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

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/...

(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).

Assuming you are serious:

Bluesky is ... arguably 'federated', but it is centralized, not decentralized.

https://gigazine.net/...

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.

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

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

Bluesky and ATProto are not meaningfully decentralized, and are not federated either.

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

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

How could they follow the pied piper rasputin a SECOND TIME??? There's a saying in Texas, maybe it's in Tennessee, fool me once shame, shame on you, fool me twice eh.. Can't get fooled again!

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 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.

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

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?"

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

It was an obvious op from the beginning. You could tell by the people they were trotting out to sell it. Lots of liberal pro-authority types.

They are not the good guys, the fediverse is.

I think you're overselling the Fediverse here. The Fediverse also absolutely has censorship, it's just by individual instance admins instead of a for-profit company. If large, influential instances shut down or defederate, a lot of content goes with it.

Yeah, federated instances technically cache that data, but those communities are effectively dead, links are broken, etc. Users can jump to other services, sure, but the service isn't the same.

We've seen this here on Lemmy. Beehaw was a cool instance, but they defederated fairly early on. Lemmy.ml was super impactful, but their admins are super aggressive with moderation to the point that many avoid their communities. And so on.

Whether "the Fediverse" is good depends on your instance and the mods and admins of the various communities you are part of. That kind of sucks.

Maybe it sucks less than whatever major social media network you're comparing to, but I hesitate to call it "good," just different.

I should've been on here instead. I legitimately thought that Anarchists, Communists, &c could make a difference being on there. Now I get people deliberately blocking accounts that aren't even fascist, and being concerned with "bullying" instead of actually solving real problems. BSky has upper-class liberals talking about D&D, whining about how laws aren't being followed correctly, cheerleading American imperialism, making unfunny jokes, and claiming that radical politics came from 4chan rather than legitimate political grieviances. All sorts of suburban slime. I really should've been elsewhere.

But but but... Bluesky pwomised they would join the fediverse someday! A super duper pinky pwomise!

People on the Turkey subreddit were running a campaign to move from X to Bluesky

I see so much astroturfing for Bluesky. They have good PR people who know what buttons to push, clearly.

My experience as a person who has a lot of experience working with computer is basically thus:

When you solve a problem for someone, you are a magician.

When you can't, you are completely full of shit and know nothing about tech and your entire life is a lie.

When you tell someone 'hey I wouldn't do that', your experience and expertise means nothing if what you are suggesting would mildly inconvenience them for 10 minutes, or takes more than 30 seconds to explain why it is a bad idea.

When you tell them 'hey have you tried this?' your experience and expertise also means nothing if you cannot do it for them and also make it so it never breaks again, and also they will keep doing the thing that makes it break even though you explained to them how to not do that thing that makes it break.

... I may as well just start an IT flavored Rodney Dangerfield comedy routine, it would be much more fun and less stressful than always being a db admin/data analyst/backend dev/frontend dev/whatever else my job title now apparently includes.

I wouldn't be surprised if he held some share of it but Dorsey probably doesn't have much to do with Bluesky anymore, at least in an official capacity. The more salient point is about not really trusting any single party that asserts centralized control over a platform.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/desktop-browsers/

Governments are more powerful than companies, if there is resistance it is because the government does not have all the power and if there is no resistance it is because the government has all the power

But I don't want to sit alone in a room.

No offense but I think your effort is wasted on the people (already) here.

If Fedi server owners will start getting legal requests from the Turkish government, they will start banning people too. Or will be forced to close their operations in Turkey.

It costs money to run and admin servers though

On the one hand it is crazy, on the other hand I suppose you don't even need that many 'policemen' on the interwebs to clean it up compared to the amount of (secret) policemen you need to keep the physical country 'clean'.

Who could've ever predicted this?!?

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.

I wish the tooling around Secure Scuttlebutt wasn't so annoying to use, more attention might have had some of the rough edges filed off.

On one hand you can have an offline first replication method (Phones syncing messages over bluetooth, etc.), but then you can't post from multiple devices without moving your account between them.

