Mildly Infuriating

Well its Saudi Arabia after all. It isn't exactly known for being all that high on the freedom index. I'm sure you realize that though.

From a technical level there are ways to bypass censorship. The thing to keep in mind is that Saudi Arabia doesn't have any rights for citizens. The law can be enforced arbitrarily and you could just disappear one day. If you are looking for technical information on avoiding censorship I can try to help.

I didn't know Saudi can block fediverse instances

I quickly threw together a script to check which other Fediverse instances are blocked in Saudi Arabia by using Globalping. I know it's horrible, but it works so far. Will share the results once it's finished running. I'll probably also rewrite the script later.

I got the list of instances from lemmy.world: curl -s https://lemmy.world/instances | rg -o 'href="([^"]+)"' | rg -o 'https?://[^"]+' > instances.txt

#!/usr/bin/env fish

set INSTANCES "./instances.txt"
set OUTPUT_FILE "./output.txt"
set COUNTRY "saudi arabia"

for instance in (cat $INSTANCES)
  if globalping http $instance from $COUNTRY --method GET --limit 3 | rg 'Blocked URL' 2&>1
    echo "Blocked: $instance" >> blocked.txt
  end
end

I'm running tail -f blocked.txt in another terminal to monitor the results in real time.

(Yeah I know the script sucks. Don't judge me, I use fish and prefer its syntax over bash. I also use ripgrep, because I like it.)

texas will probably block us next.

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.

Saudi would take a hacksaw to them if they could

They fucking geoblocked blahaj.zone.

I suppose THEY is Saudi Arabia.
How can you be surprised about that? Saudi Arabia is a Sharia law country. An absolute shit stain of a country in many more ways than this.
You can get a death penalty for posting something against Sharia Law on any site. Actively using Lemmy could be enough to see you in jail.

MBS said no more 196

???

same vibe as queer.af

Just click there and tell them it shouldn't be blocked.

I am sure they'll listen!