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Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky
- rvz 2y agoSeveral folks in Brazil had much to choose from out of Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky as alternatives to Twitter / X. Now that X got banned in Brazil and to potentially lose over 100M+ users we are starting to see which platforms they are choosing to sign up to. So far, Bluesky is seeing a surge in user registrations after the invite system was lifted a year ago. I would expect Threads to also see a surge in registrations as well. Mastodon however appears not to be even considered as a migration path at all yet, but either way it is still early days for all options. We'll see in the next 6 months after this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39471807
- guerrilla 2y agoWhere are you pulling your statistics from? I'm looking at one of the Mastodon Users Count bots and it seems like there's a 43% increase in sign-ups per weeks since last week. Of course, I have no idea why and that might be normal noise.
- timeon 2y agoSeems there is another increase in last ~2 hours: https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/113056992789219982 https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount/11305699278921998...
- stevebmark 2y agoMastodon was dead from the start, it isn’t in the running. Threads has too big of an image problem to overcome. No one wants Instagram for Twitter. Bluesky is the only platform currently that has a chance, but it’s an under funded, tiny team who can’t ship on time. Bluesky will see a surge in registrations but no change in DAU as they still haven’t supported video, so no one will stay on the site.
- gargron 2y agoWhy do you believe that about Mastodon?
- FMecha 2y agoMastodon is too fragmented for the common people, and any chance of that being popular is getting usurped by Bluesky anyway.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoOnboarding and discovery is much too difficult for the average user. Distributed is technologically cool, but will remain niche IMO.
- timbit42 2y agoMastodon isn't distributed, like bittorrent; it's decentralized, like email.
- threeseed 2y ago> No one wants Instagram for Twitter It has about 200M MAU. So a lot of people clearly do want it.
- crossroadsguy 2y agoMastadon is the green ribbon worn by 13 people out of 57 people attending a conference out of 230 million people in that country who were there to condemn, in strong terms, the privatisation of the national health service. Thread doesn’t stand a chance. I don’t have an Instagram account. So I am not going to create one for Threads. Nope. I know friends and colleagues who detest even the idea of this connection even though they have accounts. Meta/Fb didn’t create X/Tw competition/alternative. They created an Instagram add-on. Does bsky stand a chance? Probably? Does ATProto stand a chance? Nope, it doesn’t. Sad, but it doesn’t. It has the same Mastadon problems - not technical but practical.
- threeseed 2y ago> Thread doesn’t stand a chance Twitter/X has 368m MAU. Threads has 200m. Based on trajectories Threads will be the biggest text-first social network in less than a year. It's amazing how out of touch people on here about what is popular or not.
- joejohnson 2y agoHopefully most people migrate to one of the alternatives not owned by an American oligarch
- adventured 2y agoThere are no possible alternatives to US based services unless you enjoy extreme restrictions on speech. Europe has become a big no-go zone for speech over the past decade, they're outright hostile and authoritarian about it (with only a few exceptions among European nations). And the direction re liberalism and human rights in Europe is overwhelmingly hostile toward speech. And for South America, Africa and Asia you can entirely forget about it, there are no reliable speech protected locations in any of those.
- joejohnson 2y agoMastodon, Bluesky, many other less-popular federated social networks.
- mstipetic 2y ago[flagged]
- LightHugger 2y agoBecause people lie about what the lies are, without fail. As soon as any "misinformation" rule becomes a thing, it is already being abused by liars.
- whatwhaaaaat 2y ago[flagged]
- nickpsecurity 2y agoOne of the linked articles said it boiled down to X being ordered to censor political opponents of those in power. They chose not to. I’m glad. Now, traffic is going to Bluesky. I wonder if this means that Bluesky has or will be offered the same choice. We might see what the character of that organization is by what choice they make.
- katbyte 2y agoElon musk was happy to allow government “censorship” it turkey India and other countries where it aligned with his views.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nickpsecurity 2y agoI was commenting strictly on what’s in the articles’ links. If he did that, it would be just as deplorable as the censorship they were claiming to oppose.
- fjkdlsjflkds 2y ago> If he did that, it would be just as deplorable [...] No need for hypotheticals. He did do that (this is an easily-verifiable fact [1][2][3]). > [...] the censorship they were claiming to oppose. The thing is that this is clearly an empty claim, when Musk has no problems either complying with similar censoring orders from right-wing governments (Modi, Erdogan) or with arbitrarily censoring people for using medically-approved terms (like "cis" or "cisgender") that he simply does not like [4][5]. All of this censorship by Twitter is (legally) 100% within their right to do, as a private entity, but then whatever claims he (or Twitter) has of being a "defender of free speech" ring a bit hollow. Given these things, the more plausible explanation for Musk's actions is not that he wants to defend free speech (or that he is fundamentally against censorship), but simply that the request comes from a (left-wing) government that is not ideologically aligned with his views. It's a choice. But choices have consequences. [1] https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-turkey-twitter-erdogan-india-modi-free-speech.html https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-turkey-twitte... [2] https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/world/2024/04/musk-fulfilled-hundreds-of-content-removal-orders-from-x-outside-brazil-without-accusing-censorship.shtml https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/en/world/2024/04... [3] https://theintercept.com/2023/03/28/twitter-modi-india-punjab-amritpal-singh/ https://theintercept.com/2023/03/28/twitter-modi-india-punja... [4] https://www.advocate.com/news/cisgender-restriction-x-twitter https://www.advocate.com/news/cisgender-restriction-x-twitte... [5] https://nitter.poast.org/elonmusk/status/1719077000483066319?lang=en https://nitter.poast.org/elonmusk/status/1719077000483066319...
- pram 2y agoBluesky can become the modern version of Orkut.
- stavros 2y agoOr, hopefully, of Twitter.
- crossroadsguy 2y agoNooooooooooo! I loved Orkut. Only social network I have fond memories of. I hope it doesn’t become X. Its demise had felt sad. Really sad. Hatred for Google hadn’t taken proper shape by then. And it had died before being completely Googlified.
- neilv 2y agoReportedly, Orkut (which originally was popular in Brazil) was reactivated a couple years ago: https://applemagazine.com/is-the-long-extinct-social-network-orkut-on-the-verge-of-a-comeback/52177 https://applemagazine.com/is-the-long-extinct-social-network...
- geekodour 2y agois this some kind of sick joke? i want orkut back so bad!
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- newsclues 2y agoPeople still aren't CHOOSING to leave Twitter/X.
- sumeno 2y agoCitation needed. I know tons of people who have chosen to leave Twitter since Elon took over
- tourmalinetaco 2y agoObjectively, if Twitter is banned in your country, you were not given a choice in the matter.
- chomp 2y agoYour response is a non sequitur; adding on to GP’s comment, countless people have left voluntarily and are easily findable on mastodon and bluesky, refuting GGP’s comment.
- sumeno 2y agoThat wasn't the claim. The claim was that people aren't leaving voluntarily, which simply isn't true. Lots of people have voluntarily left Twitter since Musk took over (About 23% DAU, a ~50 million drop) and that's before Brazil banned it That people are also leaving because of twitter being banned in their country isn't relevant to the original claim
- mensetmanusman 2y ago5 tons / average American = 24 people?
- debo_ 2y agoThis is an underrated comment. I laughed out loud.
- newsclues 2y agoIf the government bans a service and forces them to leave, that isn't people CHOOSING to leave the service. That is being FORCED. This isn't about you and your friends that hate Elon leaving for other platforms.
- dont_forget_me 2y agoIt saddens me the Brasil banned X because of racism, anti-semitism and hate-speech. But X is still not banned in the west. At some point we have to come to this realization in the west that absolutism is never the answer. Free speech is good upto certain extent, the way it was at Twitter before the rich and powerful took over. Moreover, it is content moderation and it doesn't have anything to do with free speech.
- diogocp 2y ago> Free speech is good upto certain extent Up to the extent that you agree with it?
- timeon 2y agoThat seems to be current model for Twitter.
- chomp 2y agoWorks for free speech absolutist Elon Musk?
- chipdart 2y ago> Up to the extent that you agree with it? That's the norm in Elon Musk's Twitter. Since his takeover, content like white supremacy, antisemitism, and industrial state-level propaganda operations from fascist and totalitarian regimes is perfectly ok to publish on that platform. Criticism of Elon Musk or fascist regimes, however, is completely different. Elon Musk's Twitter was also caught hardcoding censorship and throttling of both pro-Ukraine discussions and users who published pro-Ukraine content. Russian bots however have free reign. More importantly, Elon Musk's Twitter is finding itself in trouble in Brasil not because of censorship, but because Elon Musk made it his point to go to great extents to avoid even appointing a legal representative to handle complains of illegal activity. This isn't even about censorship, but complying with basic legal requirements. It's like bitching that having to pay taxes is persecuting based on free speech just because you refuse to even file a form.
- croes 2y ago
- Laaas 2y agoThey will ban Bluesky too if it gets too popular .
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- alphabettsy 2y agoIt’s not as easy to ban.
- new_user_final 2y agox.com is also not easy to ban. vpn are always to use but you will be fined by the government if they can identify you. same goes for any other platform that are not "easy to ban".
- stevebmark 2y agoAT Protocol aggregators (“relays”) can choose their own content moderation policies. It’s possible that if there are multiple relays, and one of them doesn’t block violent / hate speech, the government would ban that relay and corresponding domain, and others could continue to thrive.
- verdverm 2y agoATProto actually separates moderation from PDS or App View. Users can choose which labellers they prefer and can even combine them, separate from where they host their data or the UI they choose to use. https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderation https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati... They do the same for feeds, 4 core components, with user choice and interoperability for each
- jazzyjackson 2y agoSo what levers does that give governments seeking to get compliance out of an internet service - if multiple apps are hosting anti-party propaganda the government has to block the domains of each app ? Or, perhaps the domains of the content itself is blocked so apps continue to work but fail to load content within certain borders ?
- alphabettsy 2y agoI’ve started using it again recently and find it’s improved massively. I can find all the people I want to follow and my feed is much nicer. I see no reason to go back to Twitter.
- pfraze 2y agoServers are holding up so far. Somewhere been 800k-1mm signups (need to check backend). Fortunately we were overprovisioned. If we hit 4mm new signups then things should get interesting. edit: we did have some degradations (user handles entering an invalid state, firehose crashed a couple times, image servers are giving bad load latencies randomly) but we managed to avoid a full outage.
- pfraze 2y ago(in case I look like a crazy person, hn threads got merged so see my other comment which was a copy & update of this)
- braunjohnson 2y agoI remain surprised at how casually people will step over the free speech dead body so they can hate on people the media at large has maligned. Regardless of what you think of Musk, where's your outrage over this blatant authoritarianism?
- amlib 2y agoAuthoritarianism would be if the government was pre-screening everything that was posted, having agents routinely shaking down social media companies or acting without any support of the law. What happened here is that bad actors have been taking advantages of the lack of accountability that social media had for the last 20 years. When laws were finally issued a few years ago, those "bad actions" could finally be labelled as crimes. Twitter was given ample time and opportunities to comply with such law, but after failing many times a court order was issued to block it. What would be much more productive to discuss is if such law that gives accountability to social media is valid and weather the implementation is of good enough quality to catch abuses without impacting freedom of speech. I suspect it is, since we have similar laws mandating accountability to traditional media for 100s of years by now. Afaik any democratic country has such laws, in fact, the usa used to have strong laws around traditional media accountability until a few decades ago when they were weakened.
- matheusmoreira 2y ago> Authoritarianism would be if the government was pre-screening everything that was posted I've got you covered then. Before the 2022 elections, this exact same judge did just that. I witnessed him and his electoral court censor a documentary a priori. Before watching it, before it was even released, they declared it was "fake news" and did not allow it to be published. To this day that fact shocks me. In my lifetime, I witnessed the exact same a priori censorship that was omnipresent in last century's military dictatorship, the same dictatorship my parents were subjected to and told me stories about.
- edmundsauto 2y agoIs it acceptable for foreign owned entities to not follow the rules of a country? I think, probably not - the choice is to follow the regulations or to not be there, like Meta in China.
- throwadobe 2y ago[flagged]
- siproprio 2y ago[flagged]
- ikmckenz 2y agoFreedom of speech is a general conception of human rights, not any one particular law. Governments can choose to respect (or not!) those rights, but the idea applies to everyone.
- bad_user 2y agoWhen it comes to human rights, unfortunately, the notion got perverted by USSR and its allies. The difference between the US and the rest of the world is that the US has the First Amendment, which it upholds. So, for example, in the US "hate speech" is not banned, and while inciting violence is banned, it must be literal incitement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat... This is important, because freedom of speech was supposedly allowed behind the Iron Curtain as well, as long as it wasn't "going against the socialist order" or "promoting fascism" (with capitalism or social democracy being just light fascism). Various countries found ways to pay lip service to human rights, while being authoritarian.
- profeatur 2y agoThe divide goes back even further than the USSR. The enlightenment era gave us two separate definitions of freedom. At its foundation, the US govt is granted whatever rights it has to constrain freedom by wholly autonomous and free individuals, and in the other (French, continental) conception freedom is both defined and granted by the state. Authoritarianism is baked into the definition. It will take future historians living in more intellectually permissive times to give a full account as to why the first concept of freedom only ever took root in the US and why the majority of countries have adopted the second.
- NickWrightData 2y agoFound this on Bluesky lol
- toomuchtodo 2y ago“Masterful gambit, sir.” (X is facing a deep decline in revenue, cutting its valuation from $44B to ~$12B [Musk’s stake is worth ~$7B], and Musk makes a choice that drives millions of users to an alternate site: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitters-revenue-collapses-84-tesla-171535190.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitters-revenue-collapses-84...)
- pqdbr 2y agoMore power to him. He’s making the hard choices and paying a steep price for actually standing for free speech like no other big tech does.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- xmprt 2y ago> actually standing for free speech I don't know how anyone can continue to claim this with a straight face when he sued advertisers for not continuing to advertise on the website.
- declan_roberts 2y ago[flagged]
- WalterBright 2y ago"The lawsuit from his X platform against the non-profit advertising initiative GARM has led to its dissolution. A major ad industry group is shutting down, days after Elon Musk-owned X filed a lawsuit that claimed the group illegally conspired to boycott advertising on his platform." -- Google I.e. Musk did not sue the advertisers.
- eadler 2y agoYes he did: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.393003/gov.uscourts.txnd.393003.1.0_2.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.39... Parties include the following. The last 5 are advertisers. - WORLD FEDERATION OF ADVERTISERS; - UNILEVER PLC - UNILEVER UNITED STATES, INC. - MARS, INCORPORATED - CVS HEALTH CORPORATION - ØRSTED A/S docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69017972/x-corp-v-world-federation-of-advertisers/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69017972/x-corp-v-world...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bilvar 2y ago[flagged]
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago[flagged]
- perihelions 2y agoIt does indeed look like BlueSky overtly celebrating a nation-state banning Twitter, their competitor.
- pfraze 2y agoMike Masnick is on our board and wrote some commentary on this: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/30/brazil-bans-extwitter-in-battle-with-musk-takes-vpns-users-down-with-it/ https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/30/brazil-bans-extwitter-in... I do have to ask where the equivalent free-speech outrage is that Musk is overtly campaigning for a political party via X.
- perihelions 2y agoI highly respect Mike Masnick and Mike Masnick speaks for himself and the BlueSky official account speaks for itself, and they have different takes.
- sillyalbatross 2y agoMusk, like anyone else, has a right to endorse whoever he wants. Unless there's evidence that he's mass censoring or banning Democrats, I don't really see why there'd be any outrage. No one certainly seems to care when Silicon Valley big wigs donate to the other side. Seems like even Masnick agrees, albeit begrudgingly, that this judge is an authoritarian. Where I cannot agree with Masnick is the implication that Musk and this man are somehow both equally wrong. A government official, no less a judge, should be held to a far higher standard as his actions impact hundreds of millions of people. And as we can see by his unprecedented order banning VPNs, he clearly lacks the circumspection and self-reflection necessary to hold such an important office.
- pfraze 2y ago
- verdverm 2y agoI left Xitter about 6 weeks ago and went all in on Bluesky. Took time to give feedback to the algo, but it's doing much better these days. I don't feel like I'm missing out on much, you'll get the same news & events on Bluesky. A lot of people who were scared of losing their following are reporting more, better engagement with lower follower counts. What I really like about it is the ATProto, which while imperfect, seems like the best current design for the next gen of social media built on a federated foundation. - DID for identity - PDS for data mobility - algo feed & moderation choice, you can build your own and anyone on Bluesky can use it (https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderation https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-12-2024-stackable-moderati...) If you didn't see, they recently added anti-toxicity features and are looking towards community notes - Bluesky is the twitter like view, but you can build anything on ATProto and leverage the shared infra I'm personally working on a "reddit" like view of the Bluesky network. Not a reddit clone, but a different way to organize the same information around topics, news events, and/or links. One could also design their own Lexicon and build something very close to reddit. One of the cool things is that all the objects for all apps are stored into a single SQLite database per user. So if you want to move your data to a different host, all of the apps, content, and connections survive that migration.
- declan_roberts 2y agoBlueskey seems to have all of these neat features that developers/nerds seem to like, but literally nobody else cares about.
- segmondy 2y agoattractive developer/nerd features often seeds developers to develop for the platform which will end up attracting more users.
- verdverm 2y agoIt's not that they don't care, it's more that they are used to centralized social media and unaware of even the possibility for a different paradigm. I have seen them respond with intrigue and support once these things are explained.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoIs there any plan to offload hosting costs to users repos or do the relays have to bear the cost of images / videos ? It just seems very incongruous to me for a decentralized app to suffer from hugs of death like this link is right now. I actually tried to pull this up on the wayback machine but they seem to have only crawled as far as the butterfly logo ? Is this intentional ? I know that bluesky likes to give users control of where their post ends up, maybe they have asked internet archive not to crawl ? [0] I liked how urbit did it, just paste s3 bucket credentials into the app settings. A - its pretty cheap even for a terabyte of storage, B - it removes liability from the application not having to host user content, C - it increases decentralization, with many hosts in many jurisdictions able to host content. EDIT: I went to sign up for a new account and right away I'm given the choice to host content on my own server, neat, I think I'll give this a try [1] [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20240831230005/https://bsky.app/profile/bsky.app/post/3l3277gkjjc2y https://web.archive.org/web/20240831230005/https://bsky.app/... [1] https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation
- pfraze 2y agoThe bad crawl for internet archive is because it's a giant SPA. It's a react native codebase which, while irritating for web users, allows us to target all the platforms without building multiple apps. Kind of a life-saver. Relays actually don't process media; that's up to the applications. We intentionally keep the repo-hosting costs low (and they'll get lower soon) so that self-hosting your data and keypairs remains affordable. Think of the application model as equivalent to a search engine, with the repo-hosts (PDSes) being web servers. That's almost exactly how it works. The only way decentralization would make a hug of death irrelevant is if the individual nodes weren't processing the full network, in which case you're not getting the global social experience, so.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoPlease consider a formal, efficient mechanism to push archival data into the Internet Archive. Edit: tremendous, thank you!
- dgfitz 2y agoDisclaimer: indifferent at best to musk, probably more dislike than anything else, but not with vitriol. So I read that this is all because musk refused to appoint a Brazilian citizen as an X representative, as dictated by Brazilian law. I have not verified this part. Musk refused because the last person to fill that role had all their bank accounts frozen by the judge. The judge also cut off payments from Brazilian citizens to starlink, something about relating star link to x. so musk said “well then starlink is free for Brazilian citizens because I don’t want to cut people off from their internet connection.” Or something like that. Edit: blackeyedblitzar child comment of this has better information.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoNot exactly. X had a local representative who was threatened by this judge issuing illegal censorship orders. It’s not that they refused to appoint a representative but that they had to get rid of all their employees and legal representation in Brazil because the judge was going after them as individuals, making it impossible for X to challenge what they viewed as unconstitutional orders to censor speech. The root of the issue is that Alexandre de Moraes, a single justice on the Supreme Court, has been issuing secret orders to censor content, ban accounts, and jail people over political speech. This is unconstitutional in Brazil per article 5 of the 1988 constitution, so X refused the orders. Note that the text of the Brazilian constitution explicitly says that the freedom of expression is guaranteed without censorship (it mentions “censorship”). If they were legal orders they would have complied, as they have in other countries. Also the “Musk refused” part isn’t accurate. Ultimately these decisions are made by Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X.
- pfraze 2y agoCopying over my latest backend status update; figure folks would find it interesting Servers are holding up so far! Fortunately we were overprovisioned. If we hit 4mm new signups then things should get interesting. We did have some degradations (user handles entering an invalid state, event-stream crashed a couple times, algo crashed a couple times, image servers hit bad latencies) but we managed to avoid a full outage. We use an event-sourcing model which is: K/V database for primary storage (actually sqlite), into a golang event stream, then into scylladb for computed views. Various separate services for search, algorithms, and images. Hybrid on-prem & cloud. There are ~20 of the k/v servers, 1 event-stream, 2 scylla clusters (I believe). The event-stream crash would cause the application to stop making progress on ingesting events, but we still got the writes, so you'd see eg likes failing to increment the counter but then magically taking effect 60 seconds later. Since the scylla cluster and the KV stores stayed online, we avoided a full outage.
- delichon 2y agoDoes Bluesky intend to be responsive to the kind of court orders that X rejected?
- mwilcox 2y agoClearly given he is excited to receive the traffic
- meiraleal 2y agoInterestingly, the cohort moving to Bluesky isn't the same as those who were having trouble with the law.
- siproprio 2y agoYes. Brazilians were censored and moved to bluesky. Elon musk has problems with the law! Absolutely no overlap whatsoever. Also very interesting in its own way.
- 2y ago
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoHopefully the growth of Bluesky doesn't get crazy. It's handy for Twitter to keep the eternal September types in a sort of quarantine. Grandparents on Facebook, culture wars and spam/scams/porn on Twitter. It's best if there's no single monolithic "winner" in the exodus from Twitter because that community would descend into the same patterns of stupidity that are unavoidable past a certain community size. The next phase of social media should be about community affinity and quality, not size.
- toofy 2y agothis a point which im glad to see someone else bring up. i’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the line the same group of sil val investors started trying to convince us that everyone should want to be in the same place at the same time or it’s somehow a “failure”. i keep repeating it, but that kind of ridiculous idea wouldn’t ever be fun in the real world and it’s just as ridiculous to suggest it would somehow be different just because it’s “online”. every city has multiple styles of restaurants, bars, clubs, stores, etc… for obvious reasons. sometimes we want a quiet night out, sometimes we want a loud concert. some people don’t enjoy the same things i enjoy and i don’t enjoy their shit tastes either ;) and that’s totally ok. i’m very very skeptical of anyone who suggests _everyone_ should have fun being in the same venue at the same time. it’s weird af. the mere suggestion is incredibly shady at worst and plain ridiculous understanding of people at best. it’s one of the quickest ways to make me stop taking someone seriously.
- makeworld 2y agoThat's what the fediverse is all about! :)
- stonethrowaway 2y ago[flagged]
- markdown 2y agoOh? Could you explain why he did "the right thing" in Brazil but not in Turkey, India, China, and other countries?
- croes 2y agoYou do know it's about the people who stormed government buildings in a riot to overthrow the government? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Brazilian_Congress_attack https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Brazilian_Congress_atta... Musk ist protecting the Brazil version of the January 6 rioters of the US.
- stonethrowaway 2y ago[flagged]
- croes 2y agoIf the side wants violence and a Coup d'État by the military it's definitely the wrong side.
- Pedro_Ribeiro 2y agoCurious about what your opinion of the Venezuela elections.
- WalterBright 2y ago[flagged]
- polski-g 2y agoIt's really good at code
- mlindner 2y agoThis is all very unfortunate. It's sad to see liberalism dying in Brazil in real time. The very little reported thing is that this judge also installed a fine of something like $8000 per month (more than double the top percentile salary) for anyone using a VPN and also demanded that Apple and Google remove X and any VPNs from their app stores. Brazil is rapidly turning into a police state.
- throwaway48476 2y ago*back into a police state Unfortunately western countries are no longer willing to set a good example to encourage developing countries to follow.
- krisboyz781 2y ago[flagged]
- fdgjgbdfhgb 2y agoThe VPN part was almost immediately overturned, but it is concerning that it was included in the first place
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago...using a vpn to access twitter.
- zone411 2y ago[flagged]
- Slava_Propanei 2y ago[dead]
- wetpaws 2y ago[dead]
- nova22033 2y agodouble standards? https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/modi-twitter-bbc-musk-elon-documentary-watch-video-rcna67497 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/modi-twitter-bbc-m... “First I’ve heard,” Musk wrote in response to a question from Canadian lawyer David Freiheit. “It is not possible for me to fix every aspect of Twitter worldwide overnight, while still running Tesla and SpaceX, among other things,” he added, referring to the multiple companies where he is CEO.
- a_victorp 2y agoThe difference is that, in Brazil, he would be censoring the far right and Musk wouldn't do that
- Finnucane 2y agoHe bought Twitter claiming he could fix it. Now he is too busy to fix it? Maybe he should have thought about that before spending billions on ego boo.
- xenospn 2y agoI wonder who’s fault is that?
- AlienRobot 2y ago>overnight It's been a year and half.
- hooverd 2y agoBrazilian Miku is dead. Long live Brazilian Miku.
- xandinho 2y ago[flagged]
- slowhadoken 2y agoI’m glad I don’t live in Brazil. Why ban X? It makes no sense.
- tumsfestival 2y ago[flagged]
- viburnum 2y agoPeople used it to organize an attempted coup against a democratically elected government and twitter is not cooperating with the investigation.
- Green_Frog 2y agoCoup without firearms. How does that work? Are the people supposed to shout their lungs out until the government decides to step down cooperatively?
- slowhadoken 2y agoBloodless coups are a thing.
- slowhadoken 2y agoI’m pretty sure that’s the CIA’s job. Isn’t it because Brazil doesn’t have free speech so they have absurd “hate speech” laws similar to the ones that are backfiring in Scotland right now?
- viburnum 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Brazilian_Congress_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Brazilian_Congress_attack
- whatshisface 2y agoI don't see how that argument would leave coffee shops and other gathering places able to stay open during elections.
- paulvnickerson 2y agoThat the tide turned against Musk when he undid the old Twitter censorship regime which was targeted towards primarily American conservatives. Since then, a lot of folks, including here and on major subreddits like news and politics, have openly wished harm on the site and on Musk. Here Musk was pushing back on illegal [1] censorship, and many people on this thread are celebrating the authoritarian judge responsible. Lots of pro-censorship people on HN. Remember what happened to Brendan Eich? [2] [1] https://x.com/AlexandreFiles/status/1829979981130416479 https://x.com/AlexandreFiles/status/1829979981130416479 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7525198
- hocuspocus 2y agoThen why doesn't Elon push back against blocklists from the UAE, Turkey, Russia, ... Are those governments less authoritarian than Brazil?
- paulvnickerson 2y agoIs there any information on this either way?
- krisboyz781 2y ago[flagged]
- Adrian_Ferreira 2y agoI'm from Brazil and this judge is totally out of control. I agree that X needs to have a legal representative in Brazil, this is correct anywhere, but he threatened a fine of 200k and imprisonment to the person Musk appointed as representative if his stricture orders were not complied with. He threatened us to pay $9k in fines per day if we use VPN to access X. Unless you are part of the government base, it is difficult to find someone who approves of his actions.
- Adrian_Ferreira 2y ago72% of Brazilians do not agree with the banning of X: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UleMSw8m3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UleMSw8m3o
- dyauspitr 2y agoThat’s a random sampling with a tiny group of people. You might as well do an internet poll on a very directed channel.
- hu3 2y ago[flagged]
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoJust to be clear, the sample size of 1200 is enough for a margin of error of 3% with a 95% CI. It is a huge sample for the claim being made for a population the size of Brazil.
- kelnos 2y agoI'm not sure what that proves, though. Even if the judge you mention was not totally out of control, and was actually applying the law properly and correctly (with the same outcome), I could very easily see a large number of people being all "no, not my Twitters, what am I going to do with my afternoons now?" without giving any critical thought to whether or not the law is being followed and if that's a problem.
- dartharva 2y agoI don't understand why Tumblr hasn't been able to lift itself up amidst all of this
- pmdr 2y agoDidn't tumblr kinda die the day they banned porn?
- AlienRobot 2y agoHonestly, it's because Tumblr is too good for Twitter users. In my brief experience with Twitter, it felt suffocating. Every recommended tweet didn't see me as a person to share thoughts with but as some sort of prey, like they only wanted me for my attention, formulating tweets with open-ended questions and clickbait to bait me into engaging with them. On Tumblr, it's just people's blogs. I follow a guy who takes photos of birds. No sweating. No engagement metrics. Just cool birds. Check it out https://www.tumblr.com/doingitfortheexposure https://www.tumblr.com/doingitfortheexposure It's relaxing. I don't think Twitter users would get used to the peace of mind that Tumblr can offer them. In fact when I checked Bluesky, some new Brazilian users were talking about how there was no "trending topics" section in Bluesky. A part of Twitter's interface that I personally tried very hard to avoid looking at.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoTumblr is for longer form; a completely different type of network
- surume 2y ago[flagged]
- throwadobe 2y ago[flagged]
- krisboyz781 2y ago[flagged]
- pipeline_peak 2y agoWho would’ve thought it took legal obligations to get masses to finally adopt a Twitter alternative…
- hypnotist 2y agoI am surprised no one mentioned nostr. https://nostr.com/ https://nostr.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostr supposedly more distributed and censorship resistant than bsky. https://thenewstack.io/bluesky-vs-nostr-which-should-developers-care-about-more/ https://thenewstack.io/bluesky-vs-nostr-which-should-develop...
- stiltzkin 2y ago[dead]
- slimsag 2y agoNostr is a protocol. Bluesky is a product.
- martin82 2y agoThat's why Nostr is far better.
- pcfreak30 2y agoUm.. compare nostr to atproto, not bluesky. They take very different approaches even if they have similar goals. Neither is better I think unless you want to get fanboy tribal. It is to be seen what apps will scale and gain adoption for each, though bluesky having a few mil in funding and normal users definitely puts it in the lead. Speaking as someone funded in the crypto industry... nostr, IMHO, is dominated by BTC maxis and creating a monoculture around it, which will prevent adoption, b/c a social network isn't going to just be talk about NgU and HODL'ing all day.
- nunobrito 2y ago[flagged]
- consumer451 2y ago> It's OK. Liberals, lefties and pseudo-rebels tend to jump from one walled garden to another. It is very difficult to take a statement seriously when it includes sweeping politicized generalizations like this.
- seydor 2y agoSo what can brazil do to shut down Bluesky if it starts hosting the same illegal accounts?
- extheat 2y agoThey can get rid of apps and block websites that they want, which is basically what they’re doing right now.
- Maken 2y agoMaybe Blursky will comply with local legislation?
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- locallost 2y agoHere is a friendly reminder that Twitter/X started cooperating way more with government takedown requests since Musk took over [1]. So obviously Musk is not protecting free speech here because he usually doesn't do it. What is he protecting? [1] https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-orders/ https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...
- aaa_aaa 2y agoNo he is just rubbing them the wrong way. States, governments are control freaks. They make sure only their "disinformation" must be spread (public schooling, paid academia, controlled media). Rest will be muffled.bl Before musk Twitter was aligning with them, now not much.
- qsdf38100 2y agoMusk himself said he had no choice but to comply, to justify censorship in on several other occasions. Looks like he doesn’t have to after all.
- neonsunset 2y ago[flagged]
- smrtinsert 2y agoBrazil already has laws allowing it to censor websites, what is new here? It seems the judge is targeting accounts related to gangs of misinformation run by supporters of Bolsanaro and may have been involved in their Jan 6 (Jan 23). What context is missing? If anything it seems like Musk seems to be attacking the sovereignty of a nation because he agrees with anything far right these days.
- pmdr 2y agoBanning a company from doing business in your country is one thing, free speech be damned. But immediately threatening your own people with ungodly fines is authoritarianism pure and simple. Love or hate Musk, it's still not justified.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pmdr 2y agoMisinformation has been rampant ever since social media has gained momentum, on both sides of the political aisle. The sad part is that some folks on the left would happily have a site banned now that Musk is a right-wing nut. They don't seem to grasp the implications this would have on free speech once other countries adopt Brazil's model. In their world, it's a 'nothing burger', as they'd been calling 'the twitter files.'
- h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 2y agoWell, the general issue that caused it is disinformation campaigns People that point out Brazil's current state of affairs don't seem to realize that eventually, a ban of unmoderated social networks is inevitable from a legislative standpoint. I wish that X/bluesky/Facebook/etc had something like a clear label next to its users, maybe a robot icon when the post was created via their API or in an automated manner. That would help people to identify campaigns already a lot. But on the other hand, these are the paying customers, right? It's always "just advertisement" until it is not anymore.
- ben_w 2y ago> Well, the general issue that caused it is disinformation campaigns … > a ban of unmoderated social networks is inevitable from a legislative standpoint. I am surprised this even needs to be stated; either 15 or 18 years ago I made the mistake of creating a phpBB forum instance for my shareware, and it was a rounding error from 100% of signups being spammers. The only difference between spam and disinformation is economic vs political power.
- Green_Frog 2y agoDespite of its original meaning, disinformation has become just a slogan word for content people in power don't want you to see. The antidote to disinformation isn't moderation, it is true information. X has advanced more than any other platform with community notes. Tech is the antidote, not more government regulation and centralized power.
- blueredmodern 2y ago[flagged]
- kelnos 2y agoNo thanks, there are much better ways to support free speech than giving Musk money for his Twitter boondoggle.
- yabatopia 2y agoThis doesn't make any sense. How does paying for some erratic billionaire's pet project equals to supporting free speech? There are way better alternatives to support free speech. Don't waste your money on X.
- dangcock 2y ago[dead]
- ryzvonusef 2y agoTwitter is 'banned' in Pakistan for very similar reasons (requiring a local representative, requiring censorship, etc) under the guise of 'national security concerns'. We are all still using it via VPN. We get all the govt related info from it, and no one is asking, how come the govt dept themselves are using twitter when it's banned? No one will move to bluesky/threads/mastodon because as I said everyone is on twitter. Afterall, if I want to know about the next road blockage or electricity outage, I know I need to go to twitter to check, where else would I go? these are bullship tactics, but they seem to be working, and the internet is fracturing. It was nice while it lasted, but we will no loner have a 'world-wide' web, just national networks with passport controls on accessing external nets.
