• Supervisor194@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    So I read the other day that Russia has banned Facebook/Twitter/et al and it made me wonder, are sites like Reddit and Lemmy banned too? How much do these bans matter to the average Russian, do they just do a VPN anyway and generally no consequences, or what is the deal?

    • andrew_bidlaw
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      1 year ago

      Hi there.

      Reddit isn’t popular at all because of a language barrier and existence of similar local resources. There was a motion to ban it but it was silently dismissed so I doubt anyone noticed it. Lemmy, with it’s multiple instances, while even less popular is more ban-proof I believe. I have seen like 5 accounts saying they are from here and I’m not sure if it’s 5 different persons.

      Free VPNs don’t work as good as they did after the Iranian protests (maybe they partnered up on that one), paid are hard to obtain since SWIFT was cut. Their sites or download links are sometimes banned too (not the appstore pages tho). It’s usually the line that stops most people. And, if they really want to get information, there’s this shady Telegram app but also dedicated news apps with workarounds and email newsletters. Even Youtube isn’t banned, and I think it satisfies any interest, especially since we don’t have ads and virtually nothing gets banned here these days.

      Consequences happen in a semi-random fashion. Yes, they have black boxes on each ISP server, they do listen to traffic and probably can tell packet sizes, protocols, maybe even content itself, but I’m yet to hear it becoming the leading cause of persecution. You need to first get someone’s attention IRL or on social media for them to involve tech methods. Like, having a big oppositional channel and putting someone to shame, or being snitched on by a random observer. Then they’d start to dig things up. Last tech thing I’ve heard is them tracking the protesters by their phones pinging closest cell towers, but that was more than a year ago and I’ve yet to see something as advanced.

      As someone who is on Lemmy, thus a minority in the minority, I encounter random sites being blocked from our side or from theirs. It’s not a big deal for me most of the time, but this barrier makes lazier, less tech-savvy majority isolated from the global web, and it doesn’t help our society at all. If anything, it makes them boil in the pot heated only by our propaganda, unchallenged. It shows that you need to make it slightly inconvinient in order to kill russian international blogosphere and they did just that. In their minds, they get the full picture from russian media alone. Good for them they aren’t involved with anything like programing or science. They could’ve become very upset at the perspective of being cut off.

      Other than that most people don’t care or even a bit angry about being denied foreign services and needing to buy foreign currency for them. Sadly, that’s the limits of their world ):

        • andrew_bidlaw
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          1 year ago

          Thanks. As I’m yet to wake up to artillery shelling I guess I’m doing better than many who got involuntary affected by this last crusade. If you are from a less sanctioned part of the world and not as broke as I’m, I guess you know how you can move this ‘someday’ a little closer (: Didn’t know I’d suggest such a thing in Jan '22 or '14, but here we are, fuck.

      • u/unhappy_grapefruit_2@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        This is quite an interesting read. Good luck with all those state sanctions m8 hopefully soon maccy des will open again lol

        A Intriguing question that is on my mind and i may as well ask is this I wonder how far Russia or any other surveillance state would go to silence someone as unimportant as you I or anyone else in this thread

        • andrew_bidlaw
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          1 year ago

          Depends. I’m pretty relieved knowing that even the Great Firewall can be casually pierced by chinese guys without consequencies. If something, it would probably be just a fine in most ordinary cases. It’s when they want to do an example of you shit gets morbid. Say, if they’d ever need to show that even english rhetoric on obscure board isn’t off-limit for them, they’d make sure to pin as much sentences as they can ranging from discreditating the MoD, the state, to what else can I do here? Sharing intel? Participate in international terrorist activities? What if NCD is not just fellas, but a short-hand for Nuclear Charges Deployment?

          I’m exaggerating here. Even issuing an intern to study Lemmy sounds absurd. But these last couple of years people got charged big sentences for as little as changing 5 price tags in a local 7\11.

    • u/unhappy_grapefruit_2@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Reddit is almost certainly banned in Russia there’s alot of pro Ukraine revorick on there maybe not so much lemmy due to its low popularity and its large popularity of tankies

      • andrew_bidlaw
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        1 year ago

        Naha. I think that it’s total russian userbase is too small to concider. No one here knows what it is.

          • andrew_bidlaw
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            1 year ago

            After I wrote that, I recalled catbox.moe being slower or not availiable without a vpn, and that’s where many videos are posted before embedding or reuploading. Other than that, there’s still Telegram where most of these originate, and it’s not limited, in part because that’s where our ‘milbloggers’ post too. Finding /r/combatfootage and such seems less likely than finding this content in the social network almost everyone uses on the daily basis.