How easily can Lemmy be censored?
Being an old grandpa not that adept at tech, I don't know how Lemmy works. I mean, I know it's decentralized and it's supposed to be better than reddit, but still, how vulnerable is this platform from censors looking to block anything in here?
Are we invincible like those thepiratebay.org instances which jump up the more you try to censor them or are we basically like reddit. In other words, can I reliably access lemmy in China?
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Not really, you would only be able to access instances that China hasn't blocked.
Are you sure? There are multiple sites where you can check if a site is blocked in china. I've put a few lemmy instances in the first 3 sites i found and they all claim they're accessible. I'm not sure how 'reliable' that would be, but seems as of now they aren't censored.
I mean in the end it’s a server somewhere like any other website. If your decide to block all traffic that goes to that site, yiu blocked it. The thing with lemmy is just that it’s decentralized and technically you could just another instance and acces the cache and interact ther from what I understand.
So if if China works with a Blocklist and not an Allowlist, instances might go up faster than they can block them?
Yes, exactly. On the other hand the list of lemmy instances is public. And we even have websites that help new users to find a suitable one from the list of all known instances.
I bet a censor like china has people or program(mer)s to to go through such a list and block each and every known instance. I'm not an expert on china. I wouldn't be surprised if somebody told me they're already doing it like that for other federated or distributed platforms.
Yeah I guess my point is that China could block Lemmy instances.
Unless China blocks all activitypub traffic, that’s a losing game of whack-a-mole. Or I guess they could scrape the federations of the instances they want to block and add them in real time.
But yeah, you’re right it isn’t designed to evade state level censorship.
I would say the same about the entire china firewall.
Unfortunately, China's firewall is a extremely robust technology. It is much more than just a DNS sink hole.
For example, it can block IP addresses (probably dynamically), like digital ocean or AWS. It can even block internet protocols, like TLS1.3 https://www.zdnet.com/article/china-is-now-blocking-all-encrypted-https-traffic-using-tls-1-3-and-esni/ . It can even block tor, a inernet protocol designed for anonymity and prevent censorship https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/04/04/186902/how-china-blocks-the-tor-anonymity-network/
It is truely disheartenng to see talented engineers working on this piece of oppressive technology. I imagine if they want to, it would be rather trivial to block most activitypub instance.
Yeah I mean, deep packet inspection at that scale is certainly an impressive feat. But that doesn't change the fact that it's a game of whack-a-mole. Tor entry relays get detected? Tor devs change the handshake or use purified to reach the entry nodes: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-china/
A friend of mine was able to bypass the firewall there a few years ago using unlisted VPN endpoints he got from his VPN provider.
They can block most things for most uninformed users. But they'll never be able to make it impenetrable without cutting off access to the larger internet completely.
How many instances are there? I can if I need to create my own instance right? So, it's just like pirate bay I suppose, you close one instance another will take it's place or am I mistaken?
Yeah true. It would require some additional work if you wanted to federate with blocked instances though. Same goes for if you wanted to migrate the federated data in the event the instance gets blocked.
But you could access from the unblocked China instance to the world couldn't you?
Yeah, unless that unblocked instance resides in China then it's probably subject to the same restriction as you. Unless they proxy the federation traffic.
Images are an issue though, as those don't get cached by the local instance but are just links to the remote instance.