this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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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.
Mastodon's main code repo is on GitHub, a government could just pressure MS to take down that repo, although that isn't going to account for anyone self-hosting an instance and also hosting their own git repos outside of any of the major hosts.
In order to take down self-hosted instances, they'd have to raid people's homes and take out their physical servers assuming they have physical servers in their place.
I'm betting GitHub is not the only place that the code repo is mirrored. Sure, it might be there, but something tells me it's on a bunch of people's computers as well, for people who work on it, or have just forked the repository. And there's probably even copies of it on other mirrors, such as Code Bird, etc. in private repositories.
I don't know when Microsoft would cave, but Nepal asking them to remove it probably isn't going to that level. Maybe they geoblock but I can't see them removing it for a everyone.
Nope, in that particular case they just have to hand over a strongly worded letter (and a small bribe) to the ISP.