Comment by ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works on 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.

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?

Based on the comments, I’m not so sure. Louder for those in the back.

Blue Sky isn’t in a country that is closely allied with turkey. They could have totally ignored these requests but then Blue Sky would have just been banned in Turkey

Which is why we need to get off corpo platforms. A corporation will never care for people or look out for people’s best interests, it only ever cares about finances going up, and will put that before everything. An authoritarian regime wanting to censor their genocide? Absolutely. Fuck the victims, it’s more important that our pockets are well lined.

Bluesky is just twitter. It’s the same bullshit with a different recipe. It’ll never be a good platform for democracy.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

Decentralization isn’t done to hide the author, federating content works because the content is spread beyond a central owner. I don’t know if you ever used a peer-2-peer network like you do when you torrent a movie, but the concept is very similar. It is harder to censor something because you have more places you need to censor.

Imagine you are in a country where a lot of information is censored and you want to spread a message. Would you pick 1 giant billboard in the city center or would you make a bunch of leaflets you secretly hand out to someone you trust, hoping they will give the information along to someone they trust etc? Obviously, one giant billboard is easier to take down by the censoring government. That is why decentralisation does in fact work against censorship.

Anonymity or ‘layers of privacy’ are useful if you don’t want to be caught as the author of the message. In that case it is not about running the instance over Tor, but accessing the instance over Tor. You wouldn’t even need to use tor if you can trust your computer isn’t infected and you acces the instance through a VPN and remove all new data (e.g. cookies) from your pc before you disconnect your vpn.

Running the service itself over Tor is the only way to prevent local governments knocking on the admin’s door, though

Yes totally true, if you want to be safe from all governments. But there are plenty countries you can safely host an instance without fearing censorship. On the one hand you have options in wealthy countries that want to defend their values, and on the other hand you have options in poor countries which do not have the resources to locate the actual server.

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.

Where are those alternative servers?

Currently, you have stuff like Clearsky (it’s basically an archive.org for bluesky)

Which is not part of Bluesky, only proving the point having a central system controlling the data makes the data vulnerable.

Sorry what, an example of a 3rd party service proving 3rd party mirrors exists proves it’s vulnerable to what? It’s content addressed and as open as it gets, it’s literally designed to survive if the company goes down

Yes, but in comparison to a federation only the information will survive because it was copied out of the central system, but the system will fail as soon as the company folds. I mean the reason the fact that you need a 3rd party mirror to save the data proves the flaws of the 1st party. This instance for example doesn’t need to be mirrored because it is built on a foundation that already has redundancy built in.

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

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.

Right but my point is they would just submit the request to the host server. If the original is taken down then all the federated service will lose the comments as well.

If the host server just straight up ignores turkey then they’ll block all servers that host Mastodon and say mastered on is a rogue element. Better you just remove the offending comment

Right but my point is they would just submit the request to the host server. If the original is taken down then all the federated service will lose the comments as well.

Not how federation works. Let’s take a lemmy post as an example. If a server is federated with another and a new post is made, all subscribed servers are notified and a copy of the item is sent in that notification. If the original is “taken down” the copies still exist on the other servers and any deletion event is in ALL of their modlogs. ANY instance can “undelete” or revert the removal, or just ignore the deletion request all together (or roll back the database, or any number of operations to revert a change). The items doesn’t just go away. The “origin” doesn’t have all that much power to force other listening servers to do anything.

This also extends to comments. I run my own small instance with me and a few friends. My server never had serious downtime because it’s just us. Our access to larger instances never “vanished” even as their sites went completely down. The local content is effectively cached regardless of the state of the origin server.

If the host server just straight up ignores turkey then they’ll block all servers that host Mastodon

Good luck with that… There’s a lot of servers that can talk the same federation protocol. You’re not going to get them all. Forget all the normal means of bypassing blocks… you have so many fediverse and threadiverse servers to attach to in order to access largely similar content.

they’ll block all servers that host Mastodon

This will be a never-ending game of whack-a-mole.

Like how China tries to block VPNs that get around their firewall. There’s always another VPN that China hasn’t blocked yet, and there’ll always be another fediverse server that any other authoritarian regime hasn’t blocked yet.

lol how is capitulation the answer to authoritarianism but decentralization isn’t? I feel like I’m missing something from your arguments because it just seems circular and all the while condemning the very infrastructure you’re currently using on Lemmy (with obvious benefits) over centralized social-media.

You get it, they’ll just do what they did with torrents and p2p networks. /s

Despite the failures (or needs-of-improvement) of the current federation model, it is absolutely safe against that. Federation is copies, not links.

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

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Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government(lemmy.world)

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