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.
How else do you prevent spam/illegal content originating from behind those locations?
There is nothing stopping you from running your own private Lemmy instance to get around those restrictions.
It crossed my mind to host my own instance, but I am not very confident in my tech skills. It might create more security issues than it solves.
It definitely will. Past CSAM spam used abandoned or ignored instances to smuggle into the larger ones.
When you build something yourself, you also become responsible for what goes through it.
Simply disabling registration of new accounts using Tor/VPN should be sufficient and won’t affect existing users.
Although, requiring verification of accounts made via those would be a better approach. Require captchas to prevent automated posting. Automatically mark posts made from new accounts and/or via Tor or a VPN for moderation review.
There are way to mitigate spam that aren’t as blunt and overreaching as blanket banning entire IP ranges. This approach is the dumbest, least competent way of ensuring any kind of security, and, honestly, awfully close to being needlessly discriminating. Fuck everyone from countries with draconian internet censorship, I guess?