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.
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, …
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.
Don’t replace X with Bluesky! Go to Mastodon and other Federalised platforms. That is the only way to escape corporate monopolization.
So back to Mastadon then. I was not using BSKY much anyway to be fair.
And so it begins…
Funny as I got downvoted to oblivion for saying Bluesky was not really decentralized.
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.
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
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
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
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 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.
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.
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
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
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?”
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.
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?
Nothing in this message indicates that is the case.
Funny. Thats what the turks voted for.
But thats none of my business.
No, you can’t go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
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.
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.
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.
