Mildly Infuriating

Proton works in China if you set the protocol to "stealth" in the setting, maybe that works for Saudi as well?

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.)

It sucks, but it's also one positive thing about the Fediverse - if Lemmy was a central platform, it would be completely gone for you now.

Hey at least Lemmy is becoming popular enough for the authorities to block us.

If I were in Saudi Arabia I'd be using a VPN anyways.

Also, if I were in Saudi Arabia, I'd be trying to leave Saudi Arabia

geoblocked

"Geoblocking" would mean that it's blahaj who don't want saudis on their instance

Use Tor if you can, and people outside of these restrictive countries can help by running Snowflake in their regular browser.

Is it weird this makes me proud to be a blahaj user?

Like when a transphobic government starts hating, you know you’re doing something right.

Lol I'd tread a bit carefully.

KSA likes to chase people and have them "disappeared" for their opinions.

I know a guy they picked up for 3 months and when he finally showed up, his poor mouth was zippered shut.

And he was an international too.

I'd look around for a solid VPN solution anyway. Useful to have in any country.

So now if i want to see a post by a user on blahaj, i have to turn on my VPN just to see it. Fuck this place. 🙄

One of the first conversations I was on when I joined was one between Ada, the lemmy.blahaj.zone admin, and some guy in a Middle Eastern country. Apparently his country had blocked lemmy.blahaj.zone at the national network level.

The Threadiverse is federated, so one could view posts from lemmy.blahaj.zone elsewhere, but not images, which did not propagate.

I thought that at some point, lemmy servers had started also storing images posted on other lemmy servers, but upon checking, it looks like they have not. I did run into one -- no longer up -- that had, according to the description, had apparently been modified to do this, probably to afford its users more privacy and not expose their IP addresses other than to their home instance. In theory, if you could find one that did so, you could make that your home instance and just rely on propagation of images through the network.

EDIT: It sounds from this year-old post like a lemmy instance can at least be configured to cache remote images:

https://futurology.today/post/6440

I suppose it'd be possible to go look and find out exactly what the current situation is.

texas will probably block us next.

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.