Mastodawn

I love how the Fediverse/ActivityPub prevents region blocking from being effective

https://lemmy.world/post/119892

I love how the Fediverse/ActivityPub prevents region blocking from being effective - Lemmy.world

Lemmy.ml [http://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 [http://lemmy.ml] from here and even post on those communities from this account. I love this aspect of Lemmy.

Salamander Jun 14, 2023

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?

Televise Jun 14, 2023

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.

bdonvr Jun 14, 2023

It's been up and down the past day, they just moved to a beefier server.

Salamander Jun 14, 2023

Hmm, interesting. I don't know how to interpret that. Thanks!

Pekka Jun 14, 2023

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.

Skelectus Jun 14, 2023

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

Pekka Jun 14, 2023

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.

cnnrduncan Jun 14, 2023

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.

🇺🇦 seirim Jun 14, 2023

In contrast, in China you just get the browser’s default error page like you typed in a url wrong to a page that doesn’t exist, in essence they give you no error or indication info at all, just blank.

joyjoy Jun 14, 2023

You'll likely get a permanent redirect to some government site telling you access is denied. The same thing happens on a corporate or school network that blocked a domain.

Weerdo Jun 14, 2023

I like that the code is 451, but yeah no one is going to explicitly use it when they're blocking things. A little too on the nose.

mykl Jun 14, 2023

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.

cnnrduncan Jun 14, 2023

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?

aponigricon Jun 14, 2023

No, it wouldn't. The Beehaw server is located in the United States. External communities aren't retrieved via your machine, but via their server.

skeletorsass Jun 14, 2023

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.

mykl Jun 14, 2023

Sure nearly impossible to do 100% but if you put enough cats on the job you can make life tough for the mice :-)

Daniel Retana Jun 14, 2023

@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.

mykl Jun 14, 2023

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.

Daniel Retana Jun 14, 2023

@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).

mykl Jun 14, 2023

I certainly admit your dedication in working it out 😀

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.

Daniel Retana Jun 14, 2023

@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.

mykl Jun 14, 2023

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!

Daniel Retana Jun 14, 2023

@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.

Anders Rytter Hansen Jun 14, 2023

@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?

federation_helper Jun 14, 2023

I think it was just down and OP misinterpreted it.

Anders Rytter Hansen Jun 14, 2023

@federation_helper ah yeah could be.

Televise Jun 14, 2023

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

Anders Rytter Hansen Jun 14, 2023

@AndreTelevise
Yeah I got the same earlier

Televise Jun 15, 2023

Update: I think they fixed it now

Anders Rytter Hansen Jun 15, 2023

@AndreTelevise yes they did :-)

TrashMeNot Jun 14, 2023

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.

Televise Jun 15, 2023

Well, I am able to visit the site now