A couple of days ago i noticed something off with blahaj.zone. I couldn’t see images posted by users on blahaj, so i thought it was a problem on their side.
Well guess fucking what? After 3 days, it was STILL broken, so i opened it and…
Blocked. They fucking blocked blahaj.zone. Actually beyond parody🤦♂️ Why? What was the point? there’s trans content literally everywhere on lemmy. what’s next, block them all? So now if i want to see a post by a user on blahaj, i have to turn on my VPN (protonvpn.com is also blocked in saudi, jfc) just to see it. Fuck this place. 🙄
I swear a couple of days ago it worked. This is a mild annoyance (hence the community) but still.
It’s so over guys, MBS said no more 196 😔
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lmao, what’s with islamists and gay sites??
The Qur’an?
It’s not like they really care about it anyway.
Yeah, i hate gay people just as god intended, but i literally break every single law in the quran beyond that.
- Every Saudi royal
I also don’t remember a verse in the quran mentioning hacking a man then dissolving his corpse in acid, must be in surat al-baqarah…
Why would someone use an Afghanistan TLD for that, given it’s illegal to be LGBTQ there? If course the domain is going to be removed.
Why? Because “queer af” is funny as a domain, and people sometimes don’t realize that tlds can be under certain jurisdictions
It also wasn’t a problem until governments changed
also the majority of people don’t know TLDs are country based
This makes me feel old
So now if i want to see a post by a user on blahaj, i have to turn on my VPN just to see it. Fuck this place. 🙄
One of the first conversations I was on when I joined was one between Ada, the lemmy.blahaj.zone admin, and some guy in a Middle Eastern country. Apparently his country had blocked lemmy.blahaj.zone at the national network level.
The Threadiverse is federated, so one could view posts from lemmy.blahaj.zone elsewhere, but not images, which did not propagate.
I thought that at some point, lemmy servers had started also storing images posted on other lemmy servers, but upon checking, it looks like they have not. I did run into one – no longer up – that had, according to the description, had apparently been modified to do this, probably to afford its users more privacy. In theory, if you could find one that did so, you could just rely on propagation through the network.
Some shitheads started to spam CSAM and it got cached on other instances too. db0 admin created a tool to check every upload via library of hashes of known dangerous images (not images themselves). Since then, most images are stored locally on instances and aren’t cached by others.
Image proxy is what I suspect you mean. The problem with that from an instance admin is that on the network level it would them show their instance accessing whatever content their users request which then puts the owner at risk, so I believe most never enabled it. If an instance owner set up an instance with a particularly strong opsec game though where their outbound connections where routed over a VPN or TOR though that could be useful to censored countries. Might make for an interesting project…
That’s not really the problem. The main issue until now is that when you try to proxy all images, what ends up happening is that a lot of popular image hosters start rate limiting your server’s IP, so your users end up just seeing a lot of broken images, and they think you misconfigured your instance. @sunaurus@lemm.ee had to deal with this iirc.
Hmm.
IPv6 addresses are a far less-constrained resource than IPv4 addresses.
I wonder if it might be possible to do the requests over IPv6, using a range of addresses, assuming that the image hosting services in question only care about rate of requests from a single address.
EDIT: Also, for OP’s case, all he cares about is propagation of images hosted on other lemmy instances, not image hosting services. Presumably those instances don’t care about other instances serving their pictrs images. I wonder if it’d be possible to have an option to only proxy for pictrs-served images?
Rate limitors from ipv6 tend to take into account the whole subnet which is assigned to your account, so that’s not a way to avoid them
That too I suppose. I seem to recall the feature coming out not too long after all the CSAM issues, so liability for that always stuck in my mind.
If i remember correctly after the downfall of reddit and the mass migration to Lemmy happened a big issue was CSAM spreading across the Lemmy servers. Wouldn’t surprise me that that is the cause that images are no liner stored across servers.
That’s good to know, thank you. Unfortunately alot of the communities i spend time in have a lot of blahaj users, so i don’t have context of the post sometimes. Better than nothing, though.
Weird, so did I.
domains don’t really block for me. I find I have to do each community individually. Annoying really since usually its a domain where for some reason the language preference is not working. anyway I get it was a joke but it made me want to comment as I wish domain blocking did work.
Because trans content is against god. Or something like that.
What’s 196?
Except in iran, they love 'em!
