Hi, I have noticed for three days now not being able to post comments from my Lemmy.world account while connected via Tor (I was left waiting for a spinning wheel )! I thought at first It might be a problem with LW servers but after three days, I concluded they are banning Tor and VPN users from posting, I Have found a user post on their help community about VPN and tor ban.
then I tried signing-up to lemm.ee but was greeted with a couldflare of non ending page reload after solving captcha. so I created this account hoping to test this instance and ask Lemmy users with privacy concerns about where this is headed and should we expect the rest of Lemmy instances to go the way of reddit and entirely ban users behind proxies ?
The fact that very big instances hold the majority of the communities and discussions on lemmy and the fediverse in general is concerning. and adopting tactics like shadow banning and dark patterns is concerning as well. I dropped reddit for the same practices and I will drop Lemmy if it carries on like this.
Though I know what this is for, but I am against blocking VPNs and Tor since it prevent privacy-conscious people like me and other people such as dissents or other having high risks of like harassment online.
The instances being affected the most are those with open registration, and don’t block registration from temporary email providers, and have don’t have like automatic filter or using Fediverse softwares not providing such.
Though given Lemmy development may not support blocking registration by emails or filtering keywords or filtering federation of very new accounts/new account having no profile, manual approvement registration or applying bots filtering repeating spams may be enough without blocking VPNs or Tor I think
I’m also against blocking proxies, but we the privacy minded folks are a minority that actually uses vpn or tor for everyday internet browsing. There are lots of bots and malicious actors using our resources to spam large instances, and if I were managing a popular fediverse instance, I too would have been forced to consider blocking vpn/tor, even if I didn’t want it.