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Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

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Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#831

Post by pfraze »

kevinak wrote: post #751
pfraze wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bluesky team worked previously on IPFS and Dat/Hypercore and Secure Scuttlebutt. Whyrusleeping - one of the core authors of IPFS - has been an active technical advisor from the start. ATProto is basically those p2p & content addressed techs moved into the server stack. None of us are bullish on client side p2p for large scale publishing or social applications, and we spent 10 years each doing that.

I'd love to hear what the Bluesky team thinks of Nostr. It seems pretty damning to me that a founder of Bluesky is now talking up the latter.

Dorsey funded Bluesky and not much else.

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#832

Post by [deleted] »

avsteele wrote: post #707
nickpsecurity wrote: post #7

One of the linked articles said it boiled down to X being ordered to censor political opponents of those in power. They chose not to. I’m glad. Now, traffic is going to Bluesky. I wonder if this means that Bluesky has or will be offered the same choice. We might see what the character of that organization is by what choice they make.

At this point, I'm only mildly surprised by the pro-censorship sentiments which are prevalent here at HN. Still, for those with an open mind... Read the NY times article; it is not amazing well done but serves to show how unaccountable the orders of the judge are. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/world/americas/brazil-x-b... Then read the orders from the judge (as claimed by X). "Secretly ban this sitting senator w…

[deleted]

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#833

Post by HelloMcFly »

avsteele wrote: post #707
nickpsecurity wrote: post #7

One of the linked articles said it boiled down to X being ordered to censor political opponents of those in power. They chose not to. I’m glad. Now, traffic is going to Bluesky. I wonder if this means that Bluesky has or will be offered the same choice. We might see what the character of that organization is by what choice they make.

At this point, I'm only mildly surprised by the pro-censorship sentiments which are prevalent here at HN. Still, for those with an open mind... Read the NY times article; it is not amazing well done but serves to show how unaccountable the orders of the judge are. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/31/world/americas/brazil-x-b... Then read the orders from the judge (as claimed by X). "Secretly ban this sitting senator w…

When Musk is picking-and-choosing where freedom of expression matters (e.g., Turkey, India, publishing his plane's location information, banning users writing "cisgender", etc.), I don't think it's "pro-censorship" to not be on his side here because this doesn't feel motivated by true principle and puts his motives and associated narrative into highly suspect territory for me.

Is some selective censorship from Musk better than nothing? Since his selective censorship appears to be primarily aimed at supporting right-wing causes, I have a hard time feeling like the answer is "yes".

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#834

Post by just_testing »

pfraze wrote: post #78
jazzyjackson wrote: post #71

Is there any plan to offload hosting costs to users repos or do the relays have to bear the cost of images / videos ? It just seems very incongruous to me for a decentralized app to suffer from hugs of death like this link is right now. I actually tried to pull this up on the wayback machine but they seem to have only crawled as far as the butterfly logo ? Is this intentional ? I know that bluesky likes to give users…

The bad crawl for internet archive is because it's a giant SPA. It's a react native codebase which, while irritating for web users, allows us to target all the platforms without building multiple apps. Kind of a life-saver. Relays actually don't process media; that's up to the applications. We intentionally keep the repo-hosting costs low (and they'll get lower soon) so that self-hosting your data and keypairs remain…

Are you using a framework for developing with react native? I'd love to know if you have some blog posts on the UI part.

Thanks!

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#835

Post by brewtide »

diggan wrote: post #687
declan_roberts wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blueskey seems to have all of these neat features that developers/nerds seem to like, but literally nobody else cares about.

Isn't that how most applications start, catering to some piece of the nerdery population? For Facebook, it was university nerds before it started to spread, Twitter just had some subsection of the nerds at first, Mastodon/ActivityPub goes after the decentralized/distributed nerds and Bluesky somewhere in the middle the two latter ones.

Let back away a bit more. Isn't this how the Internet started?

I see a trend.

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#836

Post by insane_dreamer »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #772
insane_dreamer wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moraes was granted that authority by the Supreme Court, so it is legal. Whether it's right or wrong is a different question, but Moraes' actions are not "illegal". Moraes does seem to be acting like an unaccountable little dictator in his fiefdom, which is dangerous. But then again Elon acts like an unaccountable little dictator in his fiefdom, which is also dangerous, so I don't really mind that X is getting banned.…

> Moraes was granted that authority by the Supreme Court, so it is legal. This is not exactly true, so let me explain it. Moraes is himself a justice on the Supreme Court. He was not granted authority by it. His own claim actually acknowledges that no new laws (either legislation or constitutional amendments) were passed to give him this power. Instead his claimed power rests on something more confusing and again, il…

Supreme Court has since confirmed Moraes decision re X, so that settles it.

Also, whether some action breaks your idea of separation of powers doesn’t make it illegal (that’s for the judiciary to determine). You may think it’s I democratic but that’s a separate matter (I think a lot of things in the US are undemocratic, especially considering we elected a anti-democracy corrupt businessman as president and may elected him again)

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#837

Post by jazzyjackson »

verdverm wrote: post #675
AlienRobot wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand. Are you trying to say if a judge says "you must stop displaying this content" Bluesky will argue "we can't do that"? I think Bluesky would get banned.

