A couple of days ago i noticed something off with blahaj.zone. I couldn’t see images posted by users on blahaj, so i thought it was a problem on their side.
Well guess fucking what? After 3 days, it was STILL broken, so i opened it and…
Blocked. They fucking blocked blahaj.zone. Actually beyond parody🤦♂️ Why? What was the point? there’s trans content literally everywhere on lemmy. what’s next, block them all? So now if i want to see a post by a user on blahaj, i have to turn on my VPN (protonvpn.com is also blocked in saudi, jfc) just to see it. Fuck this place. 🙄
I swear a couple of days ago it worked. This is a mild annoyance (hence the community) but still.
It’s so over guys, MBS said no more 196 😔
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man that page is so fucking annoying, everything i try to open anything it’s just blocked. All sites critical of islam/saudi/sauds, and alcohol/porn/and anything that they hate. Even tor and vpns are blocked, i need to use a mirror to get them, which may not always be safe (atleast for the VPN, tor has trusted mirrors)
ngl i think of running a vpn on my router, literally just not to see that fucking page anymore (and security too, ofc :) )
Just as a heads-up: What you just wrote is an admission of a crime in SA. Everything you post on the fediverse is public. And you now know they’re aware of Lemmy.
I hope you are absolutely sure whatever you’re using to hide your identity is bomb-proof, and that you’ve never posted any identifying info under this account or any other one with the same username.deleted by creator
it’s been an hour
thanks 👍
Why would someone use an Afghanistan TLD for that, given it’s illegal to be LGBTQ there? If course the domain is going to be removed.
Why? Because “queer af” is funny as a domain, and people sometimes don’t realize that tlds can be under certain jurisdictions
It also wasn’t a problem until governments changed
lmao, what’s with islamists and gay sites??
The Qur’an?
It’s not like they really care about it anyway.
Yeah, i hate gay people just as god intended, but i literally break every single law in the quran beyond that.
- Every Saudi royal
I also don’t remember a verse in the quran mentioning hacking a man then dissolving his corpse in acid, must be in surat al-baqarah…
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.
I guess MBS didn’t like 196 😔
I bet he didn’t even post before leaving
MBS doesn’t rule 🤮
he doesn’t want citizens of the Kingdom to see how few upvotes his memes were getting
Dude was like
“Small community of queer people. Not on my watch”
what if innocent Saudis Arabians had no choice but to turn transgay on Lemmy??
Ngl, I can actually imagine saying that. Not doing that of course, because he already did so 😂
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
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Also, if I were in Saudi Arabia, I’d be trying to leave Saudi Arabia
Probably not, as long as you are not openly queer, you wont see any reason to leave co sidering the ridiculous amounts of perks you get, its not a 3rd world country or a backwater nation, it is a rich monarchial regime.
Rich… But only to the royals/businessmen.
Most of us live normally if not a little worse off than the average westerners.
The only perk I have at all is healthcare. The west is basically better at everything other than that.
deleted by creator
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the government also thretens people who use vpn with jail and heavy fines
Easier said than done. At least, for the second one.
What are the obstacles in the way of leaving?
Getting citizenship is hard, (even asylum is turned down often). You need a stable job in that country, and above average skills to prove your worth. If not, you’ll be deported back.
You also need to stay in that country for [upto] 10 years.
And you have to leave everything behind, your culture, your family, and your friends. It would be too dangerous to go back. And they might not even accept you, immigration is brutal.
Even after you become a citizen, many people will never truly accept you as your own, and see you as an immigrant, never as a citizen.
And Saudi Arabia is well known to harass, spy on, and even kill dissidents. There was a scandal with twitter, where the Sauds bought up large amounts of stocks, then ordered 3,000 Saudi dissident’s private info. Even in other countries you aren’t safe.
And money. You need money. A shit ton of it.
Who’s giving you asylum exactly for “I’m from Saudi Arabia”? A refugee camp in North Africa if you’re lucky?
I know a Saudi in the United States that got asylum because they are gay.
If I may ask, how was their experience applying for asylum? And what do they think of the US as a place to live?
Believe it or not, it’s possible. If you’re gay, trans, atheist or a whistleblower you are eligible for asylum. But you’re right that just being born in Saudi isn’t a free ticket to Berlin.
