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?
A close cousin of Lemmy is Mastodon. If you consider Lemmy a federated version of Reddit, then Mastodon is a federated version of Twitter.
The largest Mastodon server is probably Truth Social, on which former president Trump posts his messages after being banned from Twitter.
Truth Social uses the same protocol as Mastodon of Lemmy: ActivityPub. The difference: the Truth Social administrators blocked the Truth Social server from sending out messages to or receiving messages from other servers. So it’s a private Mastodon.
Bottom line: if you run your own Lemmy server you can block whatever server you want or none at all. And others can block your server if they want. If you create ab account at somebody else’s Lemmy server, the administrator can decide to block other Lemmy servers.
If you use a Mastodon account, it’s very easy to migrate to another server including your followers. Lemmy accounts do not appear to offer that functionality (yet?), but I expect a migration tool will be created in the future. So if an administrator decides to block another Lemmy server, but you don’t like that, you might easily move to another server. As of yet, you can’t however and need to create an account on another Lemmy server.
As of yesterday, the largest is of course Threads. Not sure if it’s actually mastodon, I assume not, but it does use ActivityPub and is part of the fediverse.
Or maybe not as a lot of people have pointed out that it isn’t actually federated with anything yet, so maybe it isn’t activitypub.
And, of course, it is (or will soon be) defederated by much of the Fediverse since we want nothing to do with Meta/Facebook.
I mean maybe. Part of the beauty of this is that I also get to consume Threads content without being subject to any of their data collection outside of what I post and interact with. I can consume their content, they of course can consume mine, but they can’t actually track what I consume.
Threads isn’t anything yet. It might use ActivityPub under the covers but we don’t know because they’ve not attempted to connect to anything else yet.
can I reliably access lemmy in China?
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.
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.
Unless China blocks all activitypub traffic, that’s a losing game of whack-a-mole.
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.
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?
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.
there is a page about this on the lemmy docs: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/05-censorship-resistance.html
lemmygrad.ml might actually be China. But each instance gives a list of the instances it federates with, so it should be easy for China to block them all. Lemmy has no features specifically for evading state censorship.
As long as an instance that is federated with the instances you want is not blocked, you can access it.
If they want to block all instances, there’s no reason they can’t.
