Admin team of LGBTQIA.Social Mastodon instance received abuse email from Russian censorship agency, where they demanded to remove an account. The account in question represented a small group that ran a collaborative blog for LGBTQIA youth and adults in Russia.

Shortly after refusal to comply with agency’s demands, the instance was blocked and is now unreachable from Russia.

All previous blocks of Fediverse instaces in Russia were related to hosting CSAM.

  • @[email protected]English
    32•1 month ago

    But blocking the instance at the DNS level does not stop the content from reaching other Russian instances, right? They would have to basically track every server that is federating with them and block like this.

    • CyberTailorOPEnglish
      21•1 month ago

      Instances hosted in Russia can’t federate with lgbtqia.space anymore.

      • vorticEnglish
        30•1 month ago

        Other instances hosted outside of Russia but available from inside Russia can still federated with them, though, right?

          • Aniki 🌱🌿English
            13•1 month ago

            Yeah this seems like a total misunderstanding of how activitypub works from the orks. Not surprising a bunch of fascist idiots don’t understand modern federation technology.

      • @[email protected]English
        13•1 month ago

        You could fix it with a relay, or having the instances conn extend with the rest of the Internet through a VPN/proxy.

        Yeah, a PITA but can still be worked around.

      • @[email protected]English
        7•1 month ago

        If it’s a DNS block I guess Russian instances just need to direct the domain to the IP address in their hosts file

        • CyberTailorOPEnglish
          9•1 month ago

          It’s always IP + DNS + Deep Packet Inspection. To access blocked websites, you have to use some sort of proxying.

      • cabbage
        3•1 month ago

        Curious - would boosts from users on non-blocked servers bypass the block here? In other words, does traffic for boosts go via the original instance, or is it direct between the boosting and the receiving servers?

        • CyberTailorOPEnglish
          4•1 month ago

          does traffic for boosts go via the original instance

          That way. You can’t trust a third-party instance to proxy content, every server has to get its own copy.

          • cabbage
            6•1 month ago

            Fair point, would be an incredibly easy vector for abuse in any other way. Good thing I’m not a software engineer.

    • CyberTailorOPEnglish
      7•1 month ago

      don’t give them ideas

      • @[email protected]English
        11•1 month ago

        They know it already.

        Anyway, it is interesting that this particular case is better handled by something like Nostr.