Since it is more centralized than Mastodon, Bluesky remains vulnerable to government censorship; after all, you can’t opt out of its moderation services. However, its third-party apps are not yet affected by this censorship.
Government censorship has found its way to Bluesky, but there’s currently a loophole thanks to how the social network is structured.
Earlier this month, Bluesky restricted access to 72 accounts in Turkey at the request of Turkish governmental authorities, according to a [recent report by the Freedom of Expression Association. As a result, people in Turkey can no longer see these accounts, and their reach is limited.
The report indicates that 59 Bluesky accounts were blocked on the grounds of protecting “national security and public order.” Bluesky also made another 13 accounts and at least one post invisible from Turkey.
Turkish users can still use third party-apps using the AT Protocol and view these blocked accounts. However, any form of migration may bring undue attention to these apps from authorities.
Other third-party Bluesky apps, which make up the larger open social web known as the Atmosphere, don’t have to follow these same rules. At least, not for now.
Because Bluesky is built on top of the AT Protocol, third-party clients can create their own interfaces and views into Bluesky’s content without applying the same moderation choices. Meanwhile, the censored accounts in question aren’t banned from Bluesky infrastructure, like relays and personal data servers which others outside the company can run, too.
Instead, the accounts are moderated by the geographic labelers at the client level. Currently, Bluesky doesn’t require any third-party apps to use its geographic moderation labelers, which would force the apps to geolocate their users and then apply the appropriate regional restrictions. That means any app that doesn’t implement the existing isn’t censoring these blocked Turkish accounts.
In other words, apps like Skeets, Ouranos, Deer.social, Skywalker, and others can currently be used to bypass Turkish censors.
There are serveal caveats to this approach though.
The app developers’ choice not to use geographic labelers isn’t necessarily intentional. Adding the geographic labelers would be extra work on their part, and most have simply not bothered to implement them yet. In addition, these third-party apps have much smaller user bases than the official Bluesky app, which allows them to fly under the radar of government censors. That also makes decisions like this less of a concern for the app developers — at least for the time being.
If these third-party apps grew popular enough, a government like Turkey’s could also approach them and demand action. And if they failed to comply, they could risk their app being blocked in the country (e.g., several Bluesky app developers told us they won’t worry about adding geographic labelers until Apple approaches them about a potential removal from the App Store).
Do you think Mastodon instances can be affected by similar censorship requests that may be faced by these third-party Bluesky clients?