2y ago

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 love this aspect of Lemmy.

41 comments

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?
- It just says 502 Bad Gateway. I'm not even sure if the block is intentional on their part, or a server issue of some sort.
  
  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.
  
  It's been up and down the past day, they just moved to a beefier server.
  
  Hmm, interesting. I don't know how to interpret that. Thanks!
The 502 error with Lemmy.ml due to connecting with IPv6. Once I disabled that on my computer, everything loaded. See https://lemmy.world/post/120796
Something must have happened during the upgrade yesterday and DNS isn't pointing correctly. Hopefully it is fixed soon.
- Well, I am able to visit the site now
I’m not sure that’s the case. Any country that blocks your end-user access to that server would also be blocking your local servers’ 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 they’re 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?
  
  No, it wouldn't. The Beehaw server is located in the United States. External communities aren't retrieved via your machine, but via their server.
- @mykl @AndreTelevise Or even better you can use the ActivityPub like me to send a comment from Mastodon to Lemmy.
  So if they block every instance in Lemmy, which is impossible by the way, you can still use other fediverse social networks to access to it.
  
  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 now…
  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.
  
  Sure nearly impossible to do 100% but if you put enough cats on the job you can make life tough for the mice :-)
Shhhh don't tell them that!!
@AndreTelevise Why is it blocked in your country? Is it your ISP blocking it or Lemmy.ml who doesn't allow people from your country?
- I think it was just down and OP misinterpreted it.
  
  @federationhelper ah yeah could be.
- I'm not sure, but it is a 502 error so it's likely just some server-related thing
  
  @AndreTelevise
  Yeah I got the same earlier

41 comments