Jack Dorsey quits Bluesky board and urges users to stay on Elon Musk’s X
Apparently they do a whole lot of blocking and deleting of websites in response to complaints in Germany. I don’t know if teacup.social was among them but with that much stuff getting nuked every day there are bound to be a few false positives. Something to consider before you host anything at Hetzner, perhaps.
Edit: On further searching the web, it seems that ordinary web censorship doesn’t typically involve big scary-looking notices from the BKA. Maybe they happened to somehow or other share an IP address (or a server) with these guys?
Could the US Government Run a Lemonade Stand?
Why would anyone want this?
The US government has made a habit of providing lemonade to the people of our fair city. Maybe selling it at Walmart is not the best conceivable option for such a large and important undertaking. You’d think the government could get its act together sufficiently to run its own lemonade stand. Maybe the Department of Information could hand out their weekly flyers there too.
Some people don’t like going in to Walmart, some resent their every visit being recorded on the store surveillance cameras, and some people are banned from Walmart. So it might be better, democratically speaking, for the government to run its own lemonade stand.
Technical and Organizational Hurdles
Given the massive complexity and funding challenges of running a lemonade stand, we can assume that it would take several years to set up and that it would cost of several billion dollars. There may be requirements for new banking regulations, new government departments, NASA will probably want to get involved, and there will need to be user training and onboarding programs to make sure everyone is well prepared for serving and receiving lemonade.
Policy
Without the convenience of relying on Walmart to provide its reassuringly friendly and reliable security enforcement, we’ll need new procedures to deal with the kinds of hate speech, CSAM, terrorism, sedition, treason, weapons smuggling, drug trafficking, and moral hazard that are very likely to occur at any lemonade stand.
It will take a large team of lawyers to come up with reasonable ways to run a lemonade stand without violating the 8th amendment.
It’s Still Worth Trying
Sure is a lot of work, so we’d better get started.
Yes, that’s a perfectly good explanation for why they need to block wikipedia, deviantart, archiveofourown, github, bandcamp, lemmy.ml, and mastodon.social: they’re all just fronts in the Capitalist Information War
I’m sure lots of people do, it’s a big country. But for the vast majority I imagine that the risk of getting in trouble for it, plus the risk of the one you paid for getting successfully blocked, plus the difficulty of finding out which ones are allowed to operate only because they share all your data with the authorities, plus the cost, plus the usual difficulties in finding a good vpn outweigh any desire to communicate freely with foreigners.
As the comment there says, the surprise is that not every instance is blocked yet.
But I’ve seen hardly any Chinese on the fediverse, so they probably don’t care that much. And it’s not just that I’ve stuck to the English-speaking parts, there’s been lots of Japanese and various European languages. I suppose even if it otherwise would have a chance to catch on there, Chinese users know that if it did it quickly would get blocked.
Ah, well it wasn’t even clear to me that you were talking specifically about lemmy. Other software already has some of the features you want such as federating only with a chosen few.
It seems the main thing you actually propose is a new system for categorizing potentially undesirable content. I would suggest looking at what has already been tried in that area. There’s more to it than you’d suspect. How to choose the categories will never be uncontroversial, and coming up with a standard that any large fraction of the fediverse might accept would take some actual work.
Arguing against that, of course, is nostr being out there at the opposite extreme where it appears to have more different kinds of client software than it has users.