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Bluesky Goes Dark in Mississippi over Age Verification Law
- sherburt3 1y ago[flagged]
- sojournerc 1y agoCool take. Shitting on the south is an age old American tradition. I have a hard time understanding why people gleefully have these attitudes towards fellow human beings. Does someone from Mississippi not deserve factual actual push back against these laws? If we can't fight it there, it'll be in Connecticut soon enough.
- TylerE 1y ago[flagged]
- jrockway 1y agoWhat about the people that didn't vote for this? Every election is 49/51 so when someone says "they're getting what they voted for", half the people are getting the opposite of what they voted for.
- curtisf 1y ago"The Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act" ("HB 1126") was passed essentially unanimously by the Mississippi state legislature.
- sojournerc 1y agoElected legislature. You haven't proven anything against their point that a minority is unrepresented.
- davesque 1y agoAnd 100% of voters in Mississippi voted for the representatives currently in the legislature?
- TylerE 1y agoIt wasn't close to 51/49. The south doesn't work like that. I've lived here my whole life. In 2024 Mississippi went 61/38 for Trump. They haven't sent a Democrat senator to DC since 1982. In their most recent state house/senate cycle, 2023, overall voting was 62R vs 34D. They voted for this.
- jjj123 1y agoOPs point wasn’t about the exact stats, it’s just that there is a significant percentage of people in a state that don’t agree or support their government. I’d consider 38% significant.
- TylerE 1y agoIn 1980, when Ronald Reagan took 44 of 50 states, Jimmy Carter took 41% of the vote. In electoral terms a party taking 38% of the vote is almost a non-entity. You don't come close to succeeding in a first past the post system with those numbers.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sojournerc 1y ago"here", yet you say "they"... What's that about?
- TylerE 1y agoI live in the south, but not in Mississippi.
- gottorf 1y ago> get them to stop actively voting against their own interests Such a tired trope that I wish would stop. The whole point of a plural democracy is that people will have different interests, and there are few things that rub me the wrong way more than the idea that people are too stupid to recognize what their own interests are and vote accordingly.
- wkat4242 1y agoThe current administration which benefits only billionaires which make up a tiny fraction of the population proves that yes people aren't capable of voting for their interests.
- TylerE 1y agoWhat do call it when they repeatedly vote to slash the health care programs that almost half the state relies on for coverage? For candidates that defund education and basic infrastructure investment? It is objectively against rational self-interest.
- oooyay 1y agoWhile I share your frustration can I also share with you that I think your original take is entirely dim-witted and ignorant that populations are not singular voting blocs? That's to say, I lived in Texas for a long time as a leftist and people like you would come in to dunk on our suffering. Nearly half the state votes Democrat but that didn't matter to folks like you. It's unproductive and isolates more people than it gratifies.
- JustExAWS 1y agoThere is a huge difference between accepting someone’s opinion about supply side economics or US foreign policy or heck even abortion rights than “understanding” someone who doesn’t believe that people shouldn’t be treated equally and with respect because of the color of their skin, their sexuality, etc. I’m from South GA and spent all of my adult life until 3 years ago in Atlanta. I live in another red state now - Florida. I’ve spent enough time in the bigger cities in Texas to have a feel for it. Alabama and Mississippi are just…different.
- ronsor 1y agoI read the comment more as a criticism of Bluesky ("nobody actually uses it [except California liberals?]") than a criticism of Mississippi.
- none_to_remain 1y agoYou could very well read that as praise for Mississippi
- LexiMax 1y agoHating on Mississippi is an age-old Southern tradition. Unless you're from Mississippi, then you hate on Alabama.
- RajT88 1y agoBy any number of metrics, Mississippi is the least developed, most backwater state. My own personal metrics: Everyone's got that once racist uncle. Mine moved gleefully to Alabama. I have never known anyone who moved to Mississippi. Or from there! I bet MS has some amazing old homes out in the swamp with great fishing.
- greenie_beans 1y agoyou're probably from a place that is just as racist and backward as mississippi. maybe new england, the most racist region in the united states? if you feel this way about the south, just say you hate black people and be done with it.