Bluesky could implement it in their moderation service, but that does not mean users in Brazil would be impacted by it. Users could swap moderation service or swap interfaces The one thing that could happen is the PDS deleting the record for everyone, everywhere One thing to separate is Bluesky from ATProto. Bluesky is the default implementation of the 4 core pieces, but one could use alternatives for all of them as…

If you're providing tools to circumvent government bans you're gonna get banned, the government won't care about your federated moderation layer

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#838

Post by Wytwwww »

fjkdlsjflkds wrote: post #559
Wytwwww wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Exactly. It is perfectly legal for a private entity (such as Twitter) to engage in censorship, as they regularly do so. So, the argument that "we can't do that, because that would be illegal" doesn't really fly. These are in no way equivalent. e.g. the first amendment only protects you from the government not from private organizations (if anything them deciding to publish or not to publish your content is an expre…

> These are in no way equivalent. e.g. the first amendment only protects you from the government not from private organizations (if anything them deciding to publish or not to publish your content is an expression of freedom of speech and is right that the Supreme Court has confirmed). Sure, but we are not discussing the first amendment, or US law in general. As you must be aware, protection of freedom of expression…

> Ad hominem

I'm not sure what do you mean by that. How is this specific decision, or some of the other examples/laws you've mentioned not authoritarian at least to some extent? It doesn't mean that they are not necessarily or unjustifiable in every single case.

> Trying to change subjects without addressing the point I made

I kept repeating this point in every comment I made. Yet you ignored it from the very beginning. Also it's not a different subject, it's intrinsically related to the decision made to ban Twitter since that's how the judge decided to enforce it.

> without addressing the point I made could be seen as moving goalposts

The point that different countries have different laws? Well that's a fact, not sure how can I address it. However I'm curious where do you draw the line? e.g. the USSR had laws, Russia has laws, Venezuela has laws so does China, Hungary and every other country. They all have vary different attitudes to freedom of speech and a bunch of other matters, do you believe that they are all equally valid, reasonable and legitimate?

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#839

Post by vitorgrs »

extraduder_ire wrote: post #610

For anyone with a strong enough computer, you can see the firehose stream of what people are posting on bluesky live here: https://firesky.tv/ The stream has noticeably more Portuguese in it these last couple of days.

Not even strong computer but worked fine here. I guess using Firefox helps :)

Re: Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

#840

Post by fjkdlsjflkds »

Wytwwww wrote: post #838
fjkdlsjflkds wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These are in no way equivalent. e.g. the first amendment only protects you from the government not from private organizations (if anything them deciding to publish or not to publish your content is an expression of freedom of speech and is right that the Supreme Court has confirmed). Sure, but we are not discussing the first amendment, or US law in general. As you must be aware, protection of freedom of expression…

> Ad hominem I'm not sure what do you mean by that. How is this specific decision, or some of the other examples/laws you've mentioned not authoritarian at least to some extent? It doesn't mean that they are not necessarily or unjustifiable in every single case. > Trying to change subjects without addressing the point I made I kept repeating this point in every comment I made. Yet you ignored it from the very beginni…

> I'm not sure what do you mean by that.

I mean that "trying to argue based on (your perception of) the person you are talking to, rather than what is being discussed, is a bad argumentation strategy".

> How is this specific decision, or some of the other examples/laws you've mentioned not authoritarian at least to some extent?

Even if it is (which you surely haven't demonstrated), in what way does that imply that I (or anyone else) feel "appeal towards authoritarianism"? Stick to discussing the subject, instead of discussing the people you are talking to, if you want to be taken seriously.

> It doesn't mean that they are not necessarily or unjustifiable in every single case.

If they are legally, morally and ethically justifiable (at least sometimes), then it's not really "authoritarianism": it's just "rule-of-law".

> I kept repeating this point in every comment I made. Yet you ignored it from the very beginning.

No. The only time you mentioned it (in a response to me) was when I called you out. If you disagree, please post the supposed previous comment you made (in response to me) where you bring up the VPN ban issue.

> Also it's not a different subject, it's intrinsically related to the decision made to ban Twitter since that's how the judge decided to enforce it.

From what I understand, the only thing that was banned was the use of circumvention technologies for the purpose of accessing Twitter (which seems legitimate if his previous ruling is to be effectively enforced). From what I understand, the blanket ban of VPN technologies (which does not seem legitimate to me) has been reversed.

> The point that different countries have different laws? Well that's a fact, not sure how can I address it.

The way to address it is to accept that US laws (and US standards of free speech) do not apply to this case, since it is outside of US jurisdiction. Furthermore, to accept that, if a company wants to operate in a certain country, it kind of has to abide by its laws and regulations (regardless of whether they are legitimate or not).

> However I'm curious where do you draw the line? e.g. the USSR had laws, Russia has laws, Venezuela has laws so does China, Hungary and every other country. They all have vary different attitudes to freedom of speech and a bunch of other matters, do you believe that they are all equally valid, reasonable and legitimate?

Obviously not, but the fact remains: if you want to operate in USSR, Russia, Venezuela, China, Hungary, or wherever, you need to comply with local regulations and laws. Or, of course, you can choose not to, but then it is quite likely that local authorities will do whatever they can to prevent your company from operating in their country.

Musk/Twitter has no problem complying with Turkish and Indian court requests and laws, even when it involves censorship. Yet, it can't seem to do the same when it comes to Brazilian court requests and laws. Strange...

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