They're right to point out that laws like this are primarily motivated by government control of speech. On a recent Times article about the UK's Online Safety Act:
> Luckily, we don’t have to imagine the scene because the High Court judgment details the last government’s reaction when it discovered this potentially rather large flaw. First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. They suggested asking Ofcom to think again and the minister agreed.
And I could keep going. But point being there are a thousand alternative frontends and every other bit or piece to interface with the same bluesky without censorship.
And the only user facing components are the frontend and the PDS. The appview can't even see the user's IP, only the PDS it proxies through. So if you move to an independent PDS and use any third party frontend, even if you use the bluesky PBC appview, there is no direct contact/exposure to the company that could be exploited.
The client/frontend calls out to a set of XRPC endpoints on the user's PDS. The user can use any PDS they want but yes most users are on the bluesky "mushroom" PDSes. There are plenty of open enrollment PDS nowadays if you care to look around and want to switch away.
The appview have no ability to interact with the user directly so if you use any non bluesky PDS and non-bluesky client/frontend (both relatively trivial to do), then the appview is basically a (near) stateless view of the network which you can substitute with any appview you want (the client can choose the appview to proxy to with an http header) without ever touching bluesky the company.
And of course there are multiple appview hosts. As well as relay hosts (which the appviews depend on but not the user/client).
There are plenty of ways to go about using bluesky without yourself or the services you use ever touching bluesky the company's infrastructure.
Does it actually? (Genuine question.) The article doesn't get into specifics about how the block is implemented, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some non-trivial way around it.
Or, conversely, I'm unsure if other decentralized platforms would be unable to implement a similar block.
TLDR it's a single geoloc RPC call clientside. you can just tag it with an adblock filter to kill it. Or use any third party client (my comment to OP has a bunch of them listed).
Bluesky is not decentralized. The AT protocol is - albeit with few large integrators besides Bluesky, but it isn't susceptible to like 51% attacks or anything so that's mostly okay.
(I personally don't think Bluesky is a bad idea and I'm glad for more things in the ecosystem. But the point of decentralizing isn't just to protect against editorial constraint by the service owner; it's to protect against government pressure too. Mississippi could go after Mastodon service providers, but it'll cost them a lot more to find and chase 'em all).
If you think technology will protect you from censorship look at China. They can stop all but the most persistent users. It is just a question of how much they care to; they have the means. And most users are closer to Homer Simpson than Edward Snowden.
If you get 75% coverage (or let's say the 5 biggest ISPs here, comcast and so on) you don't need to really chase the long tail of small providers that hard. It would effectively be unavailable to non technical people at that point.
They don't need to. If only 1% of the people are able to access censored content and therefore hold censored ideas, the majority will treat them as crazy pariahs.
It's the same mechanism that makes us consider the 1% of flat earthers crazy. Sadly the mechanism works based on how many people believe a thing, not whether it's true, so it can also block true things if only 1% of people believe them.
Universities? The primary revenue source for basically 100% of US universities is the federal government. The concept of a private university in the US is little more than a legal technicality.
China isn't an example of the impact of poltics vs technology because chinese people generally don't use de-centralized or private tech in the first place
They're right to point out that laws like this are primarily motivated by government control of speech. On a recent Times article about the UK's Online Safety Act:
> Luckily, we don’t have to imagine the scene because the High Court judgment details the last government’s reaction when it discovered this potentially rather large flaw. First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act. They suggested asking Ofcom to think again and the minister agreed.
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/online-s...
And surprise surprise, it's in the name of "protecting children", the same thing red blooded Americans have been falling for for decades.
Some people would say "this is exactly why we can't have good things".
https://archive.is/3pave
Other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989125
How exactly can a website restrict itself in a single state?
They're blocking IPs that look Mississippi-ish. I assume just using Maxmind or some other IP geolocation database.
Badly. Anyone whose IP has recently been geolocated in that state will be swept up in the ban (and anyone with a VPN can evade it)
IP geolocation
https://archive.is/r8cfH
This proves that Bluesky is not decentralised, btw.
FWIW the only "site that goes dark" is the https://bsky.app website frontend/mobile app.
And the "block" is a single clientside geo-location call that can be intercepted/blocked by adblock, etc.
