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I love how the Fediverse/ActivityPub prevents region blocking from being effective (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
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Lemmy.ml, the most popular instance fo Lemmy out there, is not accessible in my country unless I use a VPN. But, I can subscribe to any community that exists on lemmy.ml from here and even post on those communities from this account.

I love this aspect of Lemmy.

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[–] 31 points 3 years ago (1 child)

I am curious about why lemmy.ml is blocked in your country. Is the 'ml' domain generally blocked? Or was lemmy.ml specifically added to some block list?

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  • [–] [S] 22 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    It just says 502 Bad Gateway. I'm not even sure if the block is intentional on their part, or a server issue of some sort.

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  • [–] 49 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    A 502 status code does sound more like an error from the server, yes. The correct HTTP status code for a block by the government would be 451. But I'm not sure if countries that try to block social media respect this, they probably want to hide the fact that that website exists entirely. So they might go for a 404 error instead.

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  • [–] 13 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    404 is still a server response, so I imagine no response at all would be the way to go.

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  • [–] 12 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Yea true, so you would just get a timeout (or an error from the DNS server that the domain does not exist if you use a 'government approved' DNS server.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    A lot of censorship-happy governments have specific message that show up when a page is blocked telling you quite explicitly that the page you're trying to access is banned.

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    • [–] 15 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    The 502 error with Lemmy.ml due to connecting with IPv6. Once I disabled that on my computer, everything loaded. See https://lemmy.world/post/120796

    Something must have happened during the upgrade yesterday and DNS isn't pointing correctly. Hopefully it is fixed soon.

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    • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    I’m not sure that’s the case. I’m sure any country that blocks your end-user access to that server would also be blocking your local servers’ access to it too, after all its all just http traffic to the firewall.

    I suspect that any differences in content you’re seeing between servers at the moment are down to the massive load that they’re under. Generally the federation functionality seems to be the most processor-intensive and fragile part of the setup.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Are you sure? If the government here in NZ blocks Lemmygrad (IIRC hosted in Switzerland) would that stop my home instance (Beehaw which I think is hosted in the USA) from being able to access Lemmygrad posts?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago*

    It will be interesting to see how quickly the whole fediverse gets blocked by strict countries now…

    This will be nearly impossible. Popular instances can be blocked but someone can simply create a new small one each time. It is eternal cat and mouse. Censorship by the country where it is hosted however will be effective for that instance but no other.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (1 child)

    @mykl @AndreTelevise Or even better you can use the ActivityPub like me to send a comment from Mastodon to Lemmy.

    So if they block every instance in Lemmy, which is impossible by the way, you can still use other fediverse social networks to access to it.

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  • [–] -1 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I was careful to say fediverse rather than lemmy for that reason. I think a sufficiently motivated party could still make access very difficult to sustain. Whether anyone's going to be that motivated remains to be seen.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    @mykl There's only one issue with the ActivityPub.

    Which is:
    - Is more feasible to make an account into Lemmy or Kbin to comment, save posts or give them thumbs up/down than to access to the ActivityPub from another social network in the fediverse.

    For example to make these comments into Lemmy from Mastodon I had to search for a guide on internet to make it possible. ActivityPub isn't user friendly which is the main issue in the entire fediverse (issues with UI and UX).

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    I certainly admit your dedication in working it out πŸ˜€

    I knew it was a feature, but I suspect it's one of those things that will make little sense to most people until power-users start using it to build extraordinary features and services that we don't even know we need yet.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    @mykl I make it work, but there's interoperability issues.
    Right now I can see that one of my comments got like 2 thumbs up. The issue is that I can't see it on Mastodon, not even like a "favorite ⭐" which is the closest thing.
    Also I gave you a "favorite", but Lemmy don't register it as a thumbs up, so probably you only gonna see some of my interactions with you, only if you access through the Mastodon UI.

    Also I can't find the way to follow people from Lemmy and bookmark/save their posts.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Well, early days I suppose. Now they're both receiving a lot more attention I hope that these sorts of issues will get addressed. If you enjoy the pain I hope you've checked out how it all works with kbin too!

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    @mykl Right now I think that I'll leave the ActivityPub for now.
    Is easier just to make an account in lemmy.ca and in kbin.social than trying to reply comments/toots, find a way make the comment in first place, to try to follow someone and also to find a way to save content from another social network.

    Also ActivityPub allows me to make a post on Lemmy from Mastodon on any of their "subreddits/communities".
    The issue I can only post and reply 500 characters. Which is very annoying.

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    • [–] 5 points 3 years ago

    Shhhh don't tell them that!!

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    [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    @AndreTelevise Why is it blocked in your country? Is it your ISP blocking it or Lemmy.ml who doesn't allow people from your country?

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I'm not sure, but it is a 502 error so it's likely just some server-related thing

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