There's a lot of discussion of Mississippi's age verification law for social media today, after Bluesky announced they're blocking the state.
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It‘s not only the registration, it‘s the complete usage of the service. Tricky thing.
In my eyes, this will be just the tip of the iceberg. Mississippi now, what reason comes next? DJT wanting to exclude specific groups of users? Cut off whole countries? Who knows... There will be additional reasons and if you ask me, this is just the beginning with the ugly potential to turn into censorship.
Got the point, but surely they will have more legal tools than I do with my single-user Mastodon-instance - which has registrations disabled, but doesn‘t prevent any country from reaching it.
️The way I view it is that Bluesky is a new company that is growing fast, while a site like Pornhub has been around longer and I'm sure has a large legal team that monitors laws all the time. If Pornhub said it was better to cut their losses and see if waiting out and or not seeing a good legal standing to fight with these states, Bluesky likely didn't have much of a chance.
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That appears to be you avoiding explaining how a CEO of a for-profit company could censor an entire "decentralized" "open source" app for millions of people.
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Usually Lemmy/PieFed use the first line of a Mastodon post as the title. You shouldn't need a CW for that.
@squirrel you're right, and in fact it did it that way even though there was a CW on this post for the Mastodon audience. It's a good example of it not really being what I wanted. Admittedly, my bad, I should have taken Lemmy's behavior into account and crafted a first line that would also work well as a title!
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Yes and these comments also show up on mastodon.
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I'm exhausted with all this. And it's not my fight. The fight belongs to the people of Mississippi. They elected their "leaders."
Until I know for sure that I am not on the hook to pay a $10K penalty for each person on my servers, I've blocked all Mississippi IP addresses from logging in and registering on my Mastodon, Piefed, and Friendica servers.
Wyoming will probably be next.
Have you blocked the UK as well then? Same sort of thing here.
Otherwise why can't you ignore Mississippi but can ignore the UK?
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That appears to be you avoiding explaining how a CEO of a for-profit company could censor an entire "decentralized" "open source" app for millions of people.
@Kirk they aren't censoring the entire network, just their official client app for it
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@Kirk they aren't censoring the entire network, just their official client app for it
wrote last edited by [email protected]More evasion. "Client" is Bluesky's techno jargon for "app". You still need a BlueSky account to use a client. And you can't get one of those in Mississippi.
Maybe it would help your argument that the thing BlueSky themselves says is happening is not really happening if you could produce a BlueSky post
that is available inposted from Mississippi? -
Have you blocked the UK as well then? Same sort of thing here.
Otherwise why can't you ignore Mississippi but can ignore the UK?
On feddit.online I block both the UK and France in addition to Mississippi. However, I believe in a future upgrade, PieFed can be configured to block people from specific countries from accessing NSFW and NSFL communities (feddit.online doesn't allow NSFL communities). When that upgrade happens, I will open it again to the UK and France but keep it closed for Mississippi.
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More evasion. "Client" is Bluesky's techno jargon for "app". You still need a BlueSky account to use a client. And you can't get one of those in Mississippi.
Maybe it would help your argument that the thing BlueSky themselves says is happening is not really happening if you could produce a BlueSky post
that is available inposted from Mississippi?@Kirk Are you there or do you have a VPN there? I have no way of checking how things are looking from those IPs (ProtonVPN has some US addresses, but none in that state)
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@Kirk Are you there or do you have a VPN there? I have no way of checking how things are looking from those IPs (ProtonVPN has some US addresses, but none in that state)
I am there and it's not available.
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I am there and it's not available.
@Kirk Ok, how about this here: https://deer.social/profile/bsky.app/post/3lwzadikbrc2u
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@Kirk Ok, how about this here: https://deer.social/profile/bsky.app/post/3lwzadikbrc2u
That's just a frontend. It still requires a bsky.app account.
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That's just a frontend. It still requires a bsky.app account.
well I mean technically not, Kuba is self-hosting his account at https://lab.martianbase.net/
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That's just a frontend. It still requires a bsky.app account.
@Kirk Are you talking about reading posts or making posts or what? You said "produce a BlueSky post that is available in Mississippi", you can view that link in Mississippi.
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Other sites should join to show the citizens how a blacked-out internet looks like.
We've done it before.
Back when reddit was young, before social media apps captured the content. It just doesn't matter now. Critical mass of the internet is corporations.
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@Kirk Are you talking about reading posts or making posts or what? You said "produce a BlueSky post that is available in Mississippi", you can view that link in Mississippi.
You're right good job lol you managed to evade again.
A CEO is censoring a geographical region. That is just not something that can happen on a decentralized platform.
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Other sites should join to show the citizens how a blacked-out internet looks like.
wrote last edited by [email protected]No, "other sites" should disobey unjust laws
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You're right good job lol you managed to evade again.
A CEO is censoring a geographical region. That is just not something that can happen on a decentralized platform.
@Kirk Sigh, I'm not evading… I don't know what else I can tell you.
You said you thought it was open source. I showed you links to GitHub. I said they aren't censoring the entire network, just the official client. You said you wanted proof and to show you how you can view a Bluesky post in Mississippi. I showed you two custom clients that you can access from MS and one of those you can sign up through.
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I'm exhausted with all this. And it's not my fight. The fight belongs to the people of Mississippi. They elected their "leaders."
Until I know for sure that I am not on the hook to pay a $10K penalty for each person on my servers, I've blocked all Mississippi IP addresses from logging in and registering on my Mastodon, Piefed, and Friendica servers.
Wyoming will probably be next.
Do you live in Mississippi? Because there's no reason to capitulate otherwise unless you plan on going there on vacation (no reason to do that either).
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@Kirk Sigh, I'm not evading… I don't know what else I can tell you.
You said you thought it was open source. I showed you links to GitHub. I said they aren't censoring the entire network, just the official client. You said you wanted proof and to show you how you can view a Bluesky post in Mississippi. I showed you two custom clients that you can access from MS and one of those you can sign up through.
But you are evading. The technicalities you speak of are irrelevant to the topic of censorship. The fact that parts of BlueSky are technically open source, or that other BlueSky apps exist is irrelevant to the people who are functionally denied access to speak due to the decision of a single company. There is no other "instance" we can go sign up on like with ActivityPub apps.
(Here is the part where you say I could technically get all my friends to self-host their own PDS as though it is easy and fun).