Well, I listened to an interview with the CEO of Bluesky. The thing of it is, they bought into the idea of creating a social media communication protocol instead of a website, like there's all these different email protocols, and you can access all your emails across different protocols regardless of what email service you use. Facebook doesn't have that. I leave Facebook, I lose access to all of the contacts I've made over the years. I can't migrate my friends list to another service. I'd have to do it the old-fashioned way, where I tell people I plan to delete my account and then tell them how they can get a hold of me.

Probably said something bad about their current dictator.

I'm afraid a federated micro-blogging website using ActivityPub doesn't/can't exist ;_;

How would decentralized alternatives be immune to this?

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.

The account is still up and viewable for me. US.

everything dies

The odds are 1000:0 that they won't, and I still wouldn't take that bet.

They never do.

I believe those laws target the author, so their main goal wouldn't be to take the content down but figure out who wrote it. I think when it comes to 'real' censorship you still want both to happen but it would be much more importent to get the content deleted.

There isn’t one as far as I’m concerned. People moved from one corpo social media platform to another corpo social media platform thinking that the person running the former platform was the problem, when the entire model is designed to prioritise profit over human expression.

For a company like blue sky, you bow to all governments, or you bow to none. One way you become so milquetoast nobody wants to use you because nothing interesting is ever said. The other way you become 4chan.

Its a vc funded for profit. They have no choice.

This has been a major red flag that everyone on bsky is just ignoring.

Well it gives everyone the opportunity to blindly believe everything will be better because it's not twitter.

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.

Clear from the beginning.

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.

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.

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.

They don't want to get blocked from Turkish market

Because they display (or even host, potentially) content that's "illegal" in Turkey.

What they should probably be doing is just hiding said content from users in Turkey...and encouraging users in Turkey to use VPNs, lol

Money

Because they do business in Türkiye.

It always was. The "problem" is that there's not 10% of what you can find on Bluesky (well, at least for my interests), sadly. It's less worse than say, Peertube vs YouTube but still, last time I tried to dig I didn't find much. i still use it tho, but I'm following like 3 accounts is a hundred on BS. I'll try and dig a bit more again today.

Absolutely bamboozled

They're based in the United States.

Hi, I'm Nicole, but you can call me the fediverse chick!

"There are some bad actors on this platform, thus we should completely write it off" ok buddy

I mean... does every site where communication happens not have that? random scams are just part of the Internet, federated or not 🤷‍♀️

"I went somewhere open to the public and the public was there!" That's what you sound like talking about seeing a couple bots in 2025.

People are migrating there, but if there's not a lot of content then the few people that really push out a lot of content because they make money will be very prominent.

No one is gonna randomly follow you on Masodon because no one is gonna see your posts.

Jack Dorsey only provided funding to bluesky while the old plan to make Twitter run on an open protocol was still in place (ironically he wanted to avoid responsibility for moderation by doing that).

He then left Bluesky completely, and never had any major influence after the initial funding.

Which one? TurkmeniGovernmentNet or TurkmeniOppositionNet?

My naive guess is that if the Turkish government ban access to BlueSky for not complying, that cuts into user count and therefore profitability.

let's hope they stop at that and don't give out their info like yahoo did before for china and other oppressive governments

The "fediverse" are distributed online social networks using a thing called activity pub. Because they all speak the same protocol they can interact with each other. This is why Mastodon and Lemmy can talk to each other.

BlueSky uses something called AT. AT proto has three things to it where . The pds (I think it's called) is where you can choose to store your data. Relays aggregate those. Then you have to have a way to view it. In activity pub the first two layers are the same thing and we typically call them "instances". Running your own relay for AT is wildly expensive and to my knowledge nobody is doing it because of that. Not enough people use their own pds to store data to even really make it worthwhile. The vast majority of BlueSky users are actually using BlueSky itself. Even if you consider the fediverse to be things doing federation, BlueSky isn't really as federated as they lead you to believe.

Same. It’s like being a part of society; I’m here but I have no idea what I’m doing. I can shout and scream though, so that’s fun lmfao

Link Lemmy stuff there, to advertise federated platforms. I do it and haven't been penalized like reddit does.

No, you can't go back to Constantinople

Considering you say that I don't think you're up to date as to how voting 'works' in Turkey nowadays.

Nothing in this message indicates that is the case.

Baby. You are and will always be controlled. Understand that.