Lemmy should find a way to allow people to use the site while accessing it from Tor Browser.
If there is a risk of people using Tor Browser to post malicious files or links then people using Tor should be able to post on Lemmy but without images or links.
Based on the current state of some countries and attacks of certain minorities, including Latinos and Trans people in the USA, it isn’t safe to post certain views on Lemmy when the Tor Browser is not allowed, including not being allowed for registration.
Even with a VPN and even with browser that resists fingerprinting, people make mistakes without Tor Browser. Data centers sell information about the timing of packets (netflows) to multiple parties and VPNs offer less protection than people believe. This information can be correlated with netflows from ISPs. All of this information can potentially be correlated with real identities without Tor Browser.
In the USA, the current government is increasingly adopting radical tactics to cater to the religious fundamentalist poor and the ultra-wealthy. Without Tor Browser, it is not safe to be critical of these policies on lemmy.
That’s the good thing about the fediverse: you can set up an instance that does just that, and federate with the others!
I’m currently using Tor, everything works fine.
I’ve also used lemmy.ca, infosec.pub, lemmy.dbzer0.com, they all work great!
lemmy.world = 👎 (they blocked !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com, not Jolly at all)
Safe Sailing! 🏴☠️
Edit: No offense to lemmy.world admins, I just have a small disagreement regarding your instance policy, that’s all.
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Based on the current state of some countries and attacks of certain minorities, including Latinos and Trans people in the USA, it isn’t safe to post certain views on Lemmy when the Tor Browser is not allowed, including not being allowed for registration.
If you need Tor to post something on Lemmy, you shouldn’t be posting that thing on lemmy. Posting on Lemmy fundamentally defeats the purpose of Tor.
Tor does not increase the safety of Lemmy. Lemmy destroys any degree of privacy provided by Tor.
This. Lemmy is a purely public platform. There’s no degree of privacy here.
I really don’t understand what people think that privacy is. Like, they are posting on a platform where every post is publically visible. That’s the opposite of privacy.
OP: What do you think does privacy means?
You might want to post something publicly, but conceal who you are. Tor can help with that.
There is some privacy in that there is no corporation actively selling your data or training AI on it.
Much of AI training happens on the entire public web, including here.
On the rest of the internet, your posts might get caught in the net, but it’s not as sure as when it’s written in the terms of service. In fact, smaller instances like lemmy.zip tend to take action against crawling, as they can’t afford the load. Of course, your posts could be crawled via any other instance, but again, it’s less of a certainty here.
No need to crawl. Set up an instance and let ActivityPub do the crawling for you.
The core that lemmy is based on has all the functionality of a crawler built right into it.
I remember reading a post somewhere on the threadiverse that contained a list of all websites one AI crawler was using for training, there were several Lemmy instances on it. It would even be possible to set up an instance only to crawl it.
Privacy is like security in that it’s impossible to make it 100% bulletproof. It’s all about minimizing your risk. I deliberately used the word “actively” in my OP. I don’t think most crawlers and ad companies even care to do all that, especially when there is so much data available to them through all the big platforms.
What’s stopping you from accessing Lemmy via Tor?
Have you actually tested it? I’d think that it would work. Unless some Lemmy instance is actively going out of its way to identify and block Tor nodes, I don’t see why it wouldn’t.
checks
lemmy.today looks fine to me on it.
This test comment is posted through Tor.
EDIT: Seems fine to me. I don’t see why you’d need to block images. I mean, images can expose the IP of a lemmy user if the proxying option isn’t on, sure, but all that someone would get is the IP of the exit node on the Tor network. Tor’s designed to handle that.
It should also work with lemmy.dbzer0.com and the associated piefed instance. We’re explicitly pro piracy, and I’m pretty sure the founding admin has checked and confirmed that we work through VPNs and TOR.
Maybe they meant having a lemmy server with a tor address? Idk just guessing…
I would add i2p as well. I’ve argued that it should’ve been built from the ground up as a dark web application: I just can’t understand why modern federated social media wouldn’t take it seriously.
From a anonymity perspective it has serious flaws that still need to be addressed.
I always thought of Lemmy as more of an alternative to big tech, not really as a tool against state censorship. The features seem to be build accordingly. Of course it would be cool if such feature are added. Hopefully Veilid will become mature enough to build applications like Lemmy or Discord on top of it.
Language barrier is also a big problem. Most people from Russia, Iran, mainland China, are not gonna know English very well to be able to find Lemmy. Especially with the western meme culture, so they’ll probably feel very left out and therefore participate less, if at all.
If I hadn’t immigrated to the US and grow up immersed in western culture, I’d not understand 95% of the memes here.
alternative to big tech, not really as a tool against state censorship
I’m not sure these 2 are separate. They seem to work in tandem on restricting people’s freedom. Government sets direction, big tech implements. In return government makes it so that alternatives to big tech have a harder and harder time.
probably adds another layer of obscurity that would kill off interests, and the connotations of “dark web” could scare people off.
That’s a decision for each server operator tbh.
Some allow it, some don’t find the one that fits your needs. That’s the beauty of fediverse.
I can’t even respond using a two hop VPN