The trick is actually presenting yourself and getting them to believe you though I’d bet.
Hey at least Lemmy is becoming popular enough for the authorities to block us.
The good thing about Lemmy is that due to its distributed and federated nature, it can’t be fully blocked. You can just use a different instance and see all the same content (assuming instancea that don’t block the other instances).
Can’t have shit in Saudi, not even Lemmy 😤
KSA and China are like low hanging fruit, it doesn’t take much to get blocked there…
Wake me up when OECD countries start blocking us
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.
That’s what i’m afraid of, too. Doing such risky things in the middle of the den of snakes. There isn’t much they can do to a visitors like your friend, but they can do what they please to “threats” and dissidents like me.
Why would you ever visit that shithole of a country?
Where did you choose to be born?
bro i was born here, you’re right why would i? i didn’t, fuck this shitholeSorry, I didn’t mean to sound so rude. It was just a misunderstanding
My bad; you implied that you were just visiting with your last comment.
Oh, i see how someone could’ve interpreted as such 🤦♂️ I’ll edit it jic, thank you :)
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.
Yeah, thank god. I’m more baffled on why fucking saudi arabia would care about a tiny trans-ran instance on a niche software. must’ve been a slow day there, i guess.
youre kidding right. one of the most oppressive shitty, religion-based garbage of a country that subjugates 50% of its population and you wonder why its acting shitty?
I’m more suprised at the fact that they blocked such a small website, but i guess they really leave nothing left behind. I gotta be more careful on lemmy if that’s the case.
And i know KSA is shitty, i really do, but i can’t do shit about it. I’m not suprised they’d block a trans instance, just such a small one.
its what happens when horrible people have money to burn
Only a small percentage of saudi arabia live luxuriously, guess who’s most of them? (Hint: they’re a royal family) meanwhile, i’ve seen homeless people, starved to the bone (literally), without a single piece of clothing, sitting in the sweltering heat.
yep. evil people with way too much money
You are very naive, and should probably be a lot more careful when in Saudi Arabia.
That’s the thing, I thought Lemmy was too niche to be known about by the gov. I was wrong. I should cool it on the anti saud, pro republic stuff, this can get me in serious trouble.
Ye, this shit is no joke if you’re actually inside the Kingdom! Exercise tight OpSec please!
I ought to. Do you know any general tips, or places for me to ask about making my social media presence as secure as possible?
Not posting on Lemmy about how you disagree with their censorship of a Lemmy instance might be a good first step.
https://libcom.org/article/infosec-101-preventing-doxxing
Other than that, I would suggest always using proxies or VPNs when accessing fediverse services from your location.
Good info, thank you.
Do a search on yourself - try to find out your real identity based on information online, and do it as thoroughly as if you were searching for your worst enemy.
If you can find who you are yourself, chances are they will.
Make sure you don’t have anything “hairy” tied to an email with an email address you’d use for anything uncompromising. E.g. keep the email you use to login on Lemmy and the email you use to login on netflix separate.
Use 2 factor authentication and a password manager. Treat your password leaks seriously and consider any leaked accounts burnt - assume the details you had in there are now known.
Avoid using your real name on anything you can.
Best wishes. Take care my friend!
Additional advice from a cybersecurity professional that’s good for you and anyone else reading: under no circumstances should you use SMS 2FA if there’s another option.
Yes, having another app sucks (google/Microsoft have pretty universal apps if they’re supported) but it’s trivially easy for an even slightly well funded and motivated attacker to redirect your texts/phone calls so it’s well worth the pain.
Hope this helps!
I was trying to tell my friend why having a picture of himself, and his real name on his instagram account was a bad idea (like using insta in general), if you google his name his account is the first result. The only thing with my real name on it is a github and email. I’m lucky, my name is common and there is a athlete with the same name, which took all the seo
Be more careful, and best of luck to you.
I guess watch out for shit that can get you doxxed since there are probably like 3 Saudi Arabians tops in the thread side of the Fediverse.
There are only two Arabs I know of here, and none of them are Saudi. Must be a lurker…
I’m a way that’s a downside too, it’s now easier for shit regimes to block content they disagree with, without blocking the larger services. Less people will be disrupted by it, so less people will care. See: blocking Facebook,YouTube or WhatsApp vs. blocking a single activist site.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Thank god for VPNs though.