And the "block" doesn't apply to any third party clients. So that includes:
- https://deer.social (forked client)
- https://zeppelin.social (forked client + independent appview)
- https://blacksky.community (forked client + independent appview + custom rust impl of PDS + custom rust impl of relay)
And a bunch of others like:
- https://anisota.net/
- https://pinksky.app/
- https://graysky.app/
And I could keep going. But point being there are a thousand alternative frontends and every other bit or piece to interface with the same bluesky without censorship.
And the only user facing components are the frontend and the PDS. The appview can't even see the user's IP, only the PDS it proxies through. So if you move to an independent PDS and use any third party frontend, even if you use the bluesky PBC appview, there is no direct contact/exposure to the company that could be exploited.
but Bluesky runs the API that all of these tools rely on
No it does not. That is the trick.
The client/frontend calls out to a set of XRPC endpoints on the user's PDS. The user can use any PDS they want but yes most users are on the bluesky "mushroom" PDSes. There are plenty of open enrollment PDS nowadays if you care to look around and want to switch away.
The appview have no ability to interact with the user directly so if you use any non bluesky PDS and non-bluesky client/frontend (both relatively trivial to do), then the appview is basically a (near) stateless view of the network which you can substitute with any appview you want (the client can choose the appview to proxy to with an http header) without ever touching bluesky the company.
And of course there are multiple appview hosts. As well as relay hosts (which the appviews depend on but not the user/client).
There are plenty of ways to go about using bluesky without yourself or the services you use ever touching bluesky the company's infrastructure.
Where does the firehose stream originate? From individual PDSes, or from the Bluesky relay that aggregates their repo events?
How do I do this then?
Does it actually? (Genuine question.) The article doesn't get into specifics about how the block is implemented, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is some non-trivial way around it.
Or, conversely, I'm unsure if other decentralized platforms would be unable to implement a similar block.
TLDR it's a single geoloc RPC call clientside. you can just tag it with an adblock filter to kill it. Or use any third party client (my comment to OP has a bunch of them listed).
Bluesky is not decentralized. The AT protocol is - albeit with few large integrators besides Bluesky, but it isn't susceptible to like 51% attacks or anything so that's mostly okay.
[dupe]
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989125
Meanwhile, nothing has changed on Mastodon.
(I personally don't think Bluesky is a bad idea and I'm glad for more things in the ecosystem. But the point of decentralizing isn't just to protect against editorial constraint by the service owner; it's to protect against government pressure too. Mississippi could go after Mastodon service providers, but it'll cost them a lot more to find and chase 'em all).
If you think technology will protect you from censorship look at China. They can stop all but the most persistent users. It is just a question of how much they care to; they have the means. And most users are closer to Homer Simpson than Edward Snowden.
Then we need to make every user the most persistent user. How many governments have given up because Tor Browser ships anti-censorship defaults?
Mississippi would have a hell of a time convincing every ISP in the US to put up a firewall too.
They could try, but not even China could build an impregnable firewall.
They don't have to go after all of them, they just have to make an example of one. See: qwest's Joseph Nacchio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
God, Nacchio's story is infuriating.
"Sorry, you can't use this evidence that exonerates you - it would be bad for the government."
If you get 75% coverage (or let's say the 5 biggest ISPs here, comcast and so on) you don't need to really chase the long tail of small providers that hard. It would effectively be unavailable to non technical people at that point.
AT&T, Comcast, C-Spire. I don't know anyone who is on anything else here unless it's through a university.
They don't need to. If only 1% of the people are able to access censored content and therefore hold censored ideas, the majority will treat them as crazy pariahs.
It's the same mechanism that makes us consider the 1% of flat earthers crazy. Sadly the mechanism works based on how many people believe a thing, not whether it's true, so it can also block true things if only 1% of people believe them.
six months ago I would have said the same thing about US universities.
Universities? The primary revenue source for basically 100% of US universities is the federal government. The concept of a private university in the US is little more than a legal technicality.
technology does not work unless you use it
What does that mean?
China isn't an example of the impact of poltics vs technology because chinese people generally don't use de-centralized or private tech in the first place
Or they pick a few and make an example out of them.
I believe the example would be "Good luck with that I'm in Germany."
That would be mastodon.social, yes, but there's lots of instances that are not.
Like I run one and I'm in Louisiana and I sure do not have the funds to mount a legal defense.