so apparently, bluesky has started honoring government takedown requests from turkish government. i wonder what the nature of measures taken are. do the accounts or the content get taken down or do they get geofenced, @jay.bsky.team ?
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it looks like they are restricted only from turkey. the account in question looks fine from other countries, or through VPN. as @fka.dev mentioned, how different PDS situation will unfold in these cases is a bit mystery. bsky.app/profile/gokh...
after a quick test with the help of turkish users, it turns out country-level restrictions in bluesky are only implemented in the official app currently, and they don't apply to third-party apps if they don't implement them.
It should be very easy to test! Lots of third part clients including web based ones such as skychat.social
the risk bluesky is facing by objecting to government censorship requests is a blanket ban from that country. @jay.bsky.team probably considers this a fair compromise to keep bluesky accessible from an authoritarian country as it doesn't have enough international recognition to make a stand for it.
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this obviously stress tests the decentralization claims of bluesky. if everyone's using bsky.app and the country-level bans are implemented on the client-side, how is decentralization relevant? if we start using alternative clients, how do we not fall into malicious honey pots?
it's important to note that, even without decentralization, bluesky is still a better twitter: - not for profit - fully open source - no link downranking - no non-subscriber downranking - no algorithmic chaos - better timeline customization tools - stricter moderation for hate speech