Federated content gets around that though.
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.
Yeah, but it’s a little weird how they’d go out of their way to ban such a small and obscure website. I didn’t even know the feds knew about lemmy. Besides, it’s been fine for a long time for me.
But this was bound to happen eventually, i guess :/
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
I am well aware of that :( Hopefully i can disappear out of here before they make me.
I didn’t even know the feds knew about lemmy.
Probably just an automated list of blocking then. At least I would assume theres block lists floating around at those levels
Stay safe friend.
Without giving away potentially anything dangerous to yourself, in case they are watching. Any idea what place you intend on disappearing too?
I plan on trying to apply for asylum somewhere. There’s a lot of useful information for saudi dissidents on a forum that i won’t mention the name of, but from it my choices are: Canada, Australia, UK, America, France, Switzerland, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Ireland.
All of these, i’d give a kidney to be in anyway. But if i’ll make this once in a lifetime choice, i might as well choose what’s best for me. A big problem is finance and racism. The western world isn’t friendly to Arabs from what i’ve seen, so i’d probably need to lay low.
I used to want to go to Germany, but this ominous message on the forum made me think twice. They leave it at that, but it’s unsettling to me.
Do you have any technical skills? If you can sell yourself as an asset you are going to do considerably better.
Yes, it’s a WIP for me, but i’m improving my rust and OCaml skills, but they have a struggling job market.
You could also look into trade school. In the US at least there are a lot of people desperate for electricians plumbers and other related jobs.
Haven’t heard of them till now, not necessarily my hobby but i’ll think of it as a backup, thank you.
geoblocked
“Geoblocking” would mean that it’s blahaj who don’t want saudis on their instance
Damn 😔
yeah that was my bad, sorry
Use Tor if you can, and people outside of these restrictive countries can help by running Snowflake in their regular browser.
Ooooh this is a pretty cool tool, I’ll set up the docker container on my homelab
Love tor, it’s a lifesaver (literally :) ) and thank you for the tip!
That’s a great recommendation, it’s always important to practice bypassing potential censorship as you do not always know what is being hidden from the public.
Installed Snowflake, thanks for the heads-up. Pretty simple way to try to be a little helpful. Was like two clicks.
Just click there and tell them it shouldn’t be blocked.
I am sure they’ll listen!
That shit’ll get me on a watchlist, trying to access a website for trans people 😂
But if i ask nicely…
I was joking but, maybe go find the worst bigot you know, and do it from their computer?
You underestimate how bigoted the average Gulf Arab is, I’d need to do it to everyone 😅
The average gulf Arab is a competitive racist. Especially with Jews 😂
texas will probably block us next.
The book bans are currently practice before they start banning more resources such as Wikipedia.
I wish this was a joke but these days I wouldn’t put it past them. I don’t think it would hold up terribly well since the US doesn’t have any form of advanced censorship.
With the current laws on the books, Texas could probably sue Lemmy instances because they contain pornographic content and they don’t verify users’ identity.
Aren’t most Lemmy instances ran in Europe, anyway? At most they’ll just block them, right?
Dunno, they’d probably have a hard time suing European instances, but they can’t outright block, as that would be unconstitutional. U.S. states have recently been using lawsuits to get around constitutionality. I.e. Texas also has a “bounty” law, where if you know a woman went out of state to get an abortion, you can report it, and the state will sue them and give you $10,000. I think another state has a similar law for if you see a trans person using a restroom that doesn’t match the genitalia they were born with.
you see a trans person using a restroom that doesn’t match the genitalia
lmao what??? how would you even know about that?
Hmm. Looks like that was in Texas too. https://truthout.org/articles/a-city-in-texas-just-put-10000-bounties-on-trans-people-using-the-bathroom/, and they’re going to pass quite a few more bounty laws yhis year: https://prismreports.org/2025/01/08/bounty-laws-texas-trans-rights-abortion/
Sorry to hear that, hopefully it will turn out all right for trans people in the US.
