How many domain names your government needs to block in order to censor an entire network?
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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.
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@silverpill 'blocked by 283 ' 🥴 do you know why?
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@elvecio My instance is in some shared block list. I don't know for sure, probably cryptocurrency
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Angry Sunreplied to Jeff "never puts away anything last edited by@jeffcliff @silverpill I just read it over. When I get some other things going I’ll support this