Russia's first politically motivated block of a Fediverse server

CyberTailor@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.ml – 112 points –
The registry of blocked websites
reestr.rublacklist.net

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14155096

Admin team of LGBTQIA.Social Mastodon instance received abuse email from Russian censorship agency, where they demanded to remove an account. The account in question represented a small group that ran a collaborative blog for LGBTQIA youth and adults in Russia.

Shortly after refusal to comply with agency's demands, the instance was blocked and is now unreachable from Russia.

All previous blocks of Fediverse instaces in Russia were related to hosting CSAM.

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Right. However, instances hosted in Russia can't federate with lgbtqia.space anymore.

Hm, I feel that should be easily worked around through proxies, but the problem is that the Russian authorities would go after those russian instances then

Could a Russian instance federate with an unblocked instance (e.g. lemmy.world) which federates with lgbtqia.space and then federate lgbtqia.space by proxy?

Or does the protocol not work like that?

Russian instance users can still read comments from LGBT instance users if the comments are left on .world though, right?

Or does the protocol not work like that?

That's technically possible but no major fedi software implements it because you can't trust a third-party server.

No, but the users could just create account in any other instance federated with the blocked instance

Or just spin up a new one in heitzner or something

just spin up a new one in heitzner

Russian bank cards are accepted virtually nowhere, and only few hosting operators accept cryptocurrencies.

Yeah true. So other instances is the best bet, and better used over tor to mask the connections

Would it be possible to have a shadow instance with the only purpose of circumventing blocks?