I love how the Fediverse/ActivityPub prevents region blocking from being effective
Lemmy.ml, the most popular instance fo Lemmy out there, is not accessible in my country unless I use a VPN. But, I can subscribe to any community that exists on lemmy.ml from here and even post on those communities from this account.
I am curious about why lemmy.ml is blocked in your country. Is the 'ml' domain generally blocked? Or was lemmy.ml specifically added to some block list?
A 502 status code does sound more like an error from the server, yes. The correct HTTP status code for a block by the government would be 451. But I'm not sure if countries that try to block social media respect this, they probably want to hide the fact that that website exists entirely. So they might go for a 404 error instead.
Iβm not sure thatβs the case. Any country that blocks your end-user access to that server would also be blocking your local serversβ access to it too, after all its all just traffic to the firewall.
Edit: Oh I get it now. If your country blocks access to foreign site lemmy.abc, but not to foreign site lemmy.xyz, you can join .xyz and subscribe to content from .abc. It will be interesting to see how quickly the whole fediverse gets blocked by strict countries now...
I suspect though that any differences in content most of us are seeing between servers at the moment are down to the massive load that theyβre under. Generally the federation functionality seems to be the most processor-intensive and fragile part of the setup. I've also been able to access posts on struggling servers using apps that the native web front-end isn't able to display.
Are you sure? If the government here in NZ blocks Lemmygrad (IIRC hosted in Switzerland) would that stop my home instance (Beehaw which I think is hosted in the USA) from being able to access Lemmygrad posts?
Yeah, I was careful to say fediverse rather than lemmy for that reason. I think a sufficiently motivated party could still make access very difficult to sustain. Whether anyone's going to be that motivated remains to be seen.
It will be interesting to see how quickly the whole fediverse gets blocked by strict countries nowβ¦
This will be nearly impossible. Popular instances can be blocked but someone can simply create a new small one each time. It is eternal cat and mouse. Censorship by the country where it is hosted however will be effective for that instance but no other.