server operator you have my word that I will wipe my ass with any takedown requests from the Turkish government, and encourage any Turkish users to get a fucking VPN.
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.
On the one hand it is crazy, on the other hand I suppose you don't even need that many 'policemen' on the interwebs to clean it up compared to the amount of (secret) policemen you need to keep the physical country 'clean'.
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 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.
I wish the tooling around Secure Scuttlebutt wasn't so annoying to use, more attention might have had some of the rough edges filed off.
On one hand you can have an offline first replication method (Phones syncing messages over bluetooth, etc.), but then you can't post from multiple devices without moving your account between them.
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
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.
Well, I listened to an interview with the CEO of Bluesky. The thing of it is, they bought into the idea of creating a social media communication protocol instead of a website, like there's all these different email protocols, and you can access all your emails across different protocols regardless of what email service you use. Facebook doesn't have that. I leave Facebook, I lose access to all of the contacts I've made over the years. I can't migrate my friends list to another service. I'd have to do it the old-fashioned way, where I tell people I plan to delete my account and then tell them how they can get a hold of me.
Right, but ActivityPub was right there. The AT Protocol is an open standard, but in its current form it effectively turns Bluesky’s nodes into gatekeepers for the rest of the network. If you want to talk about Meta platforms, even Threads implements ActivityPub.
What was the post
Probably said something bad about their current dictator.
If only there was a decentralised alternative, that was more or less immune to this… LOL
How would decentralized alternatives be immune to this?
Bluesky doesn’t work if the IP gets blocked in Turkey, but with Mastodon, you would have to ban every single IP from every Mastodon instance and potentially all other IPs on the Fediverse.
Let’s say Turkey blocks mastodon.social. Now people in Turkey can’t access Mastodon.social under normal circumstances, but they can still access fosstodon.org, mstdn.social etc. and access the content from Mastodon.social through those other sites.
Only issue could be media uploaded to Mastodon.social, that’s blocked, unless it has been cached by the website you use.
But it's a decentralized service! /s
I've been on the fence about joining Bluesky but I think I am not going to bother.
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?
And so it begins
everything dies
Usually not that fast.
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.
Corpos aren't afraid of the Democrats. They own them.
Empowered career democrats don't care. They are complicit with the schemes.
Obama called out Fox News before, I remember something like all the other news organizations backed Fox News. They claimed an attack on any one of them was an attack of all of them or something.
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 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.
They never do.
I believe those laws target the author, so their main goal wouldn't be to take the content down but figure out who wrote it. I think when it comes to 'real' censorship you still want both to happen but it would be much more importent to get the content deleted.
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.
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.
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.
The other way you become 4chan.
I think there is a sensible middle ground. :)
Become 4chan as in being offline?
Its a vc funded for profit. They have no choice.
This has been a major red flag that everyone on bsky is just ignoring.
I wouldn't say they ignore it, more they're too naive or misinformed to understand it's a problem.
Well it gives everyone the opportunity to blindly believe everything will be better because it's not twitter.
i don't get why this is shocking; if you do business in a country you have to follow local laws.
Honestly at this point I want to host a distributed Lemmy instance and completely ignore all country laws in favor of complete and absolute freedom of speech.
It might sound extreme, but pretty sure at this point I'd be willing to die for it given the state of global politics.
Where is bluesky based? As far as I know you have to follow the laws of where you are based. Otherwisse we'd have to follow the lowest common denominator, like north korea, or afghanistan or the like
it doesn't matter where you're based; if you're operating in a country, you follow the laws of that country.
It doesn't matter all that much, if your service can be accessed in a country, you have to bend to their rules, or get blocked, and Turkish users will no longer be able to access Bluesky.
If you want your site reachable that's fine, but if you want to operate as a legal business with a local operation and all that entails, you need to follow local laws.
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.
This seems like a good place to put this meme I made a couple months ago
Is anyone surprised?
Yeah there's that one guy that appears in every thread about bluesky saying that it really is an open and decentralised protocol even if only one corporation uses it in a centralised way.
Can Turkey ask for any account/post to be banned regardless of where a post was written? For example, if I were to register there and called Erdogan a dictator who suppresses the Turks by breaking down the media and justice system and he 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. e: typo
Can Turkey ask for any account/post to be banned regardless of where a post was written?
One can always ask and when it comes to countries, it depends on how convincing they can get. Legally speaking (IANAL), I believe that it's within countries' right to ask regardless of where the author is from if a content violates their local laws.
Right, but if they feel they have enough pressure to someone in turkey banned, they probably would likely also use that pressure to ban someone outside of turkey I suppose.
