> 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...
Err, BlueSky is enthusiastically complying with that one (as you read by clicking through to their corporate statement),
> "We work with regulators around the world on child safety—for example, Bluesky follows the UK's Online Safety Act, where age checks are required only for specific content and features... Mississippi’s new law and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) are very different. Bluesky follows the OSA in the UK. There, Bluesky is still accessible for everyone, age checks are required only for accessing certain content and features, and Bluesky does not know and does not track which UK users are under 18. Mississippi’s law, by contrast, would block everyone from accessing the site—teens and adults—unless they hand over sensitive information, and once they do, the law in Mississippi requires Bluesky to keep track of which users are children."
https://bsky.social/about/blog/08-22-2025-mississippi-hb1126
It's bold of them to attempt to shift the Overton Window in this way ("OSA is actually moderate and we should hold it up as an example of reasonableness to criticize other censorship laws against"). That happened fast.
Their July 10 blogpost even frames OSA as a collaboration—it's written plain in the title, "Working with [sic] the UK Government to Protect Children Online",
The porn and gaming fans are on Reddit
Young versions of the above on Instagram.
Social media from itself. The frank answer is apps like Bluesky and Twitter should be age gated like cigarettes.
This may show paranoia but all these things that are happening recently kinda add up to preparation for war.
This is nonsense. I worked on that bill. The Israel lobby was, like, there. But to my knowledge is delivered zero votes. At the end of the day, if you want a bill passed, you are very careful about saying no to support.
From a broader social-media advertising perspective, the war in Gaza has been a financial bonanza.
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.
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.
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.
(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).
They could try, but not even China could build an impregnable firewall.
They can learn from Russia. Censorship in Russia now surpassed China. TSPU are now in every ISP facility. They pass all traffic through them and allow arbitrary bans of specific resources/protocols/etc in specific cities or whole regions.
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.
idk how "open" would this mean but drastic changes are coming.
Would be great for the Chinese if true though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_jurisdiction_in_Inter...
Like I run one and I'm in Louisiana and I sure do not have the funds to mount a legal defense.
Mississippi is a red state. Bluesky is liberal. I could see the White House turning the dispute into a tariff or defence spat.
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.
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:
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.
Or, conversely, I'm unsure if other decentralized platforms would be unable to implement a similar block.
ublock origin filters can replace the contents of any page using regex.
Bluesky is private but the underlying mechanism is OSS and accounts are portable.
Go build the replacement and people can port their accounts across.
Maybe you could theoretically have an AT "app view" that takes data from multiple relays, but nothing in the implementation does anything to support that, and as far as I know nothing in the protocol does anything to help it discover the relays... which in practice means that even if you extend the app views to use multiple relays, there will never be more than a handful of relays with meaningful reach.
The AT protocol is at best a really crappy excuse for decentralization. And frankly a pretty poor example of open source too, given the usability and organization of the code they release.
Compare with, say, Nostr, which is actually decently decentralized... but, in not-unrelated news, suffers from massive content discovery problems. Or compare with Briar, which is even more decentralized but has both discovery and scaling problems. Or for that matter Usenet.
Contrast this with Mastodon which already has a vibrant federated ecosystem.
