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:
- cheap VPS (around 10-15$ a month)
- 100% uptime, or approaching
- Lemmy doesn’t use much resources but we do use some good amount of disk space from what I understand.
- DDOS protection, and a good one
- AES host or one that will not cooperate with imperialist law enforcement.
- and of course that the distance does not slow loading times for users.
- preferably in English so we can easily customise the VPS.
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.
Backup is always good
I agree. GenZedong fell and plenty of us flooded to Lemmygrad, if this falls we need another backup
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Been thinking is it really practical to stay anonymous by using Tor? specifically for counter insurgent stuff or just stuff you don’t want people associating with ur irl identity… Edit: I think I mean insurgent… I get confused.
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u can still be exposed by spooks if you are not careful… need to proxy and do extra hops maybe…
People are generally exposed because of carelessness (could be something as simple as not clearing cookies properly or being logged in to multiple accounts simultaneously) rather than a problem with the Tor network or some organization happening to own all of the Tor nodes in a circuit
Def don’t be using this site to do anything remotely illegal, that puts everyone at risk… its a public space after all. If you need genuinely secure comms use matrix.
ok, maybe what I want to develop with my california seperatist movment is too much for this site… it’s hard to say because I try to make any call to action ambiguous regardless
(FYI that doesn’t have to do with my quest for anonymity, that is for different projects that challenge very powerful people directly and bluntly)
It would be nice, although I’m not sure how much work and/or money would be required to set up an onionsite
No money would be required and it should just be a simple config file in terms of work. The problem would be getting it listed somewhere so people know where to reach lemmygrad even if they’ve never been on the non-onion version.
Interesting; if I understood this correctly, .onion URLs are resolved in a manner similar to DNS, except federated across many Tor relays in a hash table (possibly in chunks, like for torrents?), so there’s no need to pay a fee to a central domain registrar when creating an .onion address
Yeah, onion URLs are set up in a completely decentralized manner. Anyone can have an onion address for free. The downside is that they’re long and filled with random characters, so people can’t just memorize them.