My fuckers blocked catbox.moe, most western news sites and slowed down youtube traffic, but lemmy still flies under radar thankfully. I wish you still have your ways to choose what content you want to consume.
That sounds worse, what country are you living in? Sorry to hear it. And thanks for the wishes :)
The Motherland, of course. I was born into her teenage phase of 90\00s and now I see her rapidly becoming one young and salty widow (:
Oh dear, hearing anything about russia almost makes me proud to a saudi :).
Through our suffering, we are brothers 😂
Hell yeah. We a cockroaches in their kitchen, never surrender and always persist whatever they like us or not 😉
How’s life for you besides internet censorship, if you don’t mind me asking. I’m just curious. Good luck out there!
Thank you.
For me, it’s edging on absurdity and feeling like I’m the one who feel like we are going insane, but luckily for me I found my close knit circle of friends who share that feeling and I myself adapted to see everything through some lense of satire. Even though I live in it.
What still hurts tho is how my relatives and people around are so uninformed and hostile to everything ukrainian or just european, even if they talk about relatives there, and then they are just like ‘why they don’t like us’ lol. Yeah, like, no reason. And then they order IKEA-like furniture for their flats because it’s of european quality!
My sanity is saved by my partner, my friends and my still intact trust in people, even if they are dumb af.
Same here. Only instead of partner and family, it’s the internet. They’re mad, too. It really makes you feel like you are the only one sane in the whole world, and people on the internet don’t even feel real, like they come from a fantasy. And i get the racism, too :/ But for us it’s towards Jews. Apparently the YAHOOD changed some musical cord to mind control the whole world, according to my old substitute teacher, in a completely unrelated rant.
I constantly feel like i’m at the edge of my sanity, but what could be done? Patience, i guess.
Stay safe, and i hope you can get out happily.
Stay safe out there
Any interest in Briar? I never had a use for it in the US but it is very powerful in the sense that it is designed to be highly resistant to state attacks. It works with or without access to the public internet.
I appreciate you sharing and getting to read about your experience. I really wish you, your friends, and loved ones luck. Do your best to get through it and hopefully someday things will change for the better. My fingers and crossed for you.
“None of us are free until all of us are free”
We see you.
Tor with Snow flakes is probably what you want.
You could even use Tails to avoid leaving a trace.
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.
If i remember correctly after the downfall of reddit and the mass migration to Lemmy happened, A big issue was CSAM spreading across the Lemmy servers. Wouldn’t surprise me that that is the cause that images are no longer stored across servers.
Some shitheads started to spam CSAM and it got cached on other instances too. db0 admin created a tool to check every upload via library of hashes of known dangerous images (not images themselves). Since then, most images are stored locally on instances and aren’t cached by others.
Image proxy is what I suspect you mean. The problem with that from an instance admin is that on the network level it would them show their instance accessing whatever content their users request which then puts the owner at risk, so I believe most never enabled it. If an owner set up an instance with a particularly strong opsec game though where their outbound connections where routed over a VPN or TOR that could be useful to censored countries. Might make for an interesting project…
That’s not really the problem. The main issue until now is that when you try to proxy all images, what ends up happening is that a lot of popular image hosters start rate limiting your server’s IP, so your users end up just seeing a lot of broken images, and they think you misconfigured your instance. @sunaurus@lemm.ee had to deal with this iirc.
That too I suppose. I seem to recall the feature coming out not too long after all the CSAM issues, so liability for that always stuck in my mind.
Hmm.
IPv6 addresses are a far less-constrained resource than IPv4 addresses.
I wonder if it might be possible to do the requests over IPv6, using a range of addresses, assuming that the image hosting services in question only care about rate of requests from a single address.
EDIT: Also, for OP’s case, all he cares about is propagation of images hosted on other lemmy instances, not image hosting services. Presumably those instances don’t care about other instances serving their pictrs images. I wonder if it’d be possible to have an option to only proxy for pictrs-served images?
Rate limitors from ipv6 tend to take into account the whole subnet which is assigned to your account, so that’s not a way to avoid them
That’s good to know, thank you. Unfortunately alot of the communities i spend time in have a lot of blahaj users, so i don’t have context of the post sometimes. Better than nothing, though.
Saudi would take a hacksaw to them if they could
MBS’s wet dream every night.
