this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
206 points (99.0% liked)
Fediverse
34183 readers
283 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Lemmy.zip is blocked on a national level for the UK?
Wow. Thanks for sharing.
this is your brain on it being ok for governments to regulate the Internet :(
I'm not sure that the answer to a government's regulation of the Internet should be an individual's blocking of access for an entire country. Seems like 2 sides of the same coin to me.
This is them, to the best of their ability, complying with UK law. If more people tried to comply, perhaps the UK government would realize how foolish their Online Safety Act is and do something about it.
It’s not actually complying with UK law, it’s removing it from the equation so it doesn’t have to. I don’t begrudge the decision though, it will have been a difficult choice to make. That said, it’s a sledgehammer approach to self-censorship, as a response to an inability to comply.
Like I say, I don’t have an issue with Lemmy.zip being unavailable in the UK. But I do think it is potentially damaging for Fediverse uptake to promote a default instance that is unavailable to such a large number of users.
For comparison purposes, the UK easily has the second highest number of Reddit users by country. It is a remarkable decision to exclude that potential market by default.
Wouldn't the UK potential new joiners register on feddit.uk anyway?
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45919699/19198390
Speculatively, but it would assume prior research, which many people simply won’t do. If a de-facto app (say Voyager on iOS) offers a default option that’s unavailable for a selection of its potential users, it’s another hurdle within onboarding that is already the biggest barrier to entry. If we want to grow as a platform (more users equals more content), putting up a default wall saying “your kind aren’t welcome” to entire countries seems obtuse.
Yes, those potential new UK users can get around it by picking another instance, but the question is how many will give up if they can’t get over the first hurdle.
The suggestion of changing the default instance by region, where those instances prohibit specific regions seems logical enough to me.
Which instance would you use instead of lemmy.zip?
From another post
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/37336391?scrollToComments=true
https://lemmyverse.net/?order=active_month
There's a reason lemm.ee was the previous default instance.
Haha don't put it on me, I'm merely a consumer!
You've already suggested feddit.uk, why not use that for UK Voyager installs? Anything that isn't an instance that they can't actually use would be good.
I was trying to show that it's easier said than done.
Same for the region choice, we all learned that Lemm.ee was closing 24 hours ago. The Voyager dev made the best choice with the small timeframe, he'll probably revisit down the line.
Yeah, and that's fair enough. I hope it does get revisited.
It’s not lemmy.zip that’s blocked in the UK, they (lemmy.zip) block every visitor from the UK as they don’t want to get in trouble for violating the UK’s Online Safety Act.
Have lemmy.zip defederated from feddit.uk as well? If not, why not? Is there a legal difference?
There is no need for us to defederate, the law is around accessing a specific website and the onligations to ensure the content on that website doesnt fall under the OSA.
It doesn't matter where that content comes from, just that UK users don't see specific content. Therefore we don't show UK users any content.
That's kind of a simplified summary, but hopefully makes sense.
It only impacts lemmy.zip because I am a UK resident and run the site, so am liable under the act. Otherwise I'd do what everyone else has done and ignore it.
Wouldn't feddit.uk itself be categorized as a UK user for this purpose?
At the moment, it's seen more like using a proxy or VPN. UK users connect to fuk outside of the UK, then the messages are relayed to zip. Fuk is UK focussed, so tries to work with the OSA.
The best analogy is using a UK-focussed email service (wherever it's actually hosted) to email a non-UK address.
that is okay feddit.uk is blocked by my default blocklist on the router. I've started to add it to the white list a few times but no I think I'll let fate sort it out.