As Lemmygrad grows, it puts itself in more and more danger of being censored by capitalist countries, just like the communist communities on Reddit. Including things like getting delisted on DNS servers, getting its IP blocked, and in the worst case the .ml domain org pulling the domain. Especially if they get some “incentives” by certain US organisations.
For these reasons, I think we should be making an onion site as a backup, so worst case we can still access it via Tor. Not a separate instance, just an onion site pointing to the main Lemmygrad. As far as I know it’s pretty easy (and free) to make and maintain an onion domain.
What do you think?
Deplatforming is certainly a problem that anybody can face. If the .ml domain is pulled, for example, it would mean people would have to find us from the IP alone (which they’re not gonna do unless they really want to access the grad). Then we’d have to find another domain but the damage will have been done. Go and tell everyone what the new domain is when you have no reliable way of reaching them.
That’s why if you would all just nicely give me your email – no, just joking.
But if I can assuage some fears, we changed hosts recently, a few months back, after the DDOS attacks.
This host is based in Switzerland which is not perfect, but Switzerland is not a 5 eyes country. From what we understand they also will not cooperate unless legally forced to by international law or agreements. The host also has good DDOS protection which we needed at the time, and still need.
But the most important part is that our host takes a “privacy” approach and will essentially only cooperate with law enforcement if forced to. They will also not take down content, unless illegal in Switzerland, based on reports (which was also a problem at the time as we got an email from our previous host over nothing).
We would definitely love to move the host to China, Vietnam, Cuba, wherever; but have yet to find anything there (language barrier mostly). The usecase is:
and that’s about it! if you know such a host, please feel free to DM me or just reply in the comments.
We moved to this this host fairly recently, and its been stellar, so there’s no reason to move anytime soon.
To assuage people’s fears: If the domain or the VPS gets taken down, it’ll take like 2-3 hours at most to migrate and restore everything from backups.
IP alone is not going to work actually. Lemmygrad has HSTS enabled which means browsers will refuse to load it without TLS, and TLS certs are tied to domains, so no domain = no lemmygrad. Also, federation is usually tied to domains, so that’ll most likely be lost too.
I was trying to book with inet.vn … u need a Vietnam ID or maybe residence for that it looks like.
How much computing power and storage is Lemmygrad currently using? Is it particularly taxing on servers?
Do federated instances cache external content? Like, if Lemmygrad goes down can people at least access some of it from Lemmy.ml? Or, when I post from this Lemmy.ml account to Lemmygrad, does your server store it? How long is this cached for?
What about Alibaba or Huawei Cloud? Though I imagine those might be too expensive.
Instances that federate with lemmygrad will fetch its contents and store them in their databases. The content will be accessible there if lemmygrad.ml is down.
Thanks!
Lemmy is super easy to host, very light on resources. Pictures take up a lot of space but that’s the only limatition rn. Text data is stored forever, it takes up barely any space.