Advocating piracy is one thing, but now banning people for believing in copyright? That’s like banning people for following the law. That is banning people for following the law. What gives? And to think a while ago I declared I wouldn’t have any reason to not take their bans (or the motives behind them) seriously.
Are we trying to get world governments to ban Lemmy (or, worse, the fediverse)? Love the administrative decisions or hate them, such decisions will drag down the whole fediverse. Typically sites are defederated to protect the sites defederating them from liability. Will this be an example, or does this, out of convenience, not apply? Are we forgetting a large portion of the fediverse’s demographics consist of artists trying to make a damn living?
When a government blocks a website in a country, they do so by registering the website’s name on a list of websites held by the internet providers. They can do this to any website federated with a certain website they want blocked until they’re all blocked. They have blocked email providers before, if you want a rough model of how this would work.
Okay but once you block all the existing Fediverse sites, some people spin up new sites and we can move over to those. And I think PieFed has an option to copy and move whole communities.
But also…I honestly think that the public at large needs to treat world governments and corporations as adversarial threats to be actively circumvented, even for completely benign things like applying for work or talking to people online. I.e. we need to socially normalize the mass usage of Tor and other anonymizing software because the people who least of all deserve power are the ones who control our internet.
They’re still going to try. Russia already has, and they’re the home of Marxism-Leninism.
Yeah they’re going to try to it, or really just force it on us, regardless of what we do. The people who run our world governments…they already are the monsters, they already are the warlords, they already are the people they told us to fear. They have insulated themselves from the will of the public.
So it’s not a matter of “if”, it’s a matter of “when”. Really, we shouldn’t be considering what governments demand of us, because they don’t consider what we demand of them. We need mass mobilization of the public. And at least on the online front, that’s reasonably easy: everyone should be on Tor as much as possible, everyone should be using adblock when forced onto the clearnet, everyone should ditch all FAANG [1] services and be using FOSS federated alternatives as much as possible, and people who provide web services should accept connections from Tor endpoints and people who “look legally sketchy”.
[1] Yes I’m aware that a lot of Fediverse sites use AWS in the backend. I think that, at some point, we need to move away from AWS, even if it means significantly downsizing the Fediverse and the rest of the Internet.