- RajT88 1y agoBlue as they come (Illinois). And on the contrary, I reckon Ohio is far more racist than just about any place I've been. Black folks are just fine by me. Maybe you are trying to read between the lines instead of what I wrote?
- greenie_beans 1y agono, what you say is a common (ignorant) refrain in liberal circles outside of the south
- renewiltord 1y ago[flagged]
- arghandugh 1y agoYour writing is confusing and your use of slurs is disgusting. Stop it.
- renewiltord 1y ago[flagged]
- MisterBastahrd 1y agoWhen you consistently shoot yourself in the face despite all evidence because you believe it'll make you wiser, at some point rational people just need to point out that maybe you've blown your own head off too many times to make intelligent decisions and accept your agency for your actions. Mississippi is governed by fear, full stop. Specifically, a fear that their individual mediocrity will trickle down to their children and so they will vote to make life as difficult as possible just to make it harder for people in even lower social strata to compete with them. I've lived through decades of this stuff and watched it up close and personal. They're SO racist that when you give them statistics about their state and their communities, the first thing they'll do is handwave them away because to them, statistics are irrelevant if they contain data regarding minorities UNLESS said statistics are there to condemn minorities. Same thing with people in different economic classes. Generalizations are there for them to make about other people, not the other way around. Mississippi has one of the higher murder rates? Irrelevant to them because they have a higher number of black folks. Murder rates among whites in the state are high? Irrelevant because it's the poor whites who are murdering each other. At some point, you just have to accept that the conditions they're living in are the conditions they're choosing to live in and treat them accordingly.
- sherburt3 1y agoI live in the south bro. That was a dig towards bluesky being a shitty twitter clone.
- whicks 1y agohttps://archive.is/r8cfH https://archive.is/r8cfH
- wmf 1y agoOther thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989125
- shadowgovt 1y agoMeanwhile, 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).
- Waterluvian 1y agoOr they pick a few and make an example out of them.
- shadowgovt 1y agoI believe the example would be "Good luck with that I'm in Germany."
- egypturnash 1y agoThat 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.
- Forbo 1y agoSounds like a failure to properly build a threat model. Consider relocating your instance and begin using privacy mitigations like VPN. Much cheaper than an attorney.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> the example would be "Good luck with that I'm in Germany” Mississippi is a red state. Bluesky is liberal. I could see the White House turning the dispute into a tariff or defence spat.
- esafak 1y agoIf 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.
- ChrisArchitect 1y ago[dupe] Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989125
- silicon5 1y agoThey'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-safety-act-botched-2xk8xwlps https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/online-s...
- platevoltage 1y agoAnd surprise surprise, it's in the name of "protecting children", the same thing red blooded Americans have been falling for for decades.
- fuzzfactor 1y agoSome people would say "this is exactly why we can't have good things".
- terminalshort 1y agoWho is failing to protect them from what?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Who is failing to protect them from what? Social media from itself. The frank answer is apps like Bluesky and Twitter should be age gated like cigarettes.
- platevoltage 1y ago
- immibis 1y agoThis proves that Bluesky is not decentralised, btw.
- spondylosaurus 1y agoDoes 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.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y agoTLDR 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).
- irusensei 1y agoInteresting though: I wonder how long til site host lists and ad filters start shipping anti-censorship lists and features. We know some DNS provider is already doing it. (I forgot which one)
- extraduder_ire 1y agoThe client checks https://bsky.app/ipcc https://bsky.app/ipcc locally on startup, and if the json object it gets contains "isAgeBlockedGeo : true" it displays the block message. ublock origin filters can replace the contents of any page using regex.
- eximius 1y agoBluesky 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.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y agoFWIW the only "site that goes dark" is the https://bsky.app 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 https://deer.social (forked client) - https://zeppelin.social https://zeppelin.social (forked client + independent appview) - https://blacksky.community 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://anisota.net/ - https://pinksky.app/ https://pinksky.app/ - https://graysky.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.
