Saudi Arabia blocked blahaj.zone

It sucks, but it's also one positive thing about the Fediverse - if Lemmy was a central platform, it would be completely gone for you now.

Hey at least Lemmy is becoming popular enough for the authorities to block us.

If I were in Saudi Arabia I'd be using a VPN anyways.

Also, if I were in Saudi Arabia, I'd be trying to leave Saudi Arabia

geoblocked

"Geoblocking" would mean that it's blahaj who don't want saudis on their instance

Is it weird this makes me proud to be a blahaj user?

Like when a transphobic government starts hating, you know you’re doing something right.

Use Tor if you can, and people outside of these restrictive countries can help by running Snowflake in their regular browser.

Lol I'd tread a bit carefully.

KSA likes to chase people and have them "disappeared" for their opinions.

I know a guy they picked up for 3 months and when he finally showed up, his poor mouth was zippered shut.

And he was an international too.

I'd look around for a solid VPN solution anyway. Useful to have in any country.

texas will probably block us next.

Well its Saudi Arabia after all. It isn't exactly known for being all that high on the freedom index. I'm sure you realize that though.

From a technical level there are ways to bypass censorship. The thing to keep in mind is that Saudi Arabia doesn't have any rights for citizens. The law can be enforced arbitrarily and you could just disappear one day. If you are looking for technical information on avoiding censorship I can try to help.

Pro tip: Don't "click here"!

My fuckers blocked catbox.moe, most western news sites and slowed down youtube traffic, but lemmy still flies under radar thankfully. I wish you still have your ways to choose what content you want to consume.

They fucking geoblocked blahaj.zone.

I suppose THEY is Saudi Arabia.
How can you be surprised about that? Saudi Arabia is a Sharia law country. An absolute shit stain of a country in many more ways than this.
You can get a death penalty for posting something against Sharia Law on any site. Actively using Lemmy could be enough to see you in jail.

MBS said no more 196

???

It is not realistic to think the saudi government cared that much about this. The way it works is someone send a request to block the site. If there are banned words including “sex” then it will be block. You can request for it to be unblock and say it’s a social media site. They have different rules. Remember reddit is not blocked.

Saudi would take a hacksaw to them if they could

Just click there and tell them it shouldn't be blocked.

I am sure they'll listen!

Do I misunderstand how federation works, or should a block like that not do anything unless your home instance is hosted in that particular country? The instances communicate with each other, not directly with the users. It's similar to viewing blocked content through a VPN.

I didn't know Saudi can block fediverse instances

same vibe as queer.af

They must have thought that admin defending a troll was the last straw as well.

Please don't use so many swear words, as they might execute you.

I blocked blahaj.zone voluntarily. Same as the tankie-zone.

I quickly threw together a script to check which other Fediverse instances are blocked in Saudi Arabia by using Globalping. I know it's horrible, but it works so far. Will share the results once it's finished running. I'll probably also rewrite the script later.

I got the list of instances from lemmy.world: curl -s https://lemmy.world/instances | rg -o 'href="([^"]+)"' | rg -o 'https?://[^"]+' > instances.txt

#!/usr/bin/env fish

set INSTANCES "./instances.txt"
set OUTPUT_FILE "./output.txt"
set COUNTRY "saudi arabia"

for instance in (cat $INSTANCES)
  if globalping http $instance from $COUNTRY --method GET --limit 3 | rg 'Blocked URL' 2&>1
    echo "Blocked: $instance" >> blocked.txt
  end
end

I'm running tail -f blocked.txt in another terminal to monitor the results in real time.

(Yeah I know the script sucks. Don't judge me, I use fish and prefer its syntax over bash. I also use ripgrep, because I like it.)

Because trans content is against god. Or something like that.

What’s 196?

Blocked. They fucking geoblocked blahaj.zone.

Geoblocked for whom?

Change the title from "they" to "Saudi Arabia".

You should still be able to see the blåhaj content on your Lemmy instance. If not it's time to switch instances.

Sometimes these blocks only happen at the DNS level. Consider switching to cloudflare (https://1.1.1.1/)