Comment on Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government

toy_boat_toy_boat@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  They’re still a corporate entity, and they still want access to markets to make money.

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  • toy_boat_toy_boat@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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.

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    • MeekerThanBeaker@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I think Mastodon is closer to Lemmy as a Twitter alternative over Bluesky.

      However, this does a good job explaining the differences:

      socialbee.com/blog/mastodon-vs-bluesky/

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      • toy_boat_toy_boat@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        thanks - you’ve got it. i forgot about mastadon. ironic, really, since it’s the resource that everyone will be scrambling for in a few days. mark my words: something horrible is going to happen this weekend, and it will change your life forever.

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    • roofuskit@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Bluesky claims to support federation while being designed to make it entirely impractical and is currently entirely centralized.

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• egerlach@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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: dustycloud.org/…/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).

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  • meldrik@lemmy.wtf ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Also DMs always go through Bluesky themselves.

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    • 73ms@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      yeah the DM system is something completely exclusive to their official servers and that they just rolled up without caring at all about trying to keep up the pretense of wanting to build something decentralized.

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      • Natanael@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        They’re planning on migrating to the new MLS group messaging encryption standard, which is built to support federated messaging encryption (more efficient than the current Matrix protocol)

        (also, Matrix are also planning on adopting it, and the RCS spec is getting it too)

        It’s long to take a while though. The standard is very recent and nobody has a complete implementation yet.

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  • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    That’s not an outlandish amount of storage. You can get more than that for $200.

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    • Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      At the rate it’s growing, it’s going to get outlandish very quickly.

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    • communism@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      It’s not an outlandish amount, but for instance I have my own VPS where I host a variety of services, and it still has under 1TB storage. Most hobbyists who rent a VPS would have less storage than that.

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      • Anivia@feddit.org ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Why rent? If you have fiber and aren’t behind CGNAT you can host from your home

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    • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Yeah anyone who runs a node is laughing at those numbers

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      • fishos@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        My Jellyfin is 6 times that… And my PC is double that… Seriously, this person thinks 5TB is a lot? Don’t we have SD Cards/Flash Drives this big now? I’d be WAY more concerned about the bandwidth requirements.

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    • 73ms@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      it keeps constantly growing by terabytes and needs to be fast too though. Means you’re going to pay more than most private individuals are able to long-term just for the privilege of running that one component.

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      • Natanael@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        That’s just if you want a complete copy. You can choose to store only parts of it, and retrieve what’s missing from other relay servers when you need it.

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  • Anivia@feddit.org ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    5TB requires you to be a company??? My personal NAS already has 92TB

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  • aeshna_cyanea@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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

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    • 73ms@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      source for that?

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      • aeshna_cyanea@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        bsky.app/profile/bnewbold.net/post/3lkpdjgj5pk2i

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  • SrEstegosaurio@mstdn.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    @egerlach @toy_boat_toy_boat Yeah, ATProto is a joke and it is surprising how many computer-toucher folks have fallen for it.

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• sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Assuming you are serious:

  Bluesky is … arguably ‘federated’, but it is centralized, not decentralized.

  gigazine.net/…/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 people can actually see.

  So, this is not a many to many, tangled spider web of connections, the way lemmy 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 other users, communities, or entire instances if they choose to, but that only effects them

  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.

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  • toy_boat_toy_boat@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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.

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    • quack@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      It was founded by Jack Dorsey, the same guy who founded Twitter. At this point it does look like it’ll end up the same way.

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    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      i was asking in good faith, and i can’t thank you enough for providing such a thorough and effective answer.

      I just wanted to clarify, as… at least for myself, even here on lemmy, discussions about this have been going on for at least 6 to 9 months, and … a good number of people have not been engaging in those discussions in good faith.

      But yes, I am happy to answer, glad you found it helpful!

      Apologies for the hilariously simplistic graphics… i literally just drew them on my gas station tier phone haha. But I think they get the point across.

      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.

      Yep, it pretty much literally is twitter 2.0 (3.0?), was founded by Jack Dorsey, … its not even a non profit, it is a for profit ‘benefit’ corporation, which basically just means its corporate bylaws claim that attempts to benefit the public in some way.

      IE, literally the corporate / legal version of virtue signalling… it is still ultimately a for profit corporation that will put profit and growth above everything else… and hopefully by now, people understand how that literally always turns out.

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      • unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Oh I see here that those were your top tier gas station tier graphics. Your eagerness to share knowledge that gets you excited is commendable and people like you are what makes Lemmy worth using. I hope you have a terrific day.

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  • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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?

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    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      That is literally how I read it as well, BlueSky is farming out server load to enthusiastic and dedicated users, while also just going ham on the PR / propoganda / marketing making themselves appear to be something they are not.

      Unless I missed something and BlueSky is actually letting people run and custom configure their own relays at least semi independently… yeah, they’re basically being quite shady and misleading.

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      • LeninsOvaries@lemmy.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        People are allowed to run their own relays, but it’s really expensive and nobody wants to.

