Bluesky has started honoring takedown requests from Turkish government

thanks - you've got it. i forgot about mastadon. ironic, really, since it's the resource that everyone will be scrambling for in a few days. mark my words: something horrible is going to happen this weekend, and it will change your life forever.

someone else said something that made me think i'm conflating Bluesky with Mastadon. and apparently "conflating" is my word of the day.

Oh I see here that those were your top tier gas station tier graphics. Your eagerness to share knowledge that gets you excited is commendable and people like you are what makes Lemmy worth using. I hope you have a terrific day.

People are allowed to run their own relays, but it's really expensive and nobody wants to.

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.

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?

[email protected]

I saw it somewhere and it just sticks. I assumed that pronunciation as well

That is indeed the intended pronunciation.

They're planning on migrating to the new MLS group messaging encryption standard, which is built to support federated messaging encryption (more efficient than the current Matrix protocol)

(also, Matrix are also planning on adopting it, and the RCS spec is getting it too)

It's long to take a while though. The standard is very recent and nobody has a complete implementation yet.

Why rent? If you have fiber and aren't behind CGNAT you can host from your home

That's just if you want a complete copy. You can choose to store only parts of it, and retrieve what's missing from other relay servers when you need it.

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.

https://bsky.app/profile/bnewbold.net/post/3lkpdjgj5pk2i

Bluesky is federated in terms of that you can swap out arbitrary components and let anything talk to anything. Any app can talk to any appview, that appview can talk to any feed generator and moderation labeler for you, all three of these can talk to any (and multiple!) relays, etc.

This isn't 1:1 federation, there's no reason for one feed generator to talk to another, no reason for an appview to talk to another, no reason for two PDS account hosts to talk. Users on different appviews rely on their respective appviews having at least one shared relay to be able to see each other, and that relay can be swapped out. Every other component look at trusted moderation labelers for flagging content and takedowns - and they all choose independently who they trust. Every PDS just wants to talk to one or more relays to make their users' posts visible.

So you can have a pair of users on the exact same set of infrastructure (most regular bluesky users), but you could also have 2 users sharing nothing but the bluesky relay (or another relay) and still talking to each other.

Since it very heavily relies on domains for readable addresses (using a DID directly is possible but annoying) it's kinda hard to use in isolated physical networks. Technically you could make an app host its user's repository and hold a copy of the signing key and publish it locally, but you'd lose a lot of thread visibility unless the app archives everything to republish. Or else you can have a separate offline only lexicon for posting locally, I guess, imitating scuttlebutt.

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.

The other servers do cache the content for some time yes, but if your server is based in a country not friendly to your posts then you are vulnerable to takedowns as you say and you could be inconvenienced by having the admins of your server delete your account or something.

The benefit I'm saying we have in the fediverse is that you can pick a server in a politically safe area (ie outside Turkey in this case), so they are less likely to comply, especially if they are small or don't care about being blocked by that country (that's usually the only thing they can do unless you have an office or staff there that can be arrested - less likely to be the case if your server is run by some dude in another country).