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Russia's first politically motivated block of a Fediverse server (reestr.rublacklist.net)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 32 points 7 months ago (2 children)

But blocking the instance at the DNS level does not stop the content from reaching other Russian instances, right? They would have to basically track every server that is federating with them and block like this.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 7 months ago (4 children)

Instances hosted in Russia can’t federate with lgbtqia.space anymore.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Other instances hosted outside of Russia but available from inside Russia can still federated with them, though, right?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Correct

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yeah this seems like a total misunderstanding of how activitypub works from the orks. Not surprising a bunch of fascist idiots don't understand modern federation technology.

[–] abrahambelch 17 points 7 months ago

And it once again shows why federated social media rocks 😎

[–] [email protected] 13 points 7 months ago

You could fix it with a relay, or having the instances conn extend with the rest of the Internet through a VPN/proxy.

Yeah, a PITA but can still be worked around.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

If it's a DNS block I guess Russian instances just need to direct the domain to the IP address in their hosts file

[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

It's always IP + DNS + Deep Packet Inspection. To access blocked websites, you have to use some sort of proxying.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Curious - would boosts from users on non-blocked servers bypass the block here? In other words, does traffic for boosts go via the original instance, or is it direct between the boosting and the receiving servers?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

does traffic for boosts go via the original instance

That way. You can't trust a third-party instance to proxy content, every server has to get its own copy.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Fair point, would be an incredibly easy vector for abuse in any other way. Good thing I'm not a software engineer.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

don't give them ideas

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

They know it already.

Anyway, it is interesting that this particular case is better handled by something like Nostr.