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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 ?

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...

country-level content moderation on bluesky is seemingly configured on the client-side. i wonder if this is just a perf optimization, or a third-party client can bypass regional restrictions?

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.

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.

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

"yet"

… for now.