Related to this, there's a Google translate button at the top that reads, in Turkish, "translate to Turkish"
Which could be evidence that the screenshot comes from somebody who speaks Turkish, which increases the chances that the person receiving the email is in Turkey.
That doesn't answer your question, but it suggests that Bluesky may only be honoring requests regarding accounts they believe are subject to the local laws.
Two very important points:
That didn't take long
Clear from the beginning.
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
During HitlerPig 1.0, Erdogan came to America for a meeting with HitlerPig. As he was coming out, there were protesters to meet him. Erdogan ordered his security team to assault the protesters, and they viciously beat numerous peaceful protesters. HitlerPig said and did nothing about it. He allowed a foreign security force to come to America and severely assault people for exercising their 1st Amendment rights.
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.
But now they are not targeting the person posting it, they are targeting the platform it is posted to. If we let them they can censor the whole internet Bluesky.
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.
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...?
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
Money
Because they do business in Türkiye.
Just yesterday I saw a post on lemmy that said that turkish xitter users were migrating to bluesky. Didn't bother opening to see the comments or read it. Seeing this now, all I can think is "well, what did they expect?"
And so it begins...
Is Bluesky the next X ??? Kissing the ring of authoritarian leaders?
they all exist in the same world and they will all need to figure out how to make money sooner or later
Remove one Turk from the service or remove the entire service from Turkey?
Essentially the question Bluesky executives had to make here.
@boramalper What a surprise. /s
Don't bet on shitty protocolos backed by corpos, does not end well.
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.
Should I pretend to be surprised? 🙀 lol
Absolutely bamboozled
What the fuck? Is bsky hosted there? Why do they fucking care?
Because they're focused on just user numbers probably and many people from Turkey recently moved there. This decision might of course cause a decline anyway.
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.
So back to Mastadon then. I was not using BSKY much anyway to be fair.
it looks like they are restricted only from turkey. the account in question looks fine from other countries, or through VPN.
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.
Hi, I'm Nicole, but you can call me the fediverse chick!
We should call whoever sends these PMs The Fediverse Dick.
"There are some bad actors on this platform, thus we should completely write it off" ok buddy
I mean... does every site where communication happens not have that? random scams are just part of the Internet, federated or not 🤷♀️
"I went somewhere open to the public and the public was there!" That's what you sound like talking about seeing a couple bots in 2025.
You're not totally wrong. But this isn't "the public", it's just bots. For the same reason I wouldn't want to get chased around by buskers demanding tips every time I visited the park, I don't want my feed inundated with CamGirl amounts every time I log on.
The cam girl problem is simultaneously more difficult to solve (because there's such a low barrier to entry) and an easier one (because you typically have a handful of bad actors churning out the bulk of the spam). But since there's no profit on policing public spaces, BSKY's already paper thin budget isn't earmarking anything to address is.
No one is gonna randomly follow you on Masodon because no one is gonna see your posts.
People are migrating there, but if there's not a lot of content then the few people that really push out a lot of content because they make money will be very prominent.
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?
Jack Dorsey earning those libertarian bona fides.
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.
Which one? TurkmeniGovernmentNet or TurkmeniOppositionNet?
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.
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.
Yeah, any business would have to either accept this request or leave the market. Jack Dorsey has no relation to that.
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.
I just made an account on there and was getting ready to settle in. We can’t have anything nice…. I guess I’ll just stick to the fediverse.
I am still learning what the fediverse even is truthfully. I thought Bluesky was part of the fediverse. Man.
The "fediverse" are distributed online social networks using a thing called activity pub. Because they all speak the same protocol they can interact with each other. This is why Mastodon and Lemmy can talk to each other.
BlueSky uses something called AT. AT proto has three things to it where . The pds (I think it's called) is where you can choose to store your data. Relays aggregate those. Then you have to have a way to view it. In activity pub the first two layers are the same thing and we typically call them "instances". Running your own relay for AT is wildly expensive and to my knowledge nobody is doing it because of that. Not enough people use their own pds to store data to even really make it worthwhile. The vast majority of BlueSky users are actually using BlueSky itself. Even if you consider the fediverse to be things doing federation, BlueSky isn't really as federated as they lead you to believe.
Same. It’s like being a part of society; I’m here but I have no idea what I’m doing. I can shout and scream though, so that’s fun lmfao
Link Lemmy stuff there, to advertise federated platforms. I do it and haven't been penalized like reddit does.
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.
let's hope they stop at that and don't give out their info like yahoo did before for china and other oppressive governments
My naive guess is that if the Turkish government ban access to BlueSky for not complying, that cuts into user count and therefore profitability.
Funny. Thats what the turks voted for.
But thats none of my business.
Ahem. Fuck Thanksgiving bird country. That's all.
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.