As for 196, !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone
Lol I’d tread a bit carefully.
KSA likes to chase people and have them “disappeared” for their opinions.
I know a guy they picked up for 3 months and when he finally showed up, his poor mouth was zippered shut.
And he was an international too.
I’d look around for a solid VPN solution anyway. Useful to have in any country.
That’s what i’m afraid of, too. Doing such risky things in the middle of the den of snakes. There isn’t much they can do to a visitor, but they can do what they please to “threats” and dissidents.
Why would you ever visit that shithole of a country?
It’s worth mentioning that Saudi Arabia is where Mecca is. Millions of people have a religious obligation to travel there at some point in their lives.
“Religious obligation” is an oxymoron
bro i was born here, you’re right why would i? i didn’t, fuck this shithole
My bad; you implied that you were just visiting with your last comment.
Oh, i see how someone could’ve interpreted as such 🤦♂️ I’ll edit it jic, thank you :)
Where did you choose to be born?
Just click there and tell them it shouldn’t be blocked.
I am sure they’ll listen!
That shit’ll get me on a watchlist, trying to access a website for trans people 😂
But if i ask nicely…
I was joking but, maybe go find the worst bigot you know, and do it from their computer?
You underestimate how bigoted the average Gulf Arab is, I’d need to do it to everyone 😅
If old white US southerners are casually racist, than the average gulf Arab is a competitive racist. Especially with Jews 😂
Use Tor if you can, and people outside of these countries can help by running Snowflake in their regular browser.
Installed Snowflake, thanks for the heads-up. Pretty simple way to try to be a little helpful. Was like two clicks.
Ooooh this is a pretty cool tool, I’ll set up the docker container on my homelab
You can also run a full Tor relay: https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/guard/
There are tutorials on YouTube:
I set up a bridge on my home network. I’ll put the relay on my Hetzner VPS.
Great job!
That’s a great recommendation, it’s always important to practice bypassing potential censorship as you do not always know what is being hidden from the public.
Love tor, it’s a lifesaver (literally :) ) and thank you for the tip!
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.
They must have thought that admin defending a troll was the last straw as well.
I didn’t know Saudi can block fediverse instances
A lot of websites are blocked here.
Porn (60,000 BLOCKED PORN SITES!), alcohol/drug stores, Gay sites (from blogs to forums, anything), anti islam websites like wikiislam, and just non-muslim religious shit in general. we have a lot of banned christian sites. And news sites like middleeasteye.net
VPNs + tor is also banned too.
For some reason, israel.com + idf.il are also blocked. weird considering saudi-israel’s relationship.
Thats even worse then i Live(Which most of the stuff are blocked are Vpns,Porn sites and some lgbtq sites i am pretty sure btw am not in saudi am living in a country bordering it)
Tor isnt blocked hereOh, are you in the UAE or Qatar? Saudi arabia has the most strict censorship in the middle east, i think.
And يا هلا, دحين متأكد في على أقل 4 عرب على ليمي :)
Am living in qatar yeah am from Syria so it counts am Arab (am literate at the language tho)
Hey at least Lemmy is becoming popular enough for the authorities to block us.
KSA and China are like low hanging fruit, it doesn’t take much to get blocked there…
Wake me up when OECD countries start blocking us
The good thing about Lemmy is that due to its distributed and federated nature, it can’t be fully blocked. You can just use a different instance and see all the same content (assuming instancea that don’t block the other instances).
Couldnt you just copy the list of instances lemmy.world or a similarly large instance federates with (its in the footer), or grab a the list of Lemmy instances from e.g fedidb.org to block?
I feel that would block most of the network, and doubt there would be much value left in joining whatever unconnected instances left.
Sure, but anyone can just spin up a new instance that federates with the large instances. For example, my instance is literally just me using it.
Also, if that were to happen, Lemmy could be modified to restrict it so that only admins could see that list.
Can’t have shit in Saudi, not even Lemmy 😤
texas will probably block us next.
I wish this was a joke but these days I wouldn’t put it past them. I don’t think it would hold up terribly well since the US doesn’t have any form of advanced censorship.
With the current laws on the books, Texas could probably sue Lemmy instances because they contain pornographic content and they don’t verify users’ identity.
Aren’t most Lemmy instances ran in Europe, anyway? At most they’ll just block them, right?
Dunno, they’d probably have a hard time suing European instances, but they can’t outright block, as that would be unconstitutional. U.S. states have recently been using lawsuits to get around constitutionality. I.e. Texas also has a “bounty” law, where if you know a woman went out of state to get an abortion, you can report it, and the state will sue them and give you $10,000. I think another state has a similar law for if you see a trans person using a restroom that doesn’t match the genitalia they were born with.
you see a trans person using a restroom that doesn’t match the genitalia
lmao what??? how would you even know about that?
Hmm. Looks like that was in Texas too. https://truthout.org/articles/a-city-in-texas-just-put-10000-bounties-on-trans-people-using-the-bathroom/, and they’re going to pass quite a few more bounty laws yhis year: https://prismreports.org/2025/01/08/bounty-laws-texas-trans-rights-abortion/
Sorry to hear that, hopefully it will turn out all right for trans people in the US.
The book bans are currently practice before they start banning more resources such as Wikipedia.
Change the title from “they” to “Saudi Arabia”.
My fuckers blocked catbox.moe, most western news sites and slowed down youtube traffic, but lemmy still flies under radar thankfully. I wish you still have your ways to choose what content you want to consume.
That sounds worse, what country are you living in? Sorry to hear it. And thanks for the wishes :)
The Motherland, of course. I was born into her teenage phase of 90\00s and now I see her rapidly becoming one young and salty widow (:
Oh dear, hearing anything about russia almost makes me proud to a saudi :).
Through our suffering, we are brothers 😂
“None of us are free until all of us are free”
We see you.
Hell yeah. We a cockroaches in their kitchen, never surrender and always persist whatever they like us or not 😉
How’s life for you besides internet censorship, if you don’t mind me asking. I’m just curious. Good luck out there!
Thank you.
For me, it’s edging on absurdity and feeling like I’m the one who feel like we are going insane, but luckily for me I found my close knit circle of friends who share that feeling and I myself adapted to see everything through some lense of satire. Even though I live in it.
What still hurts tho is how my relatives and people around are so uninformed and hostile to everything ukrainian or just european, even if they talk about relatives there, and then they are just like ‘why they don’t like us’ lol. Yeah, like, no reason. And then they order IKEA-like furniture for their flats because it’s of european quality!
My sanity is saved by my partner, my friends and my still intact trust in people, even if they are dumb af.
I appreciate you sharing and getting to read about your experience. I really wish you, your friends, and loved ones luck. Do your best to get through it and hopefully someday things will change for the better. My fingers and crossed for you.
Stay safe out there
Any interest in Briar? I never had a use for it in the US but it is very powerful in the sense that it is designed to be highly resistant to state attacks. It works with or without access to the public internet.
Same here. Only instead of partner and family, it’s the internet. They’re mad, too. It really feels like you are the only one sane in the whole world, and people on the internet don’t even feel real, like they come from a fantasy. And i get the racism, too :/ But for us it’s towards Jews. Apparently the YAHOOD changed some musical cord to mind control the whole world, according to my old substitute teacher, in a completely unrelated rant.
I constantly feel like i’m at the edge of my sanity, but what could be done? Patience, i guess.
Stay safe, and i hope you can get out happily.
Tor with Snow flakes is probably what you want.
You could even use Tails to avoid leaving a trace.
I blocked blahaj.zone voluntarily. Same as the tankie-zone.
not lemmy.blahaj.zone?
If they really blocked
lemmy.blahaj.zone, they’re not going to see your comment, but everyone else will, so we can make fun of them without them knowing it.hmm interesting
There is a difference between state censorship and preference. One is good, the other is a symptom of corruption.
I can see that. How about not living in a country with laws like that? It is always easy to complain, but what is it that you have done so far?
hateful lmao “have you considered the obvious?”
my condolences fxomt, earmuff at dbzero doesn’t think you’re trying hard enough from their cozy armchair
And how would you even remotely know, what I have been through. Again, it is easy to complain.
I’m trying, hopefully one day i can.
Getting citizenship (particularly in the EU, and any country for that matter) is insanely hard, and that’s just the citizenship (even asylum is turned down often). You need a stable job in that country, a place to live, and above average skills to prove your worth. And you have to leave everything behind, including your family since it would be dangerous to go back. Can’t forget people will never truly accept you as your own, and see you as an immigrant, never as a citizen.
And Saudi Arabia is well known to spy and even harm dissidents, even if outside the country.
