Feddit.org officially announces they will ban criticism of Israel and pro-Palestinian posts and comments.

Regarding Mid-East-related Comments on !europe - feddit.org

Feddit.org announced today that they are changing their rules to match German law despite their server not being hosted in Germany.

Feddit.org now bans

The sentence "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"
Comparing Israel to the Nazis
Calls to end Zionism
Calling for the dissolution of Israel

And much more. The full original post can be found here, or

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436 comments

Unforced error really, there's a lot of secure hosting providers that take anonymous payments. Could easily say you transferred domain control to someone else to avoid liability when the law passed. They're doing this because they have no convictions and are lazy at best, at worst they support Israel.
- Not really.
  You can't become anonymous and retain site ownership. The site would've needed to be shut down and a new, somehow completely unrelated site would have to be started.
  Besides, even if that were done you bet your ass a random German lawyer would immediately sue the new site for violating Impressumspflicht. That's one quick way to get the police investigating your site. Your OPSEC better be close to "hosting an illegal streaming site" level.
  Even German forums about piracy would rather have an impress and remove illegal content than remain anonymous and evade police - see tarnkappe.info.
  
  I'd argue every small social site should run on the principal that they will be prosecuted like an illegal streaming site. You can divest yourself of liability and doxing with basic opsec.
  An example: host on 1984.hosting and pay with mined or donated Monero. Only access the site through a computer specifically for that purpose, and only with Tor / Tor Browser and a Linux distro such as Qubes, Tails, or less suspiciously, Fedora Atomic. Memorize credentials if possible, if not encrypt them on drive with a strong password via a keepassxc databases. If you are hosting the site properly, you can transfer the site podman/docker container and url with databases and info intact with no effort. