Turkey Banning Threads Is A Wake Up Call For The Fediverse
On April 29th, Meta will officially deactivate Threads accounts for anyone residing in the nation of Turkey 🇹🇷.
To comply with an interim order of the Rekabet Kurumu/Turkish Competition Authority (TCA), we will shut down Threads in Türkiye from Monday 29 April. We know this will be very disappointing for the many people in Türkiye who engage on Threads with their community. [...]
The TCA recently issued an interim order prohibiting the sharing of data between Threads and Instagram. We disagree with the interim order, we believe we are in compliance with all Turkish legal requirements, and we will appeal. The TCA’s interim order leaves us with no choice but to temporarily shut down Threads in Türkiye. We will continue to constructively engage with the TCA and hope to bring Threads back to people in Türkiye as quickly as possible. (Meta Newsroom)
Although Turkey 🇹🇷 is banning Threads over technical & legal reasons, those active on the Fediverse on other platforms should be aware of the dangers of putting all of your Fediverse eggs 🥚 in one ActivityPub basket 🧺.
Fedi-citizens should consider using multiple platforms on multiple instances, just in case a government:
- Blocks an instance or the hosting service of your instance
- Seizes a domain from your preferred instance (Afghanistan 🇦🇫 seized the domain from a pro-LGBT instance)
- Sanctions a large scale DDoS attack against your instance
For example, according to China Firewall Test:
- four of my instances are partially blocked in China 🇨🇳 (both of my WriteFreely instances, my Misskey instance & my Pixelfed instance) due to who I have chosen to host with
- two Fediverse instances are entirely blocked (alas Flipboard & Threads!)
- The other five instances (one Mastodon & four WordPress) are fully available.
If possible, I would advocate either solo hosting or using less popular (albeit more minor) instances which most governments usually overlook.
While there is nothing wrong with creating an account on a more prominent instance, more often than not, they are the target of government anger (for trivial or political reasons), which means followers may not be able to follow your Fedi-adventures if your instance is blocked.
👨🏾💻 by @darnell@darnellclayton.com 🔛 @darnell@darnell.day 📧 darnell@darnell.day
🕺🏾 Follow my adventures upon: 🐘 Darnell (One) 🦁 Darnell (Movies, Opuses, Entertainment) 📸 Darnell (Out Of Office)
🦹🏾♂️ WordPress Workarounds: 💻 Darnell (TeleVerse) 🌍 Darnell (Africa) 👨🏾🎨 Darnell (Creative Outlet)
🥷🏾 Other Hideaways: 🧵 Darnell (Threads) 🔞 Darnell (Hard News) 🐬 Darnell (Flipboard)