This week, Bluesky hid accounts in for users in Turkey after a government order. I take a closer look at government censorship and ATProto, how geographic moderation labelers work, and the impact on the future of decentralised social networks.
The articles take is actually much more nuanced and neutral than that, but it still really amounts to the same thing.
Even if there are other options for viewing the limited content, those options are not widely used, and as such, the content block is generally effective.
oh no! wasn’t bluesky decentralized and federated?!?
The articles take is actually much more nuanced and neutral than that, but it still really amounts to the same thing.
I agree that the article is much more nuanced than that: “But how Bluesky and ATProto handle moderation, and the way that it can be sidestepped, show that [decentralisation] is not a hard requirement.”
I would like to make one thing that the article is alluding to clearer, that is, this is a cat-and-mouse game. So far the Turkish government is happy with having “significantly restricted the visibility of accounts they deem unwanted” but the moment Turkish netizens start sidestepping the moderation (e.g. via third-party clients), the government will step up their game as well and will ask Bluesky to moderate content at AppView or perhaps even at Relay level.
I know that this is a cat-and-mouse game because web censorship in Turkey started with DNS-tampering at first, which people started circumventing by simply changing their DNS servers, and then the government implemented IP-blocking (including of popular VPN providers) and even Deep Packet Inspection. I’ve experienced this first hand but you can read more about it here: Internet censorship in Turkey (2015)
I don’t think that it’s all that hard to blacklist Fediverse hosts, if that’s the comparison made. You just have a spider that walks the federation network, builds a list of hosts, and update your blacklist accordingly. A larger blacklist will mean more entries to stick on routers or whatever, but I assume that they’re gonna be able to scale pretty well.
oh no! wasn’t bluesky decentralized and federated?!? how is this possible?!? /s
You cannot evade country-wide bans. Federation doesn’t help. That’s not how this works.
The articles take is actually much more nuanced and neutral than that, but it still really amounts to the same thing.
Even if there are other options for viewing the limited content, those options are not widely used, and as such, the content block is generally effective.
I agree that the article is much more nuanced than that: “But how Bluesky and ATProto handle moderation, and the way that it can be sidestepped, show that [decentralisation] is not a hard requirement.”
I would like to make one thing that the article is alluding to clearer, that is, this is a cat-and-mouse game. So far the Turkish government is happy with having “significantly restricted the visibility of accounts they deem unwanted” but the moment Turkish netizens start sidestepping the moderation (e.g. via third-party clients), the government will step up their game as well and will ask Bluesky to moderate content at AppView or perhaps even at Relay level.
I know that this is a cat-and-mouse game because web censorship in Turkey started with DNS-tampering at first, which people started circumventing by simply changing their DNS servers, and then the government implemented IP-blocking (including of popular VPN providers) and even Deep Packet Inspection. I’ve experienced this first hand but you can read more about it here: Internet censorship in Turkey (2015)
Nostr relays over tor with snowflake proxy
A Lemmy or mastodon instance could just make an onion address?
I don’t think that it’s all that hard to blacklist Fediverse hosts, if that’s the comparison made. You just have a spider that walks the federation network, builds a list of hosts, and update your blacklist accordingly. A larger blacklist will mean more entries to stick on routers or whatever, but I assume that they’re gonna be able to scale pretty well.