The TikTok ban and Donald Trump's rise to power show how fragile our social media accounts are. We must normalize and invest in decentralized social media.
I have a feeling this place and other decentralized social medias will be banned in the near future. Look at what’s happening to TIktok. You either bend the knee or you get axed. It’s why the other social media giants bent the knee. They understand the writing on the wall. There’s more going on behind the scenes that they don’t share with us. I think we’re sort of watching a quiet coup.
Isn’t decentralization a thing that makes that much harder? There isn’t the same “national security” concern. I’m not saying it won’t happen just that the mechanism is much more difficult to make work.
You’re mixing multiple subjects here, one being the logistics of blocking a federated system like Lemmy, the other being whether the wrong person finds the content of such a system objectionable and labels it a “national security issue.”
I’m being a tad pedantic here, but my reason for pointing this out is that I think #2 is not far fetched at all, but I’m unsure of how feasible #1 might be and would love if somebody who knows more than I do would chime in.
EDIT: Looks like some have already discussed #2 in the other comment thread started by Teknikal.
Not saying you are wrong if anything though I think Reddit is probably the next obvious victim after TikTok they’ll simply point to the Chinese Tencent who own shares and the next thing you know Musk will be part owner.
Fediverse I think will probably be the last hit simply because it’s small and because of the design can’t be hit easily, wouldn’t surprise me if they just targeted the biggest servers though.
Realistically if it is hit it’ll be through some sweeping “social media safety” bill that makes the cost of administrating a social media site as a hobby prohibitively expensive and/or time consuming, maybe even as on the nose as requiring the software to receive a specific certification before it’s allowed to open registration.
We’ve already seen the UK’s online safety bill cause many admins of small forums and communities to shutter their communities as a result, and who knows how Australia’s recent social media bill will affect Australian Fediverse servers & users
A decent amount of the larger servers are hosted outside the US, which might complicates matters.
However, many also use Cloudflare (US based) as a proxy, which might make targeting the Fediverse easier.
Isn’t it possible to just move the site under a different domain name, or have mirrored secondary servers in an entirely different location in case the primary one gets taken down?
I’m not sure if duplicate servers are supported with AP, I suspect it will cause the posts to be shared twice.
I have been thinking about whether instances also being available on TOR could help, mostly due to Saudi Arabia banning lemmy.blahaj.zone. Commercial VPN’s are apparently something problematic governments detect, so I doubt that accessing the TOR network is safe.
Yeah I think along the same lines can only hope if servers are compromised like this they get defederated immediately to make a point, ultimately though I think the design of the fediverse pretty much keeps it safe but some servers may unfortunately face consequences
I’m not really expecting any attempts to compromise the servers themselves, I think it’s more likely to see more website blocks like Saudi Arabia did with lemmy.blahaj.zone did some time ago.
Dont worry, lemmings worry about some shutdown every other week. Been here since the API closures, and its quite nice (if you block the news communities)
they can’t ban everything, the Internet is too big. people will find a way
they don’t really have to ban everything. for example, the persistent chinese internet-goer has the ability to view things he’s not supposed to see even though China bans large swathes of the internet.
but by making it as difficult as possible for most people and creating strict punishments for breaking the rules, you can effectively ban most things you want for majority of people
if posting on lemmy makes you an enemy of the state and the state is becoming increasingly harsh with its punishments… would you still be going on and posting regularly? i would certainly think twice.
I have a feeling this place and other decentralized social medias will be banned in the near future. Look at what’s happening to TIktok. You either bend the knee or you get axed. It’s why the other social media giants bent the knee. They understand the writing on the wall. There’s more going on behind the scenes that they don’t share with us. I think we’re sort of watching a quiet coup.
Isn’t decentralization a thing that makes that much harder? There isn’t the same “national security” concern. I’m not saying it won’t happen just that the mechanism is much more difficult to make work.
You’re mixing multiple subjects here, one being the logistics of blocking a federated system like Lemmy, the other being whether the wrong person finds the content of such a system objectionable and labels it a “national security issue.”
I’m being a tad pedantic here, but my reason for pointing this out is that I think #2 is not far fetched at all, but I’m unsure of how feasible #1 might be and would love if somebody who knows more than I do would chime in.
EDIT: Looks like some have already discussed #2 in the other comment thread started by Teknikal.
Not saying you are wrong if anything though I think Reddit is probably the next obvious victim after TikTok they’ll simply point to the Chinese Tencent who own shares and the next thing you know Musk will be part owner.
Fediverse I think will probably be the last hit simply because it’s small and because of the design can’t be hit easily, wouldn’t surprise me if they just targeted the biggest servers though.
Realistically if it is hit it’ll be through some sweeping “social media safety” bill that makes the cost of administrating a social media site as a hobby prohibitively expensive and/or time consuming, maybe even as on the nose as requiring the software to receive a specific certification before it’s allowed to open registration.
We’ve already seen the UK’s online safety bill cause many admins of small forums and communities to shutter their communities as a result, and who knows how Australia’s recent social media bill will affect Australian Fediverse servers & users
A decent amount of the larger servers are hosted outside the US, which might complicates matters. However, many also use Cloudflare (US based) as a proxy, which might make targeting the Fediverse easier.
Isn’t it possible to just move the site under a different domain name, or have mirrored secondary servers in an entirely different location in case the primary one gets taken down?
I’m not sure if duplicate servers are supported with AP, I suspect it will cause the posts to be shared twice.
I have been thinking about whether instances also being available on TOR could help, mostly due to Saudi Arabia banning lemmy.blahaj.zone. Commercial VPN’s are apparently something problematic governments detect, so I doubt that accessing the TOR network is safe.
Yeah I think along the same lines can only hope if servers are compromised like this they get defederated immediately to make a point, ultimately though I think the design of the fediverse pretty much keeps it safe but some servers may unfortunately face consequences
I’m not really expecting any attempts to compromise the servers themselves, I think it’s more likely to see more website blocks like Saudi Arabia did with lemmy.blahaj.zone did some time ago.
I hope not. I just arrived!
Dont worry, lemmings worry about some shutdown every other week. Been here since the API closures, and its quite nice (if you block the news communities)
Yeah I finally decided to actually commit to getting off reddit would be unfortunate.
then we will all get on WordPress or something and go back to rss feeds. they can’t ban everything, the Internet is too big. people will find a way
they don’t really have to ban everything. for example, the persistent chinese internet-goer has the ability to view things he’s not supposed to see even though China bans large swathes of the internet.
but by making it as difficult as possible for most people and creating strict punishments for breaking the rules, you can effectively ban most things you want for majority of people
if posting on lemmy makes you an enemy of the state and the state is becoming increasingly harsh with its punishments… would you still be going on and posting regularly? i would certainly think twice.