Mildly Infuriating

It sucks, but it's also one positive thing about the Fediverse - if Lemmy was a central platform, it would be completely gone for you now.

Hey at least Lemmy is becoming popular enough for the authorities to block us.

Proton works in China if you set the protocol to "stealth" in the setting, maybe that works for Saudi as well?

If I were in Saudi Arabia I'd be using a VPN anyways.

Also, if I were in Saudi Arabia, I'd be trying to leave Saudi Arabia

It is not realistic to think the saudi government cared that much about this. The way it works is someone send a request to block the site. If there are banned words including “sex” then it will be block. You can request for it to be unblock and say it’s a social media site. They have different rules. Remember reddit is not blocked.

I quickly threw together a script to check which other Fediverse instances are blocked in Saudi Arabia by using Globalping. I know it's horrible, but it works so far. Will share the results once it's finished running. I'll probably also rewrite the script later.

I got the list of instances from lemmy.world: curl -s https://lemmy.world/instances | rg -o 'href="([^"]+)"' | rg -o 'https?://[^"]+' > instances.txt

#!/usr/bin/env fish

set INSTANCES "./instances.txt"
set OUTPUT_FILE "./output.txt"
set COUNTRY "saudi arabia"

for instance in (cat $INSTANCES)
  if globalping http $instance from $COUNTRY --method GET --limit 3 | rg 'Blocked URL' 2&>1
    echo "Blocked: $instance" >> blocked.txt
  end
end

I'm running tail -f blocked.txt in another terminal to monitor the results in real time.

(Yeah I know the script sucks. Don't judge me, I use fish and prefer its syntax over bash. I also use ripgrep, because I like it.)

Edit: so far I only got 3 blocked instances:

Blocked: becauseimbored.com
Blocked: mamot.fr
Blocked: federotica.com

I need to rewrite this to use the REST API, create an account and use the authentication token, because it runs out of credits and fails.

Is it weird this makes me proud to be a blahaj user?

Like when a transphobic government starts hating, you know you’re doing something right.

They must have thought that admin defending a troll was the last straw as well.

same vibe as queer.af