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.
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.
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.
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.
your home computers would probably not have the reliability or the disk performance required to run it.
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?
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.
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 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 it 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.
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?
They are fundamentally different, the whole ActivityPub federation vs ATProtocol decentralization has been talked to death in technical detail.
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.
Not true. Bluesky has PDS migration in its design. In ActivityPub it is simply not possible
I mean…
⚠️ Warning ⚠️ ️
Account migration is a potentially destructive operation. Part of the operation involves signing away your old PDS’s ability to make updates to your DID. If something goes wrong, you could be permanently locked out of your account, and Bluesky will not be able to help you recover it.
Therefore, we do not recommend migrating your primary account yet. And we specifically recommend against migrating your main account if you do not understand how PLC operations work.
Also, the Bluesky PDS is not currently accepting incoming migrations (it will in the future). Therefore this is currently a one-way street. If you migrate off of bsky.social, you will not be able to return. However, you will be able to migrate between other PDSs.
This is literally the first thing you see on the page you just linked.
And it was last updated 7 months ago.
So I think you mean to say that account migration in BlueSky is currently in development, and is problematic and essentially experimental, and maybe sometime in the future this will change but also maybe not, who knows.
You are right though that is not possible in ActivityPub.
That there are actually multiple relays. There’s no hard coded single relay, that would be ridiculous and idk why people keep repeating it
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
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?
Several people have self hosted relays. Afaik nothing that anyone has used in “production”, everyone just uses the default one. I expect that will change as people figure it out, and trust in bsky pbc drops with things like the current Turkish censorship incident
Example of self hosting https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3lkwg2djrfk23
The code to run a relay is here https://github.com/bluesky-social/indigo
Your “example of self hosting” is not an example of self hosting the relay, just an appview which is still being fully dependent of other Bluesky services like the relay. It’s pretty unlikely that the relay would be at all practical to host on a RPi5. But even if it was the problem still remains that the network is set up in a way where self-hosting it only results in you creating your own separate bubble, not meaningfully participating in the official one.
I also doubt anyone has selfhosted relays long-term since right now there’s very little purpose to that and the resource requirements are massive as well as keep growing at a fast pace in terms of the disk space required.
Can you explain what do you think “backfill” means in the context of the linked post?
Sorry if that sounds disrespectful but we kinda need to have shared definitions for stuff
… Yeah, as 73ms already pointed out… that first link is just someone setting up an AppView.
To truly run an independent BlueSky system… you would have to run your own PDS, your own Relay, and your own AppView.
Your second link does actually have code and a rough setup guide to running your own Relay, so I will give you thanks and credit for showing that at least it is possible to theoretically do this…
But you say ‘several people run their own Relays’ and then do not evidence that.
The Relay config here is just… how to host your own Relay that would act as a member of BlueSky’s Relay network.
Basically, that is just how to transfer some of BlueSky’s server hosting costs … to yourself.
If you set up a totally independent Relay… could it even interface with BlueSky’s Relays?
As far as I can tell: No.
It would be totally independent… a parellel network, not a federated one that interfaces with the rest of BlueSky, and is thus not actually able to ‘federate’.
What… you would have to do… is set up your own Relay, connect it to basically all the other preexisting PDSs you want to include, then also run your own PDS, then also run your own AppView, and connect it to your own Relay… or just trust someother person running their own AppView, or just trust the official ones.
(But… I think that to connect your own Relay to preexisting PDSs… that would require those PDSs to… disconnect from the mainline BlueSky Relay system… because they can only point to one Relay system at a time… so that’s kind of a problem.)
That would be the only way to make your own … sort of branch of the BlueSky system, that at least in theory might be resistant to centralized censorship from BlueSky.
And again… I am not aware of anyone who has yet done this, or if it would even work at a technical level.
When dealing with software and tech companies, a good rule of thumb is that a planned or possible feature… doesn’t actually exist untill its been provably demonstrated to exist and work.
It is a top down hierarchy, a pyramid.
It’s not a pyramid, it’s a reverse funnel system.
Like a toilet bowl, mounted to the ceiling.
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 https://dustycloud.org/blog/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). https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t
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
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 :\
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?
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.
Edit: this was under the assumption that they took it down completely, but it looks like they only geofenced it. Regardless, if they are pressured enough they would be capable of completing hiding an account worldwide, which isn’t possible with activitypub without the legal alignment of every instance’s country since bluesky on the other hand has sole control of the only relay.
I’m not an expert on how activity pub works, but… You’re saying if I had an account on mastodon.social, and if mastodon.social took down a post from my @user@mastodon.social account that, regardless of takedown reason, it would still be visible from other instances?
I’m trying to understand precisely where the resiliency lies.
I’m saying that if your home server (mastodon.social in your example) 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 and they might have a bunch of users in Turkey, 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.
