this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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I wish them luck banning Mastodon, Lemmy, and Nostr... Oh wait, they cant
Its totaly easy:
No, you will not get the hobby revolutionary this way who really wants to "fight the man", but you surely will scare away the nepalese version of the average joe and with this effectively killing the networks there for main stream adoption.
Are there any instance administrators in Nepal to jail?
Well... we will see
Not familiar with the other examples, but Lemmy doesn't need an app. Can get to it via browser. Maybe the others need one?
Websites you can block via DNS - yes, i know that this can also be fairly easy circumvented - but the folks who know this are NOT the target audience for state action like that.
Oh, yeah I know that sites can be blocked easily enough. My comment was more about whether specific apps are needed. For example, I rarely put apps for specific websites on my phone and instead just use the browser. Cuts way down on ads and other bullshit.
I am curious how they are planning to ban Mastodon. I am assuming they are going to block say the top 25 instances?
Hate to say it but it honestly doesn't sound crazy hard to just block any instance that pops up. Yes it's whack a mole but if it's an automated script, it can just crawl through a backdoor instance and ban any domain it sees.
Yeah that's a solved problem. Iran, Russia, China and other countries have gone through this "stages of denial" process years ago. It starts with "haha they are incompetent and can't block everything" and 10 years later half the Internet is blocked and you have prison sentencing for accessing "illegal" information (for the flgood of the people of course). Anyone who claims that internet censorship is not possible is a naive person fortunate enough to live in a place where it's not a thing.
"IT people/programmers are furry gay liberals" is a myth. There are plenty of bootlickers among them, like in any large enough group of people that's not defined by a specific ideology/political affiliation.
As someone who is friends with many furry gay liberal IT dudes and dudettes.
I can't name a single one that wouldn't bend the knee the moment their job is threatened and their option is getting fired and risking their entire career or just being a good cog in the machine.
The people who bend the knee the fastest tend to be the ones most at risk of being abused by the powers that be should they not comply. It's the very fundamental reason that revolutions tend to be so explosive. There's a LONG build up of people not pushing against authority because of fear and security.
So till the breaking point where the gay furry liberals have no options and it's death or do what their bosses tell them. You can full well expect them to work right along with the bootlickers. They just are going to bitch about it more in the break room then the bootlickers.
They will block all instances except the ones registered. They just want a point of contact for when there is illegal activity. Yes it becomes a problem if they make criticizing the government legal but it is a democracy for now.
Does a recursive DNS not get around all of this though? I’ve got to be missing something
And as we all know, that would not ban it entirely. They'd have to block every instance, every new instance that comes online, the main web page, the code repository, etc., to even have a hope of banning it.
There are sites dedicated to listing all federated lemmy instances. Knowing the FOSS nerds, surely there's even an API already.
Some might slip, but very few large ones. That's if the government cares about lemmy
The fact it's interconnected makes it easy to just worm your way though banning everything.
Doesn't matter if it's all independently hosted. The greatest strength of the frediverse is the fact it's federated.
That also it's biggest fuck up point. These arent wholely independent forums.
And if the frediverse has to fully defederate everything to prevent itself from being scrubbed away. It defeats the entire fucking point.
Cause at that point just fucking go back to forums.
I think they best solution here is just easy to deploy proxies, it prevents banning by DNS or IP. More than that and they might as well just put the great firewall.
The problem is that if you can access one, you can access all of them. It doesn't even matter how you access the one. Even if you access it over tor, as long as you can get to one instance, you're in the Federation.
Well, if they start by blocking the clients, then block any webpage or server sending / receiving ActivityPub packets at the ISP level, they could possibly cut it off. Heck, just spin up a new Mastodon or Lemmy server, send out a ping, and have every Nepalese ISP & mobile provider block all domains and IPs that respond.
They're still tor.