Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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?

Where are those alternative servers?

So, just like Twitter, then? When the official servers don't show whatever the government tells them not to show?

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.

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.

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.

"Bluesky" itself is trademarked and all the rest, but it uses AtProtocol which is a completely open federation protocol. AtProtocol doesn't have the support of ActivityPub because it's much newer and also more complicated (for good reason, but still).

Not sure if you were joking but Mastodon has substantially more users than Lemmy.

Averaging 1 million users/month versus Lemmy's 50k.

You're right. The effort of writing 2 sentences to promote a platform some people may not have checked out in some time, if at all, was definitely wasted. I'll remember that next time.

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.

Same on lemmy... Yet, here we are? I'd call that a win.

I'd rather have a bunch of smaller dudes hosting servers than yet another US multinational that will use their money to destroy democracies around the world.

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.

/s?

There’s Mastodon and a ton of others.

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.

Do they have the choice?