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.
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?
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.