Edit: Now that I think about it, there’s also the fact that as long as the account itself isn’t limited by their home server, the content in question would be accessible through the federated copies, so if the home server isn’t within Turkey / jurisdiction and doesn’t take down the account, the country trying to take down the content would need to send takedown requests or request to geofence the content to each individual server on the entire fediverse - since the home server would be freely federating it to every server with users who follow the content, otherwise they would need to block every fediverse server and every new one every day that more pop up.
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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!
Funny as I got downvoted to oblivion for saying Bluesky was not really decentralized.
I hope those downvotes were not from here.
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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
Bluesky is a for-profit company that is capitalizing on the Xodus. They may be better for the time being, but the march for more and more profit will end the same as it always does. Enshittification. They are not the good guys, the fediverse is.
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.
Well it is fundamentally better because it does not only have a single party that makes all the calls thanks to the real decentralization. I wouldn’t call all of fediverse “the good guys” but I would call it “good”.
Sure. It’s like comparing having one tyrant, which can be good or bad (but at least isn’t going anywhere) vs a lot of tyrants whose power is limited to their little area, and who will come and go. I guess that’s better, but I don’t think anyone would say it’s “good,” just a bit better.
I like the Fediverse, I just think it only went halfway to solving the problem.
Do you have a proposal for how you’d solve the other half then or just think it isn’t enough?
Yeah, I’m working on something that I think should improve on things, but I keep bringing it up in the hopes that someone beats me to it. Here are some notes:
- P2P network based on something like IPFS or Iroh (I picked Iroh)
- a “community” is a distributed hash table, with posts, comments, etc as structured keys
- everything is cryptographically signed by the author, so you can check for tampering (built-in feature of Iroh)
- moderation is also distributed, based on “trust”; everyone is a moderator, and you “trust” others’ moderation either explicitly or by happening to moderate similarly; options are “like,” “dislike,” “relevant,” “report” (spam, CSAM, etc)
- everyone contributes a little storage to the network, and you can adjust your storage quota
Some interesting side effects of this design:
- single namespace - no “instances” since hosting is distributed (so just “Technology” instead of “Technology@lemmy.world”)
- everyone will see a different feed due to differences in moderation choices
- no concept of “all” since you wouldn’t sync communities you don’t care about - I would add a discovery mechanism to help here
- could be “sneakernetted” if countries block this service, provided you have a way to discover other users in each closed region
- nobody can censor you since moderation is opt-in, so I literally cannot respond to takedown requests by governments
- there’s a very real risk of echo chambers, but that’s on the user not centralized mods
When launching, I’d have a default set of mods that automatically “block” things like CSAM, but users can choose to remove those and/or adjust weights. The idea is for moderation to be transparent, but also something users aren’t expected to change.
The only hosting needs would be:
- relay servers to connect people - relay servers would be federated and incredibly lightweight
- storage instances - only needed in the early days until enough people join the network
- website for documentation and whatnot
It’s very early days (still working on the P2P part, but have a POC for the moderation algorithm). I’ll probably post once I feel like it’s actually useful, which won’t be for a while.
There’s always gonna be an admin of some kind unless we all run our own instances, but that ends up with everyone just in large echo chambers again, as they federate only with people they agree with, or to scream at people they don’t.
That’s not necessarily true. Is there an admin of BitTorrent? Not really, people just contribute resources and the network keeps on trucking.
I’d like to see more exploration of P2P networks like BitTorrent. It should be that a single person leaving the network doesn’t impact anyone, data just gets shuffled so it stays available. The tricky part is moderation, but surely that’s a solvable problem.
For sure. Not that we don’t have problems, but corporate overlords mining our data or censoring us for political back scratching aren’t among them. That’s all imma trying to say.
Nothing is really stopping them from mining your data on Lemmy, all they need is to create an instance and federate, and then get can hoover up whatever they want.
Censorship is more difficult, sure. But we’re still subject to whatever arbitrary censorship the mods and admins want.
I think the Fediverse is on net better, but I do think the model has many other problems, and that it’s more of a stepping stone to something better. But being “better” doesn’t mean we’re “good” and the other options are “bad,” it just means we make different tradeoffs. There’s a very real risk of large instances shutting down because the admins lost interest, for example, and that’s less of a concern for a for-profit operation.
I guess my point is to not oversell the Fediverse. It’s cool, hence why I’m here, but it’s far from perfect.
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!
God damn it. People on the Turkey subreddit were running a campaign to move from X to Bluesky because X was honoring the requests of the Turkish Government to take down footage of police brutality and shit.
I and many others have told people to NOT go to Bluesky because it was “owned” by Jack Dorsey and could get bad as Twitter did.
