cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/14155096

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.

  • velox_vulnusEnglish
    20•4 months ago

    This can be easily circumvented using an alt Fediverse instance, right?

    • CyberTailorOPEnglish
      17•4 months ago

      Right. However, instances hosted in Russia can’t federate with lgbtqia.space anymore.

      • db0
        19•4 months ago

        Hm, I feel that should be easily worked around through proxies, but the problem is that the Russian authorities would go after those russian instances then

      • @tourist
        7•4 months ago

        Could a Russian instance federate with an unblocked instance (e.g. lemmy.world) which federates with lgbtqia.space and then federate lgbtqia.space by proxy?

        Or does the protocol not work like that?

        Russian instance users can still read comments from LGBT instance users if the comments are left on .world though, right?

        • CyberTailorOPEnglish
          8•4 months ago

          Or does the protocol not work like that?

          That’s technically possible but no major fedi software implements it because you can’t trust a third-party server.

      • velox_vulnusEnglish
        5•4 months ago

        Would it be possible to have a shadow instance with the only purpose of circumventing blocks?

      • @[email protected]English
        5•4 months ago

        No, but the users could just create account in any other instance federated with the blocked instance

        Or just spin up a new one in heitzner or something

        • CyberTailorOPEnglish
          11•4 months ago

          just spin up a new one in heitzner

          Russian bank cards are accepted virtually nowhere, and only few hosting operators accept cryptocurrencies.