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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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Signal is a social media platform?
Depends on how you want to look at it. They have "stories" which could most certainly be considered that.
I wish them luck banning Mastodon, Lemmy, and Nostr... Oh wait, they cant
I am curious how they are planning to ban Mastodon. I am assuming they are going to block say the top 25 instances?
Hate to say it but it honestly doesn't sound crazy hard to just block any instance that pops up. Yes it's whack a mole but if it's an automated script, it can just crawl through a backdoor instance and ban any domain it sees.
Yeah that's a solved problem. Iran, Russia, China and other countries have gone through this "stages of denial" process years ago. It starts with "haha they are incompetent and can't block everything" and 10 years later half the Internet is blocked and you have prison sentencing for accessing "illegal" information (for the flgood of the people of course). Anyone who claims that internet censorship is not possible is a naive person fortunate enough to live in a place where it's not a thing.
"IT people/programmers are furry gay liberals" is a myth. There are plenty of bootlickers among them, like in any large enough group of people that's not defined by a specific ideology/political affiliation.
As someone who is friends with many furry gay liberal IT dudes and dudettes.
I can't name a single one that wouldn't bend the knee the moment their job is threatened and their option is getting fired and risking their entire career or just being a good cog in the machine.
The people who bend the knee the fastest tend to be the ones most at risk of being abused by the powers that be should they not comply. It's the very fundamental reason that revolutions tend to be so explosive. There's a LONG build up of people not pushing against authority because of fear and security.
So till the breaking point where the gay furry liberals have no options and it's death or do what their bosses tell them. You can full well expect them to work right along with the bootlickers. They just are going to bitch about it more in the break room then the bootlickers.
Does a recursive DNS not get around all of this though? I’ve got to be missing something
They will block all instances except the ones registered. They just want a point of contact for when there is illegal activity. Yes it becomes a problem if they make criticizing the government legal but it is a democracy for now.
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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.
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.
assuming they have physical servers in their place.
Nope, in that particular case they just have to hand over a strongly worded letter (and a small bribe) to the ISP.
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.
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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.
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Well, if they start by blocking the clients, then block any webpage or server sending / receiving ActivityPub packets at the ISP level, they could possibly cut it off. Heck, just spin up a new Mastodon or Lemmy server, send out a ping, and have every Nepalese ISP & mobile provider block all domains and IPs that respond.
They're still tor.
OK so three things:
- How are they going to ban Mastodon. Like they cannot ban every mastodon instance.
- From what I know about people in regimes like this: VPN usage is basically normal because of things like this. I live in the UK and I'm using a VPN.
- Hamro Patro, if you don't know, is the Nepali "everything" app. It's officially a calendar app, but it also does News, Horoscopes (something that's important to Nepalis I guess), Exchange Rates, Radio and Podcasts. It is one of the most popular apps in the country and the most popular Nepali developed app period. This is like if the US banned the CNN app or if the British Government banned the Sky News app.
Modern laws rarely if ever have anything to do with what they claim to be changing. Just figure out where the graft is flowing and that's your answer. There's no graft to be had with mastodon because nobody is making any money there so at first it's simply ignored unless it annoys someone in Nepal's government. If an instance suddenly started getting popular and making money in Nepal then it gets on their radar and they have to start paying bribes to continue operating just like the big guys, and there will be no room at all for a 'medium guy' who makes a little profit but not enough to comply with the requirements of corruption.
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A number of these sites try hard to Filter out VPN users.
Nepal went full iron curtain. Hope the EU, US, and UK don't get any ideas....
None of the platforms allowed employs E2E encryption, does it?
Telegram allowed. It does not e2e encrypt by default. How will they make sure that option isn't chosen by Nepalese?
All Nepal is asking for is registration so that there is a point of contact if there are any complaints. Telegram contacted Nepal after being banned.
Others didn't respond and deliberately have no contact details online.
I tried to contact Reddit in Sydney about my ban but could only make them down to a multi-client large office building in Barangaroo.
This isn't necessarily a bad move on Nepal's part.
They only implement DNS blocking so you have to change your DNS and everything will work again — this is also the case with their ban on porn sites. It's just an inconvenience to the citizens, all because they aren't competent enough to manage "criminal activites".
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