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.
pardon my ignorance, but how is a de-centralized and de-federated online community bound to such annoyances?
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: https://dustycloud.org/blog/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).
That’s not an outlandish amount of storage. You can get more than that for $200.
At the rate it’s growing, it’s going to get outlandish very quickly.
Yeah anyone who runs a node is laughing at those numbers
My Jellyfin server is 6 times that… And my gaming 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.
Edit: laughing my ass off at the downvotes. Yes, my server has 30TB. Yes my PC has around 12TB. It wasn’t expensive or hard. The hard drives in my Jellyfin are NAS drives… Bunch of people acting like you need quantum computers to run a node lmfao. Storage space is easy. It’s the networking and bandwidth part that’s hard. So yeah, complaining that 5TB of storage puts it out of reach of the average person when one 12tb NAS drive cost $200? Just bitching. Plain and simple.
its still not a small amount of storage. and no, there’s still not really sd cards or flash drives bigger than 1tb, but obviously even if there were and they were super cheap, that would still never suffice as server storage. plus, if you’re hosting a node you’d want at least 4 or 5 times that storage to use a raid 5 or 6 array + at least one onsite backup, and one off-site backup.
now we’re talking thousands of dollars in equipment just for storage, not the actual server itself, internet connection, etc.
You literally just described my Jellyfin, minus the raid because I don’t feel like setting it up. Think all in all I’m down about $1200 for it. Not thousands. You do realized a 12TB NAS drive is $200, right? Only reason my build cost as much is because I have a few 2TB ssds in there which were just leftovers from the PC anyways. I could’ve done it all for $500.
Off-site backup isn’t required. Nice, but not required at all. In the literal sense, you don’t need it. It’s good to have, but an extra.
So yeah, 5TB, literally the only metric I was discussing, isn’t much. Maybe in the future the person should say all the nuance and not “5TB is unreasonable for the average person”. It’s not. Plain and simple.
maybe your hobbiest server doesn’t need a off-site backup but an instance of a massive social media network expected to be used by many users absolutely will. and sorry, but your nas simply will not cut it as far as throughput goes. it’s just not designed for that much activity.
You’re right that Bluesky isn’t federated, but it most definitely is centralized.
Wouldn’t your “home” server in an activity pub network always be subject to such requests?
Funny as I got downvoted to oblivion for saying Bluesky was not really decentralized.
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.
And now you know why corporations and politicians don’t use mastodon
So. When ever I post my families genocide story as Armenians in The Ottoman empire. There’s always a Turk to call me a liar online. Then they get you banned from the sub because they have people injected into mod teams. Pretty disgusting experience. Also happened with Azerbaijani posters to. Interesting how deep they injected themselves in Reddit.
I can’t believe it! Someone who chose to use a centralized platform instead of Nostr was banned?! It’s so shocking!
I will share the same shock the day I see that 16 out of 15 posts on Nostr are not related to Bitcoin or using Nostr.
Oh, so NOSTR is not hated here anymore. Good Anakin good.
Seriously, an amazingly successful platform.
People always want to try subtler and subtler tech, and NOSTR’s dumb architecture with relays is something that could only be conceived by people not that fond of tech brilliance. And that’s good and right! And if those people are cryptobros, then so be it, they found the right way and this is what matters.
They had a task one can’t solve with classic P2P, because mobile devices and energy consumption and uptime. They solved it the old-fashioned way which is still right, kinda like Usenet, except reducing news servers to asynchronous relays.
NOSTR already has some standard extensions for moderated communities, I’m just not sure if there are any clients supporting that.
The relevant question here is if you are in Turkey because if you aren’t this is a much bigger deal than if you are.
Also, does “restricted access to your account for users” mean for all users or just for those in Turkey?
Even if it’s a Turkey-specific restriction for users based in the country, it nonetheless shows that Bluesky is willing to comply with government requests.
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, …
I just looked up all of those terms on Bluesky and found nothing, so I am going to very reasonably conclude that you’re making things up and there’s definitely nothing else going on here
USA are searching people’s phones for signs of criticism of government policy. They are detaining and deporting people (even citizens). China is not the sole bogeyman you think it is.
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.
If they were posting CP it wouldn’t be Turkey calling for a banning, it would be forwarded quietly by the company to local law enforcement.
Because they are a company and a board of ethical leaders to ensure it doesn’t turn to shit is no guarantee it doesn’t turn to shit. BlueSky is something a corporate mindset person creates because that’s the only thing they know. Have a problem to solve? Needs company + board.
This seems like a good place to put this meme I made a couple months ago
deleted by creator
What’s the point of Bluesky if they’re just going to bow before authoritarianism?
Its a vc funded for profit. They have no choice.
This has been a major red flag that everyone on bsky is just ignoring.
Is anyone surprised?
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?”
i don’t get why this is shocking; if you do business in a country you have to follow local laws.
Honestly at this point I want to host a distributed Lemmy instance and completely ignore all country laws in favor of complete and absolute freedom of speech.
It might sound extreme, but pretty sure at this point I’d be willing to die for it given the state of global politics.
That didn’t take long
Clear from the beginning.
