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.

  • @NateNate60
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    25 days ago

    I feel the best way to deal with this type of crap is to pretend like they’re some unimportant random person.

    Hello. A request has been created. A member of our staff will respond to your enquiry within 10 working days.

    Do not respond at all. When they send another email, auto-reply with the same message. Then reply this after their third email:

    We have detected an unusually large number of enquiries sent from your IP address. To prevent spam, further emails will be filtered. If this is in error, please write to P.O. Box 12345, Somewhere, Some Country.

    The P.O. box number given doesn’t exist. But international mail is slow so it will take them two months to realise that.

    • cabbage
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      6225 days ago

      Obviously they won’t give too much of a shit and they’re not going to send any mail, they’ll just block the server like they would anyway. They are, however, going to be annoyed to be treated as insignificant nobodies. So all in all not a bad idea.

      • @kautau
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        1925 days ago

        “Do you even know who my dad dictator is”

  • @[email protected]
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    3225 days 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.

    • CyberTailorOP
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      2125 days ago

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

      • vortic
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        25 days ago

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

          • Aniki 🌱🌿
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            1325 days 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]
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        1325 days 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]
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        725 days 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

        • CyberTailorOP
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          925 days ago

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

      • cabbage
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        325 days 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?

        • CyberTailorOP
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          425 days 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
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            625 days ago

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

    • CyberTailorOP
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      725 days ago

      don’t give them ideas

      • @[email protected]
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        1125 days ago

        They know it already.

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