Of course, absolutely nobody listened. Some celebrities also even moved to Bluesky (including the comedian and actor Cem Yılmaz, one of the most known amongst the people. Basically the Jim Carrey of Turkey.) And now THIS happens. Bravo.
I remember seeing some telling others to use OperaGX because a Turkish PARODY ACCOUNT of the official X account posted a meme that supports the protests. I said it’s stupid to support OperaGX because of who is behind it and one of them had the balls to say “Bruh like a browser changes anything your info is everywhere”
So mind boggling.
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.
Ya, the marketing blitz here and on Reddit was nuts. Thankfully the PR-bullshit has calmed down some.
I am functionally a pr dude for atproto (bluesky) on here because people repeat so much disinfo, and I have “someone is wrong on the internet syndrome” 😭
However, atproto and bluesky are still distinct and I am pretty appalled at a fair amount of bluesky’s recent decisions, esp this one
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.
And now you know why corporations and politicians don’t use mastodon
Wow, all the bsky lovers are now facing the reality. None of the corpos have user’s interest in mind. They only care about numbers: number of active users’ data that they can sell to the highest bidder.
Don’t replace X with Bluesky! Go to Mastodon and other Federalised platforms. That is the only way to escape corporate-sponsored fascism.
But I don’t want to sit alone in a room.
Not sure if you were joking but Mastodon has substantially more users than Lemmy.
Averaging 1 million users/month versus Lemmy’s 50k.
And yet, I feel like I struggle to find relevant content more on Mastodon than on Lemmy. Maybe I just still don’t know how to Mastodon.
It’s not just you, there’s been a lot of threads on let me talking about it but the problem with Mastodon is the fact that there is no content recommendation algorithm. You basically just get shown stuff from your local instance and maybe stuff it’s Federated with. Which is pretty much guaranteed to be a bunch of useless garbage nobody is interested in and random cat pictures.
Bluesky is not perfect, but it’s better than X and i can actually find content i want. I’ve tried so many times to Mastodon and it’s just not worth it. Finding content is a huge effort and i don’t want to put that effort in.
Blue Sky learned very quickly that I’m interested in artists content and now when I open it I find at least one new artist to follow each day so I can just open it scroll through the people I’m following look at the Discover tab to find a new one whose art I like and feel better that’s just not going to happen on Mastodon
Totally agree. I like the Fediverse (that’s why I’m here), but it is just too hard to find interesting content on mastodon. This way it will never attract a large crowd.
Very much same
I feel like this is probably the biggest problem with mastodon after the on-boarding. Not only does someone actually need to understand instances and put in more effort to sign up, when they do there’s like absolutely no good way to find new stuff, it’s all just basically random
I understand the “no algorithm” stance on things but jesus would it be too much to let me sort by top of the day? I want to see what people are talking about, what’s going on, not just what ever happened to be posted in the latest minute.
This is a problem I have with a bunch of other fediverse app (Pixelfed & Loops primarily) and it seriously bothers me that there isn’t any real option to sort anything except reverse chronologically, and the ability to do so is the only reason I keep coming back to Lemmy over all of the rest of fediverse fr
Same experience
But don’t you already when you peepee or poopoo and post from the bathroom. *replies it as I poopooing
No offense but I think your effort is wasted on the people (already) here.
You’re right. The effort of writing 2 sentences to promote a platform some people may not have checked out in some time, if at all, was definitely wasted. I’ll remember that next time.
should’ve put an /s there maybe, don’t want to curb your enthusiasm of writing 2 sentences to promote a platform some people may not have checked out in some time, if at all. Do your thing lol
It costs money to run and admin servers though
Same on lemmy… Yet, here we are? I’d call that a win.
I’d rather have a bunch of smaller dudes hosting servers than yet another US multinational that will use their money to destroy democracies around the world.
Serious question: what is a US multinational?
probably meant US conglemerate
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.
https://bsky.app/profile/ssg.dev/post/3lmvrdmkdnc2d
Censorship requests from the Turkish government are only being applied in the official bluesky app. Third-party apps continue to show censored posts. Feels like that might be relevant
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.
Do they have the choice?
The account is still up and viewable for me. US.
I’ve been on the fence about joining Bluesky but I think I am not going to bother.
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.
Watching how quickly all these companies crumble, it really is astonishing the Obama and Clinton didn’t take on Fox News for all it’s bullshit.
Corpos aren’t afraid of the Democrats. They own them.
Empowered career democrats don’t care. They are complicit with the schemes.
Obama called out Fox News before, I remember something like all the other news organizations backed Fox News. They claimed an attack on any one of them was an attack of all of them or something.
I believe there are laws in the EU that would be violated by many rightwing posts (such as glorifying nazis in Germany). The litmus test would be if a complaint about these violations would cause an account to be banned.
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.
