Does lemmy.ml have a Tor link? And how viable would that be against censorship-resistance?

The Telecommunications Bill, 2023 is a deathblow to democracy in India - you can read more about it over here.

The bill allows the government to take over, manage or suspend telecommunication services or a network over national security.

Federated apps are not censorship-resistant, right? I’d like to believe that this should not cause issue over federated web-apps, but at the same time, will it force VPS vendors to comply with the rule of the state, and therefore, restrict apps?

I’d like to think of how could such arrangements be bypassed? Lemmy’s documentation mentions about running it as a Tor-hidden service.

Oha,

lemmy.ml doesnt have one but some instances, including mine have a hidden service

cypherpunks,
@cypherpunks@lemmy.ml avatar

If your local censor is not effectively blocking Tor, then you can just use Tor Browser to access lemmy.ml’s normal address via an exit node. Onion services don’t particularly help with circumventing censorship that is performed by the ISP of the user.

Onion services are useful for removing load from the exit nodes (since connections to them don’t need to go through exit nodes) and for having a self-authenticating address that doesn’t immediately reveal the location of the server. However, the location-hiding properties of onion services are not actually very strong at all (note that they used to be called hidden services and mostly aren’t anymore) and should not be relied upon. There are many adversaries who can locate a “hidden” service in a relatively short period of time. So, onion services are only potentially useful for resistance of censorship at the server’s location in the short-term and/or against weak adversaries.

canis_majoris, (edited )
@canis_majoris@lemmy.ca avatar

You guys realize that the server rules regionally only apply regionally, and not globally right? If you don’t like the rules of your nation state it’s very easy to move your hosting elsewhere where the rules you are trying to avoid are not going to apply.

Just because India has some massive breaking sweeping law doesn’t really change anything about our other servers if they are just not in that jurisdiction. Lemmy.ca is not going down for Indian rules, because we’re hosted in Canada. Lemmy.ml I would imagine is also not hosted in India.

The fediverse is not even big enough (we’re about the size cumulatively of like a medium subreddit) to really want to actively police.

It’s like saying Iran or anywhere else in the Middle East has powerful internet control, as if that’s going to change literally anything hosted outside of those incredibly repressive nations. Unless India has some agreement with other states long-term to remove content they disagree with, literally nothing is going to change. I know North American sentiment towards India is not strong these days because of the recent assassinations (and/or attempts) within our borders of Sikh “extremists”.

CaptainBasculin,

Every fediverse site can interact with each other; so to ban interacting with lemmy.ml; you’ll also need to ban the entire fediverse; not to mention the oncoming new fediverse capable sites. Pretty much a piracy hydra situation but each head can be linked to each other, with the exception that fediverse sites hosted on India might not be able to reach the sites banned on India.

If lemmy.ml gets banned, you can still follow communities there using another fediverse site like lemmy.world or mastodon.social.

syd,
@syd@lemy.lol avatar

If Lemmy.ml is taken down you can use another instance but I don’t know if it can be served from Tor 🤔

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