How many domain names your government needs to block in order to censor an entire network?
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silverpillreplied to ᴍᴏᴏɴ :AkibaBunny: last edited by
@moon The value of a network depends on its size, so the total number of nodes and distribution of users are quite important. If you cut off 99% users the network will be dead no matter what.
Censorship circumvention has a price, and most users will not pay it.By the way, the cheapest solution is not to deploy a new node, but to use a VPN.
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Could you go in depth? Doesnt the fediverse already self-censor i.e. mastodon.social users cant fins poa.st users? The nostr outbox models makes it so there are infinite domains, have you seen https://how-nostr-works.pages.dev/ ?
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Taylan (Male Feminist Arc)replied to silverpill last edited by@silverpill
> In practice the network is smaller and easier to disrupt, that's what my post was about.
But presumably this is just a factor of the smaller popularity? Is there a technical reason Nostr couldn't have as many relays as Fedi has nodes?
> If those people don't want to interact with you, I don't see any problem
I think about 99.999% (literally) of those people have never heard of me, and will never hear of me on the Fediverse, since I've been pre-emptively blocked for them by their admins.
Also, in almost all cases, even the admin blocking me doesn't do so because he or she heard of me, let alone has ever actually seen a post by me. Rather, the block is implemented by importing pre-made block lists.
These block lists include massive numbers of people, who might be associated with wrongthink in some way, because at some point the Fedi node they're on was flagged by someone and put on such a list. There is no oversight of this process, or transparency about the reasons. It's just a tiny minority of people who are trusted blindly as authorities on what people you should and shouldn't interact with. And they successfully split the entire Fediverse in two halves (or even more pieces) that can't interact.
This is all done "for the safety" of their users, even though it doesn't in any way prevent the "bad people" from seeing those users; it merely silences them on Fedi.
It really is just straight up authoritarian censorship, pretty much as bad as on centralised platforms like Twitter and Facebook. -
@877308276be50ce9bafa7e5e374e4fcbf5e9859a21918f34baefd000746b7d35 Moderation is not censorship. Mastodon.social users don't want to interact with poa.st users, so they disabled federation with them.
>have you seen https://how-nostr-works.pages.dev/
It talks about a situation when user is banned by multiple relays. To recover from that, he deploys new relays and then attempts to contact his followers. Nice idea, but realistically, who is going to do that? Software developers, and a small number of power users?
And again, this is "ban resistance", not censorship resistance. Censoring almost always happens at the network level, not the application level. In that case people use VPNs, Tor and similar tools
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Taylan (Male Feminist Arc)replied to Taylan (Male Feminist Arc) last edited by@silverpill
> This is all done "for the safety" of their users, even though it doesn't in any way prevent the "bad people" from seeing those users; it merely silences them on Fedi.
Actually, I was unclear here. I think you know what I mean, but for the avoidance of doubt:
It doesn't fully silence those people, of course. They can still talk to each other on their own nodes, and could for instance still organise harassment campaigns if that was their intention.
It doesn't deal with truly harmful people in any meaningful way. It just disrupts communication on a massive scale, between thousands of people, just to make it ever so slightly more difficult for a tiny minority of actual bad actors to carry out their harassment campaigns.
I think the real intention isn't even to combat harassment. It's just to silence people with views deemed unpleasant, and the "safety" thing is just the justification. (Exactly how authoritarian censorship always goes.) -
ᴍᴏᴏɴ :AkibaBunny:replied to silverpill last edited by
@[email protected] ah yeah that's how people keep accessing Twitter in Brazil, just using free vpns
But I was thinking the censorship would come like that, blocking access to the client, in this case a website. If you just create another access point in another dns you're in again and the relays are not affected, are they? -
silverpillreplied to Taylan (Male Feminist Arc) last edited by
>Is there a technical reason Nostr couldn't have as many relays as Fedi has nodes?
There is no technical reason, but I think there's a social reason. People are not good at managing secret keys, so as the network grows, more and more people will forgo key management and will use trusted services. Basically, the same scenario that played out in cryptocurrency world. An average user don't want to think about keys and relays, so market will provide convenient but centralized solutions.
This hasn't happened in Fediverse because of the very feature you're criticizing it for. Reputation of the server can be damaged by actions of its users, and that creates a strong incentive to split into smaller communities.
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silverpillreplied to Taylan (Male Feminist Arc) last edited by
@taylan I agree that instance admins are often over-reacting with instance blocks, but I don't see how moderation can work on a large scale without such mechanism.
The situation can be improved by making identity decentralized. I've been working on it: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md
This solution allows full account migrations (not just followers), and multi-homing. A bit like Nostr, but "instances" still exist as moderation domains. -
silverpillreplied to ᴍᴏᴏɴ :AkibaBunny: last edited by
@moon Some clients make connections to relays directly from the browser, so they won't be able to connect to blocked relays. If requests are proxied by client, it won't be affected.
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Jeff "never puts away anything, especially oven mitts" Cliff, Bringer of Nightmares 🏴☠️🦝🐙 🇱🇧🧯 🇨🇦🐧😷“🌐replied to silverpill last edited by@silverpill of course it probably isn't much more difficult to block 1 domain name than it is to block 20,000 if you're ICE. Maybe some extra paperwork that's about it.
That's why it's so important to remove dependency from DNS altogether and for *certain* to not have bluesky's deep dependency on DNS. It's difficult to move fediverse servers from domain name to domain name and should be easier -- but possible. Don't know about nostr i'd imagine nostr doesn't care either way -
Latte macchiato :blobcoffee: :ablobcat_longlong:replied to aeris last edited by
@[email protected] @[email protected] See how good your life is when the main Bluesky relay blocks your PDS, or when your account gets deleted from their PLC.
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silverpillreplied to Jeff "never puts away anything last edited by
@jeffcliff I don't think blocking 20000 domains at once is a realistic scenario, because normally censors are tasked with suppressing specific sources (while minimizing collateral damage).
However, you're right that deep dependency on DNS is not a good thing, even though DNS is necessary to maximize reach and provide good UX. I designed FEP-ef61 which addresses this issue by detaching identity from domain name.
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aerisreplied to Latte macchiato :blobcoffee: :ablobcat_longlong: last edited by
@[email protected] @[email protected] It's still better than being locked on an AP instance with no possibility at all to migrate content. And for having an instance currently massively ban from the Fediverse, I can say it's definitively not better here than on BS.
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Latte macchiato :blobcoffee: :ablobcat_longlong:replied to aeris last edited by
@[email protected] @[email protected] Your instance is blocked by 13 others. I don't think that really qualifies as massively banned from the fediverse.
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aerisreplied to Latte macchiato :blobcoffee: :ablobcat_longlong: last edited by
@[email protected] @[email protected] No. My instance is not blocked by 13 others.
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@[email protected] @[email protected] My instance is publicly blocked from 249 known instances, and certainly way more not publicly. It's around 10-15% of the network.
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@[email protected] @[email protected] And i'm the good example of the "censorship" trouble on the fediverse. You can look about those ban, mostly all if not all are highly problematic.
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Jeff "never puts away anything, especially oven mitts" Cliff, Bringer of Nightmares 🏴☠️🦝🐙 🇱🇧🧯 🇨🇦🐧😷“🌐replied to silverpill last edited by@silverpill @sun does pleroma do this?
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@aeris @privateger Well, I'm blocked by 283 instances. Couldn't care less
Moderation is not censorship. If people don't want to interact with you, there's no good reason for you to interact with them.
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silverpillreplied to Jeff "never puts away anything last edited by
@jeffcliff @sun No, but Streams can do this, and Mitra has partial support.