- irrational 1y agoHow exactly can a website restrict itself in a single state?
- zerocrates 1y agoThey're blocking IPs that look Mississippi-ish. I assume just using Maxmind or some other IP geolocation database.
- jayknight 1y agoI'm near Mississippi but not in it and I'm blocked on my home network. To open the app on my phone I have to turn off with and open it while on mobile data. Once the app is open I can get back on Wi-Fi and everything works fine, so they're only checking that first time the app opens.
- panja 1y agoIP geolocation
- swiftcoder 1y agoBadly. 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)
- criley2 1y agoThey don't actually care about the block or ban, they just want to put in enough token effort that a judge in the area will feel that it was reasonably done. It's performative for the legal system.
- b112 1y agoNo, not performative or token. Blocking via geoip is a reasonable, best effort method in this case. It's doing a best effort to comply. So not merely for performance without true compliance, or tokenism, which courts really frown upon.
- PeterStuer 1y agoYou reap what you sow.
- mikevm 1y ago[dead]
- lrvick 1y agoReminder that Bluesky is not decentralized, and can be censored or bought out just like Twitter.
- zulban 1y agoMost people will never learn. It's an endless cycle.
- irusensei 1y agoCan you elaborate on that? I thought you could run your own instance and your identity was in the EDID.
- Forbo 1y agoIn theory, but is that actually the case today? I couldn't find any information about the current state of federation for Bluesky. Contrast this with Mastodon which already has a vibrant federated ecosystem.
- pfraze 1y agoYes, it is the case today. Its not a huge proportion, but there are thousands on external servers, and we recently had a nice sized migration to blacksky
- lrvick 1y agoIf it is decentralized then a ban in a US state would have no impact. Did not know about blacksky though. That is at least -some- progress.
- crowbahr 1y agoAT protocol is open source. Bluesky is private but the underlying mechanism is OSS and accounts are portable. Go build the replacement and people can port their accounts across.
- 1y ago
- willmadden 1y agoThis proves that Bluesky isn't decentralized. Children shouldn't view pornography, but I am worried about state abuse of the controls necessary to prevent it. Every scheme that isn't full-Orwell creates black markets. They all seem to be an excuse to eventually blanket ban VPNs.
- bl4kers 1y agoI don't think a lot of businesses could operate without VPNs. It's essential for secure remote work. I'd have to imagine the amount of lobbying against it would be quite strong
- willmadden 1y agoIt is essential, but never underestimate government's ability to completely screw everything up with regulation. Source: "do you accept these cookies?" when device fingerprinting exists.
- nout 1y agoWasn't Bluesky meant to be an inclusive decentralized network that does not exclude any people? How come it's able to exclude a whole state of people? This really shows that Bluesky is yet another us based social network company. This is where I think nostr is something completely different. Yes, it can be rough and if you use it naively you may see some annoying content, but oh-boy, it is actually fairly decentralized and resistant to state level attack like this.
- mayneack 1y agoThe reverse is true. There are other relays that are still functional as you'd expect in a decentralized network: https://zeppelin.social/ https://zeppelin.social/
- nout 1y agoAnd so if you try installing the Bluesky app, how many relays does it have? And in Mississippi you now won't be install the app or you won't able to use the bluesky relay either? I'm coming from understanding nostr - each app usually starts with ~10 relays and as you start interacting with other people it collects more paths/routes/relays (the new "outbox model"). So as soon as you install any nostr app, it's usually not affected by any single relay issue.
- mayneack 1y agoThis does not require the bluesky app. I'm not in Mississippi, but people on bluesky are reporting that these alternative AT Proto apps work fine there and grant full access to the same content.
- wkat4242 1y agoIt's not decentralised. They also blocked a bunch of trans people criticising JK Rowling. They couldn't do that if it were truly decentralised. IMO it's got all the bad things about centralisation and the bad things about decentralisation. The worst of both worlds. I don't bother with it. Mastodon/fediverse and nostr (the latter despite being from the same founder) are much better.