I’m just waiting for all UK users to be banned from anything that isn’t Facebook or X. It’s absolutely ridiculous and a huge win for big tech as it locks us in to their platforms and their platforms only. Those of us with a bit of tech knowledge will work around it but it’s infuriating.
Currently Twitter is doing the bare minimum by simply allowing UK users to bypass the age-checks by setting their location to another country.
The equivalent of a pop-up asking you if you’re 18 or older.
Back in the day, I was 18 for like five years.
half the internet is 45 years old this year.
Just a reminder. Self-hosting is a hobby that is both useful and satisfying, and the skills you pick up will change how you see computers that are increasingly part of everything.
You probably won’t be going off-grid overnight, but the tech industry has spent 30 years promoting propaganda that ‘only skilled engineers should worry about what goes on under the hood’ and have conditioned us to expect tech to just be magic.
Fighting back means educating yourself, and that means grabbing an old laptop, learning how to install Linux on it, fire up a few Docker projects, and exploring all the options that opens up.
It will take a few weekends to get started, and it will require some upkeep. But for that price you will gain some sovereignty back over your digital life.
For extra credit and when ready you can pay $15 /year for a vanity domain (you’d only need one, as you can freely create an unrestricted number of subdomains), once done you move from being a serf to a digital landlord.
6th with 70 monthly active users https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list
Piefed.social has 949, piefed.world 222
Piefed.social isn’t as affected because they restrict the NSFW communities. Feddit.online doesn’t have the restriction, so it’s more exposed.
The fear is a complaint being made to Digital Ocean that a server they host is violating UK law. It would be much easier for DO to remove the server than to take any other action.
To be clear, the specifics in the act go beyond not specifically hosting pornographic content.
Uhh totally unrelated but… how hard is it to get fedi platforms working over the alt internets, like tor/i2p/ipfs/etc? I’m sure somebody somewhere must be working on that, right?
Social problems aren’t solved with technology 🤦♀️, it’s great shame .online decided to abstain, but even greater shame UK illiterates desire fascistic anti-intellectualism.
It is a thing it is being done. I can’t remember the repo link but u can do it.
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The Mozilla VPN with their Firefox extension (not yet on Linux), for example, lets you change the VPN server’s country based on the domain you connect to and even bypass the VPN for certain domains. So, I believe it can be configured to select a U.S. VPN server, for example, when visiting a U.S. social site, but stay on the native connection when accessing BBC services. It uses Mullvad as the provider, actually, which is high quality. They can’t be the only one.
The Internet always seems to find ways to bypass blocks.
I’m confused, why are non-UK instances banning UK users? Are their admins located in the UK? Is anyone afraid of being extradited to UK because of their local laws? Do you block Saudi Arabia too because you can’t guarantee blasphemy laws are going to be upholded?
They believe that Ofcom could pressure their hosts to cut their services off if they don’t comply with the act, or believe they could be fined.
How would that even work in another country? Wouldn’t Saudi Arabia pressure hosts for breaking blasphemy laws?
Yes, the U.S. and the U.K. have cooperation agreements for Civil actions.
A public enforcement action by Ofcom could make it difficult because payment processors can refuse to work with the site owner, domain registrars could be pressured to suspend the domain, and hosting providers might refuse to provide services.
Who needs this drama?
I think in practice Ofcom would just geoblock your site specifically.
@misk@sopuli.xyz @Skavau@piefed.social
As a sidenote, I remember that UK has an odd and ancient “law” stating something in the lines “The Crown must not be offended” (i.e. being anti-monarchy and advocating for the end of monarchy, even without any violent language/means but a pacific defense of anti-monarchy). I couldn’t find it, nor I can remember the exact phrasing, but such a “law” threatens prison time for those who “dare” to “offend” the crowniness of UK Crown. Also, I’m not sure to what extent this law is applied in practice.
Even though I’m Brazilian (so the UK supposedly “have no power over here”, and I say it with the Gandalf’s voice), I see these international situations with some worry: there are needed laws (such as laws against noise pollution) and there are laws whose reach ends up going way too far from their “seemingly well-intentioned” puritan scope (such as the aforementioned laws).
If countries are capable of passing draconian laws against their own citizens, don’t expect that those same countries couldn’t go further to impose these laws beyond their own lawns, especially in times of interconnectedness.
And Fediverse platforms from everywhere around the entire globe end up being caught in the crossfire, due to that same interconnectedness.
In the end of the day, the world is increasingly bleaker, as the history is being repeated (maxims “One thing people can learn from history books is that people can’t learn from history books”, and “history doesn’t just repeat, it rhymes”).
Also, I’m not sure to what extent this law is applied in practice.
as per the article general_effort posted:
The act – which makes it a criminal offence, punishable by life imprisonment, to advocate abolition of the monarchy in print, even by peaceful means – has not been deployed in a prosecution since 1879.
Its one of those laws that are on the books mostly becuase no one has got around to modifying it and removing the bits that are unused.
