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.

    • vortic@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Other instances hosted outside of Russia but available from inside Russia can still federated with them, though, right?

    • rglullis@communick.news
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      7 months ago

      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.

    • Damage@slrpnk.net
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      7 months ago

      If it’s a DNS block I guess Russian instances just need to direct the domain to the IP address in their hosts file

      • CyberTailor@lemmy.worldOP
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        7 months ago

        It’s always IP + DNS + Deep Packet Inspection. To access blocked websites, you have to use some sort of proxying.

    • cabbage@piefed.social
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      7 months ago

      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?

      • CyberTailor@lemmy.worldOP
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        7 months ago

        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.

        • cabbage@piefed.social
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          7 months ago

          Fair point, would be an incredibly easy vector for abuse in any other way. Good thing I’m not a software engineer.