Discussion
Territories with national firewalls (or heavily concentrated ISPs who represent a tractable number of chokeable throats) can block noncompliant servers from their users (who might or might not avail themselves of VPNs to evade thse blocks).
There aren't many national firewalls, and enumerating all the noncompliant servers in the Fediverse is a big chore for their operators (less so for all the noncompliant Atmostphere servers, because there's just not that many of those-yet).
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On the other hand, the mobile device duopoly of Google and Apple represent a pair of trivially chokeable throats that can be used to extinguish any app that displease a country's censors (all the more reason to make everything web-first and treat apps as unreliable adjuncts to core web functionality).
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But there's one more potential chokepoint: to the extent that the Bluesky (the service) or Mastodon (the service) maintain some nexus of control over users, even users on independent servers, they could come under pressure to terminate users that displease governments.
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Now, Mastodon has no such control over users, and if it tried to exert that control (for example, by pressuring an independent server to terminate their users' access), they could be sued for tortious interference with contract.
Unfortunately, Bluesky has chosen to insulate itself from that hedge against being the chokeable throat that is used as a means to exerting pressure on independent servers in the Atmosphere.
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Bluesky's Terms of Service trap all of its users in a "binding arbitration" waiver that forces them to surrender their right to sue. That means that if Bluesky were to threaten Blacksky in a bid to force it to do age verification or engage in some other form of censorship, anyone involved with Blacksky who ever created a Bluesky account would be unable to use to courts to defend themselves:
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(However, if you set up a Bluesky server without ever joining Bluesky (the service) and clicking through its ToS, you're golden.)
Of course, none of this matters to Maga - but it should. Decentralized systems with no readily chokeable throats are good for people with disfavored views, and that includes a lot of the Maga movement. Remember, Trump's agenda is incredibly unpopular:
https://navigatorresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Navigator-Topline-F04.07.25.pdf
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Someday, Maga is going to find that their enemies have found the right throat to choke to silence them. But Maga's useful idiots just keep on stepping on this rake - these are the same self-owning fools who opposed municipal fiber and thus ensured that if just a handful of giant ISPs decided to deplatform you, you'd disappear from the internet:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love
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Bluesky users were furious when JD Vance joined the service. Maga culture warriors were furious when Bluesky users called for his account to be terminated. Both groups are nuts. If Bluesky lives up to its promise - if it becomes an unchokeable, future-proof, decentralized social media protocol, and not merely a platform, then there's no way to kick JD Vance off Bluesky (the service).
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All you can do is demand that Bluesky (the server) cut off his account, whereupon he will immediately decamp to another server where he is more welcome, and still able to communicate with any Bluesky user who wants to hear from him.
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Progressives should want this, because it's *far* more likely that Bluesky will be pressured to terminate users for failing to be insufficiently demonstrative in their anguish over the Charlie Kirk shooting than it is that Bluesky will be pressured to terminate the Vice President of the USA.
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A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
