Comment on Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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
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.
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).
This is easily solved with the god damn onion address support which is in lemmys own documents.
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
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.
So, just like Twitter, then? When the official servers don’t show whatever the government tells them not to show?
Yup
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.
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 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.
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
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
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.
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.
Corgana@startrek.website 11 months ago
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?”
ImmersiveMatthew@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Centralization is going to do what centralization does best.