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
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.
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?
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.
I hope those downvotes were not from here.
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)
So, just like Twitter, then? When the official servers don’t show whatever the government tells them not to show?
Yup
deleted by creator
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…
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.
Funny. Thats what the turks voted for.
But thats none of my business.
No, you can’t go back to Constantinople
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.
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.
Thought this way yes.
I misread and saw that it was some kind of DMCA, and an instance owner would probably not want to play around with that. Not respecting local laws on specific things is not likely to have serious repercussions
I’m afraid a federated micro-blogging website using ActivityPub doesn’t/can’t exist ;_;
/s?
There’s Mastodon and a ton of others.
It’s old internet sarcasm, I seent it many times in my life. Yeah, pretty sure it was harmless satire :) the emoticon at the end is a dead giveaway maybe—that there looks like a millennial or zillenial calling card
I’m just used to the “/s” for when something is written sarcastically.
Yeah that’s new 2014+ Reddit technology, back in the early days of the internet sarcasm was a lot harder to detect and you were expected to figure it out with context haha
lots of us don’t know people expect /s and still try to be sarcastic without /s
instead we used clues like emojis to denote it’s not serious like “lol” or “haha” when it’s sarcastic and funny or ;-; or T-T when it’s sarcasm and expressing frustration
You don’t need to explain, they are clearly retarded. Literally made a sarcastic joke without using /s, then got confused because an obviously sarcastic reply that was riffing off their joke didn’t use /s.
I don’t know why people don’t mention Pleroma/Akkoma ?
I’ve heard people complain a lot about its resource usage on the server side, that the advantages of it running on elixir are moot unless the instance has over 1k people. The web UI leaves a lot to be desired, true, but at least it’s not such a client-side resource hog/browser crasher as misskey/sharkey
If I understand this correctly, then this restriction only applies to Turkey. Which is exactly what you’d expect. If you violate local laws, then there are local restrictions. On a global level, everyone else can still interact with you.
Have I understood this correctly?
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 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.
They’re based in the United States.
Yes but they need to obey Turkish law if they want to offer their services there. Like how US websites have to show a “cookies” disclaimer within the EU due to EU privacy laws.
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.
That didn’t take long
Clear from the beginning.
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.
Well it gives everyone the opportunity to blindly believe everything will be better because it’s not twitter.
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.
Become 4chan as in being offline?
Ahem. Fuck Thanksgiving bird country. That’s all.
