Privacy

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VPN and Tor use on the lemmy verse, is it banned ? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi, I have noticed for three days now not being able to post comments from my Lemmy.world account while connected via Tor (I was left waiting for a spinning wheel )! I thought at first It might be a problem with LW servers but after three days, I concluded they are banning Tor and VPN users from posting, I Have found a user post on their help community about VPN and tor ban.

then I tried signing-up to lemm.ee but was greeted with a couldflare of non ending page reload after solving captcha. so I created this account hoping to test this instance and ask Lemmy users with privacy concerns about where this is headed and should we expect the rest of Lemmy instances to go the way of reddit and entirely ban users behind proxies ?

The fact that very big instances hold the majority of the communities and discussions on lemmy and the fediverse in general is concerning. and adopting tactics like shadow banning and dark patterns is concerning as well. I dropped reddit for the same practices and I will drop Lemmy if it carries on like this.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)

then I tried signing-up to lemm.ee but was greeted with a couldflare of non ending page reload after solving captcha.

That particular instance was very recently the source of a lot of CSAM and spam, so that'd be why. A lot of instances recently upped their security to combat that.

There's nothing forcing anyone to use those services, but the reality is that instances that aren't quick to respond to those kinds of incidents will get defederated.

Cloudflare is a lazy but very effective and economical solution to this. The alternative is staff to monitor everything that goes through 24/7 which for most instances isn't easy or possible. Many can barely afford the infrastructure costs.

The fact that very big instances hold the majority of the communities and discussions on lemmy and the fediverse in general is concerning.

It's concerning regardless of the whole proxy banning debacle. A healthy fediverse is a well spread out fediverse.

But I doubt all instances will ever be that way. You don't need a lemmy.world account to use lemmy.world's communities, any instance would do.

My instance for example doesn't use Cloudflare or any CDN, although it is invite only because I really don't have time to deal with moderation. But I can access it over Tor if I want, and you can access it over Tor and browse it (read-only) just fine.

Reddit on the other hand wants to keep the data for themselves. Their VPN, Tor and proxy block isn't just for posting, it's for reading too and that is a much worse problem. They want to hoard the data so they can train their own Reddit AI on it. On lemmy you'll always have at least read access to the platform through Tor and VPNs through random instances.

At least on Lemmy, a fully featured Tor hidden service instance is entirely possible, if someone is willing to vet the account getting registered and potentially malicious uploads. And anyone can make it happen.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

That particular instance was very recently the source of a lot of CSAM and spam, so that’d be why. A lot of instances recently upped their security to combat that.

Just to add some more context, there was an attacker recently who created accounts on several Lemmy instances and used those accounts to spread CSAM. On lemm.ee, this attacker created 4 accounts over a 24h period, but was not able to upload any CSAM to our servers due to our stricter upload rules (we require 4 week old accounts to upload any images at all), and all of the 4 accounts were removed very shortly after creation (most of them within an hour of signing up). The attacker gave up trying to use lemm.ee very quickly, and moved on to other instances.

I just wanted to share this context to illustrate that while indeed the different measures we implement to protect the instance can have a negative impact on legitimate users, I really believe that overall, they have a net positive effect. In addition to Cloudflare DDoS protection and image upload restrictions, we also have a separate content-based alerting layer on top of Lemmy, which allows our admins to quickly notice when something suspicious is going on. As another example, this alerting has allowed us to extremely efficiently deal with a current ongoing spam attack on the Fediverse, and I bet many lemm.ee users aren't even aware of this attack due to the quick content removal. We will continue to improve our defenses, and hopefully try to limit the impact on real users as much as possible, but some trade-offs are necessary here in order to protect the overall userbase.