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?
You're right that Bluesky isn't federated, but it most definitely is centralized.
Assuming you are serious:
Bluesky is ... arguably 'federated', but it is centralized, not decentralized.
https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/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 all other people/users can actually see.
So, this is not a many to many, tangled spider web of connections, the way lemmy, and 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 even more other users, communities, or entire instances if they choose to, but that only effects what that particular user sees.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 https://pigpoop.balls/
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?
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.
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.
Yes, you can host your own PDS server, that is known and stated.
The entire design of a lemmy instance is meant to be more 'self contained', as I already mentioned. This is what enables the federation network to organize in a 'many to many' connection style, as opposed to a 'many to one'.
A lemmy instance roughly has many/most of the capabilities of a PDS, Relay, and AppView... all rolled into one.
This is a fundamental difference of a 'true' federation model... all the members of the federation are capable of operating independently.
If you are in a federation of unequals, with built in dependencies... your 'federation' is much more like a king with vassal states, not a voluntary association.
Yes, migration of a user account from one instance to another would be complicated... but ... so would migrating a user from one PDS to another.
I don't even know how you could fully 'migrate away from BlueSky servers'... when BlueSky run the only Relays.
Also, many (most?) actual client apps for viewing lemmy, posting on it, etc... they pretty much hold a lot of your particular user customizations, at least as it comes to visual theming, independently, locally, not even related to the actual user account on an instance you are using.
They also support easy switching between different lemmy user/instance accounts...
...
Also also, as far as I am aware... if you have an account on a lemmy instance, you can delete your account and this will wipe out all of that account's posts and comments across the whole fediverse, aside from modlogs and internet archive web snapshotting type stuff.
I ... think you can also export your own data as well?
Not 100% sure on these last two parts, maybe an instance admin or powermod could chime in... but I think this is correct?
People are allowed to run their own relays, but it's really expensive and nobody wants to.
Really?
Like, this is genuine news to me, if its true.
https://github.com/itaru2622/bluesky-selfhost-env
I can find tools like this, that help you set up a good number of elements of BlueSky... but the only mention of the relay (apparently also known as BGS, for... BigSky?)... is that you connect to it... not run your own.
Beyond even the price point and required server hosting heft... where, where is an actual 'here is how to download, configure and run your own BlueSky relay'?
As far as I am aware, all there has been is a mix of vague, noncommital, and hopeful musings of various people suggesting that one day maybe it will be possible to do this, hopefully they'll support that soon...
... which to me at least, very much reminds me of fanboys/girls of a video game just coping with the fact that their favorite video game with a massive bug or lacking a major advertised feature... will just have it fixed one day... even though the devs have been radio silent about it for a year.
What is the advantage of Bluesky's model over Xitter? Are they just outsourcing servers while still holding censorship and manipulation power?
Content addressing
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.
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.
Twitter could not be federated, Bluesky could be but only at massive cost, so it probably won't be
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 only if you want to maintain a full archive. You don't actually have to store a full archive to run a relay
source for that?
https://bsky.app/profile/bnewbold.net/post/3lkpdjgj5pk2i
That doesn’t sound cheap though and it would become more expensive over time, right?
Those specs can be handled by a medium range laptop
Also DMs always go through Bluesky themselves.
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.
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.
They're still a corporate entity, and they still want access to markets to make money.
Calling it not federated is silly. It's not like-for-like federated like Mastodon where you have a single server doing all roles, federating to other servers of the same role.
Instead it's cross-layer federation. You can use any app, talk to any appview, use feeds hosted by anybody, use moderation services hosted by anybody, host your account on any PDS service including self hosting, and any appview can talk to any relay. It's fully mix-and-match.
Two people on entirely disparate sets of servers & services using atproto can talk to each other as long as their appviews/relays mutually retrieve content from the other.
That's federation.