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.
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.
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.
“Do you even know who my
daddictator is”
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.
Instances hosted in Russia can’t federate with lgbtqia.space anymore.
Other instances hosted outside of Russia but available from inside Russia can still federated with them, though, right?
Correct
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.
If it’s a DNS block I guess Russian instances just need to direct the domain to the IP address in their hosts file
It’s always IP + DNS + Deep Packet Inspection. To access blocked websites, you have to use some sort of proxying.
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?
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.
Fair point, would be an incredibly easy vector for abuse in any other way. Good thing I’m not a software engineer.
don’t give them ideas
They know it already.
Anyway, it is interesting that this particular case is better handled by something like Nostr.
