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Holy shit.
The Russian gov send in an abuse request for the @Bellingcat to be removed from mstdn.social :amaze:
I am not gonna comply, and have replied to Hetzner
No way I'm gonna let the evils of the gremlin dictate stuff on anything I host
UPDATE: Hetzner ignores their requests and we're in the clear: https://mstdn.social/@stux/113662573364116275
Ideally, the fediverse will help people in censorious countries access information their governments don’t want them to see, but I am not too optimistic, I used to think that about the entire Internet and look where we are now, governments around the world are very much managing to control the spread of information on it.
I still think that fedi will help, and in fact I am pretty sure it is helping already, simply because it is quite decentralized. Blocking 20k+ instances is not trivial. And each of these instances is an entrypoint, so to speak, into the broader fedi. Missing even one is thus a big deal. If my instance is blocked, I can set up an account on a different one, follow the same people, and I am back in business.
At the same time all these instances are run independently. One can’t simply threaten the whole fedi to force it to do a thing (say, take down an account), this just does not make sense.
Compare and contrast with centralized services like Facebook, gatekeepers like Cloudflare, and so on. Threatening one big entity with problems might be enough to “convince it” to take a thing down.
The reason governments and other powerful entities are able to control the information flow is because there are these hugely important single points of failure. Fedi is not perfect (mastodon.social is way too big for its own good…), but it is a step in the right direction.
Blocking is quite trivial with a whitelist… what isn’t so trivial, is to block while keeping the appearances of not blocking, or block while IT workers at ISPs and hosting providers are morally opposed to blocking.
Blocking a somewhat fluctuating list of 25k+ instances is still considerably harder than blocking a pretty stable infrastructure of a single major social media platform.
You’re thinking of a blacklist: “block NONE except [list]”. I’m speaking of a whitelist: “block ALL except [list]”.
Making a list of IPs registered with, and allowed by the government, is quite easy. China, Russia, Iran, etc. have been making those lists for years at this point.
Ideally, the fediverse will help people in censorious countries access information their governments don’t want them to see, but I am not too optimistic, I used to think that about the entire Internet and look where we are now, governments around the world are very much managing to control the spread of information on it.
I still think that fedi will help, and in fact I am pretty sure it is helping already, simply because it is quite decentralized. Blocking 20k+ instances is not trivial. And each of these instances is an entrypoint, so to speak, into the broader fedi. Missing even one is thus a big deal. If my instance is blocked, I can set up an account on a different one, follow the same people, and I am back in business.
At the same time all these instances are run independently. One can’t simply threaten the whole fedi to force it to do a thing (say, take down an account), this just does not make sense.
Compare and contrast with centralized services like Facebook, gatekeepers like Cloudflare, and so on. Threatening one big entity with problems might be enough to “convince it” to take a thing down.
The reason governments and other powerful entities are able to control the information flow is because there are these hugely important single points of failure. Fedi is not perfect (
mastodon.socialis way too big for its own good…), but it is a step in the right direction.Blocking is quite trivial with a whitelist… what isn’t so trivial, is to block while keeping the appearances of not blocking, or block while IT workers at ISPs and hosting providers are morally opposed to blocking.
Keep in mind that Russia has already done the “block it all” experiment in 2019, and keeps practicing it: https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/russia-disconnects-several-regions-from-the-global-internet-to-test-its-sovereign-net
Blocking a somewhat fluctuating list of 25k+ instances is still considerably harder than blocking a pretty stable infrastructure of a single major social media platform.
You’re thinking of a blacklist: “block NONE except [list]”. I’m speaking of a whitelist: “block ALL except [list]”.
Making a list of IPs registered with, and allowed by the government, is quite easy. China, Russia, Iran, etc. have been making those lists for years at this point.
I intentionally didn’t register on big instances like lemmy.world or mastodon.social in order to avoid being part of obvious places to censor.