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      • merdaverse@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        For relays yes, but for PDS that’s not at all true. The PDS architecture lets you own your data and migrate it away from Bluesky servers or even from the BS apps, when/if they will be available. Something that ActivityPub severely lacks. Try to migrate your account from one Lemmy instance to another.

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    • aeshna_cyanea@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      That there are actually multiple relays. There’s no hard coded single relay, that would be ridiculous.

      There is a hard coded relay in the official bluesky app, just like it has a hard coded moderation service. But both of those are changeable with third party appviews/clients

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      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I was oversimplifying a bit such that it wouldn’t be overwhelming to a self-described uninformed person asking for an explanation.

        Yes, there are multiple actual relays but they functionally constitute a single layer or class of components in a birds eye view of the whole system.

        As far as I am aware, no one other than BlueSky runs the relays, or has the code to do so.

        If I am wrong about that, I would appreciate a source indicating such.

        Does anyone other than BlueSky actually run a relay?

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  • unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Idk if you made those technical diagrams yourself but I genuinely enjoyed them.

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    • samus12345@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      “The fediverse is more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly…timey-wimey…stuff.”

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  • mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    This belongs in Best Of Lemmy or something.

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    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I don’t even know if such a community exists, or what instance(s) it would be on if it/they do exist… but uh… if one does somewhere, I guess you could submit it?

      I am assuming it would follow the basic rule of … you can’t submit your own posts/comments lol.

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      • wanderingmagus@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        !bestoflemmy@lemmy.world

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  • LeninsOvaries@lemmy.cafe ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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 pigpoop.balls

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    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      … I get the jokes, but I really, truly was just trying to use a real world example case to illustrate a functional aspect of the system, and not just … you know, bring up all the drama.

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  • merdaverse@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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 dustycloud.org/…/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). whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t

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    • Natanael@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      The fix they’re trying to implement is to make it cheaper to run relays and appviews, allowing you to run them with only partial network data, prioritizing your own social network first

      By the way, those relay storage costs include indexes and not just raw data

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  • troybot@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.

    It’s not a pyramid, it’s a reverse funnel system.

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    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Like a toilet bowl, mounted to the ceiling.

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  • oakward@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    What is the advantage of Bluesky’s model over Xitter? Are they just outsourcing servers while still holding censorship and manipulation power?

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    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      As I see it the only advantage is that it is not run by Elon Musk.

      And by ‘advantage’ I mean the ‘advantage’ of using a corporate product that, so far, is doing its best to drive people away from an actually censorship resistant Fediverse, using inclusive rainbow capitalist language to lure in the large majority of people who are not tech savvy enough to realize they are basically lying to / misleading them.

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    • twice_hatch@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Twitter could not be federated, Bluesky could be but only at massive cost, so it probably won’t be

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    • Eyedust@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Xitter

      My first time seeing this and I love it. I’m going to assume its pronounced ‘shitter’ and you can’t convince me otherwise if its not.

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      • oakward@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I saw it somewhere and it just sticks. I assumed that pronunciation as well

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      • samus12345@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        That is indeed the intended pronunciation.

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    • Natanael@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Content addressing

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• merc@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  You’re right that Bluesky isn’t federated, but it most definitely is centralized.

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• heavyboots@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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…

  • not commercially owned
  • has a proven federation capability
  • Running a pretty large number of instances right now

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  • toy_boat_toy_boat@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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 :\

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• Natanael@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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

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• paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Wouldn’t your “home” server in an activity pub network always be subject to such requests?

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  • BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    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.

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    • paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I’m not an expert on how activity pub works, but you’re saying if I had an account on mastodon.social, and if they took down a post on my @user@mastodon.social account, regardless of takedown reason, it would still be visible from other instances?

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      • BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I’m saying that if your home server (mastodon.social) is outside of Turkey, then there is less reason for them to comply in the first place because they only risk the mastodon.social server being blocked in Turkey. That one is a bad example because they’re one of the largest, so if you want to be extra safe, you’d want to pick a server that isn’t so big so that they are less likely to care about complying with some other county that they might not have any users from.

        If the server you use is based inside the country that has a problem with your content, then you’d be screwed - though all the other servers will still mirror and cache your content for a bit even if you get taken down.

        The resiliency lies in the fact that you can choose to register in a country that is politically friendly towards your posts or if your home country is friendly but you want to avoid being taken down, you can self host a single user instance and refuse any requests from other countries.

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    • jeena@piefed.jeena.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      But don't all other servers host copies of it? So if a server is hosted in Turkey then they could tell that server to block access to that content a least from Turkey or not?

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      • BakedCatboy@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        The other servers do cache the content for some time yes, but if your server is based in a country not friendly to your posts then you are vulnerable to takedowns as you say.

        The benefit I’m saying we have in the fediverse is that you can pick a server in a politically safe area (ie outside Turkey in this case), so they are less likely to comply, especially if they are small or don’t care about being blocked by that country (that’s usually the only thing they can do unless you have an office or staff there that can be arrested - less likely to be the case if your server is run by some dude in another country).

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