- therouwboat 2y agoIn my country electricity provider sends text message if there is an outage, but if I need to check something, I go to their website, they have nice map showing what areas are affected etc. Does twitter even work without account anymore?
- lopatamd 2y ago[dead]
- ryzvonusef 2y agoIn my country, they had to tell govt officers to remember to check their email because agreements would be signed, and foreign officials would email relevant officers to start work and get no reply and get confused. Turned out officers run their entire dept on Whatsapp. Everything is adhoc, emails are in the old 2MB email, 50 MB inbox era, websites have not been updated since they were created and only page that gets changed is the organogram, (got to advertise the new minister in charge). So no websites are NOT a reliable source of info. For example, there does infact exist a website to check loadshedding and work shutdown schedules... but my area was split off from a previous feeder and now has a new feeder code, but the website was not updated so I don't updated for my meter. But I can check the twitter account and see tomorrow's shutdowns, and if I am regular, I can be prepped for tomorrow's 5 hr shutdown. same for other things like road closures, due to protests or security corridor or whatever. Maybe other things, twitter is the best source of info. Officers maintain an active twitter profile (despite the ban!) because ministers also are there, and they want their work to be visible. If your boss sees the tweets of your work and people praising you in the comments, that improves your chances of a promotion and better postings.
- dariosalvi78 2y agoFunny how Musk bought Twitter for saving it from censorship and pushed it into censorship. The fact that decentralised services are becoming a thing it's a good outcome though. Maybe that's what always been in his mind after all :) ?
- wtcactus 2y agoIt’s obvious by now that this law will only get selectively enforced. Several members of the ruling socialist party continue to use X to push electoral propaganda aimed at the upcoming election (which would be funny if not tragic). [1] Any law that’s only selectively enforced, is ripe for abuse by any kind of government. More so by a government that’s descending into autocracy. [1] https://x.com/sofiafonsoferre/status/1830181842898530650 https://x.com/sofiafonsoferre/status/1830181842898530650
- seanvelasco 2y agoI like Bluesky, its devs, and its tech. I even built a third-party web client for it in Solid.js. But I find Bluesky to be too toxic. There's too much unwanted nudity, even if all my filters are turned on.
- _heimdall 2y agoThat's really the core of the social media problem though. Social platforms are asked to, and signing themselves up to, walk the fine line between free speech and content moderation. Ultimately they are private platforms and as far as I'm concerned they can censor as much or as little as they want, but its a fundamental problem of any algorithmically managed feed of user generated content. There's no easy fix there and you'll always piss of a large chunk of the population.
- sumeno 2y agoI have never seen any nudity on bsky and I've been using it for more than a year
- newZWhoDis 2y agoNow this is how you do guerrilla marketing.
- Maken 2y agoReally? I need to investigate that further.
- jazzyjackson 2y agoI wonder if anyone's doing intersections and differences on feeds yet - would be awesome if there were people aggregating all the only fans accounts so I could just subtract that from my algorithmic feed.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- extraduder_ire 2y agoFor anyone with a strong enough computer, you can see the firehose stream of what people are posting on bluesky live here: https://firesky.tv/ https://firesky.tv/ The stream has noticeably more Portuguese in it these last couple of days.
- vitorgrs 2y agoNot even strong computer but worked fine here. I guess using Firefox helps :)
- Green_Frog 2y ago[flagged]
- cbsmith 2y agoBluesky is the new Orkut! ;-)
- insane_dreamer 2y agoI think banning any network that allows citizens to air their views, whatever they may be, is very dangerous. Free speech that is free of control is essential. I also think that anyone, especially someone prone to childish tantrums like Musk, having unquestionable control of a major network on which citizens can air their views, is also very dangerous. Free speech that is free of control is essential.
- mplewis 2y agoTwitter isn’t a network where anyone can air their views. Elon regularly takes punitive action to mark links that criticize him as containing malware, has accounts banned that post evidence of his misdeeds, etc. We have a network where you can post what you want to say. It’s called the World Wide Web.
- Slava_Propanei 2y ago[dead]
- slimebot80 2y agoThis is one angle. But X is more a mouth piece for its ketamine soaked owner who has some pretty nasty views. Plenty of places to share your view. At least, anyone can create a webpage.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoAgreed; I wouldn't consider X a public free-speech forum anymore.
- virgulino 2y agoStarlink will not block X-Twitter in Brazil: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41421531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41421531
- martin82 2y agoBeazil will ban Bluesky, too, or worse, Bluesky will comply with Brazil's censorship. Nostr is the actual solution for this dilemma and our best bet to preserve free speech right now.
- bradgessler 2y agoMy favorite thing about BlueSky is I can be my domain: @bradgessler.com.
- blitzpoet 2y agoBluesky is nice, don't get me wrong, but it's also boring. Most users don't update their feeds. The Brazilians will get bored too and leave once X.com resolves the ban. X.com is where the action is at. It's where the news makers and shakers are.