@benpate this is interesting.

Is there a *Sky in Russia, like Eurosky, Gander, Blacksky or Northsky? (I should know what these are called. I think it's more than a PDS, but maybe that's the right word.)

Trot-sky would be a sick name, but I don't think the pun would translate well.

@benpate ActivityPub might work well in this case, but also badly. For example, if the Russian government blocked mastodon.social, the server-to-server data works on the same protocol and port number as the end-user interface and API.

But on the plus side, there are 40,000 other servers, so you'd still could stay connected to a big chunk of the Fediverse.

@evan

True… We are slowly centralizing.

I believe real data portability would address this. LOLA portability would even enable “hot backup” servers in cases where your primary server goes down.

And, I think Mastodon is making some progress on their signup page that will reverse this trend.

Look at me doing all this comms for Mastodon… Andy is going to owe me a beer 🍺

@benpate @evan

So what are all the possible ways they can block things, I wonder now. Not an expert. Couldn't they simply block all of #fediverse based on content-type or other aspects of #ActivityPub network communication? Deep msg inspection, etc. They want to drag their population over to that state-controlled platform I forgot the name of.