They'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.
> "They'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:"
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."
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.
(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).
If 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.
If you get 75% coverage (or let's say the 5 biggest ISPs here, comcast and so on) you don't need to really chase the long tail of small providers that hard. It would effectively be unavailable to non technical people at that point.
Universities? The primary revenue source for basically 100% of US universities is the federal government. The concept of a private university in the US is little more than a legal technicality.
They don't need to. If only 1% of the people are able to access censored content and therefore hold censored ideas, the majority will treat them as crazy pariahs.
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.
We think flat earthers are crazy because it is a fairly trivial thing to prove them wrong. If you believe something that is that easily disproved AND widely understood to be so, there is clearly something wrong with you.
We don't think that people who think there's a bearded man in heaven are crazy, even if that's crazier than thinking earth is flat.
We don't think they are crazy because they are not 1%, they are majority.
Most people think flat earthers are crazy not because they proved them wrong. Just most people around them think flat earthers are crazy and that's enough.
China isn't an example of the impact of poltics vs technology because chinese people generally don't use de-centralized or private tech in the first place
Mississippi can’t unless they can establish personal jurisdiction over a specific Mastodon operator. Which if that instance’s owner/operators don’t live in Mississippi, probably requires a novel application of the Zippo test [1] that’s a bit questionable for how noncommercial Mastodon tries to be.
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.
Bluesky 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.
Does 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.
TLDR 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).
Cool 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.
By 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.
When 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.
Every time on the Internet someone goes "X doesn't suck. It actually rules" and it turns out no one was saying X sucks I think X actually does suck.
It's trying too hard to convince people of a thing they never believed the opposite of.
On HN, I read someone say "Soldiers are not idiots. They're actually some of the smartest" in some context where no one alleged the opposite. Until that moment, I figured they were slightly higher than median (remove all the mentally disabled since nearly any employed group can't have many of those).
But after that comment I was like "he wouldn't be insisting on this if it weren't true. No one said they're stupid. The majority must be fucking retarded".
> 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.
What 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.
While 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.
Your right that interests are varied but to be more specific, what's being pointed out is that people are manipulated into focusing on an emotional interest (hating woke or whatever the current thing is) so that they'll vote against their practical (economic) interests. It's a perennial marshmallow test failure.
What 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.
It 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.
OPs 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.
In 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.
> 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.
(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).
idk how "open" would this mean but drastic changes are coming.
They could try, but not even China could build an impregnable firewall.
"Sorry, you can't use this evidence that exonerates you - it would be bad for the government."
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.
We don't think they are crazy because they are not 1%, they are majority.
Most people think flat earthers are crazy not because they proved them wrong. Just most people around them think flat earthers are crazy and that's enough.
[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.
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:
- https://anisota.net/
- https://pinksky.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.
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.
you progress the grand parent comment point, with a lot more words.
The relay: https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
Or, conversely, I'm unsure if other decentralized platforms would be unable to implement a similar block.
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44989125
Unless you're from Mississippi, then you hate on Alabama.
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.
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.
Every time on the Internet someone goes "X doesn't suck. It actually rules" and it turns out no one was saying X sucks I think X actually does suck.
It's trying too hard to convince people of a thing they never believed the opposite of.
On HN, I read someone say "Soldiers are not idiots. They're actually some of the smartest" in some context where no one alleged the opposite. Until that moment, I figured they were slightly higher than median (remove all the mentally disabled since nearly any employed group can't have many of those).
But after that comment I was like "he wouldn't be insisting on this if it weren't true. No one said they're stupid. The majority must be fucking retarded".
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.
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.
I’d consider 38% significant.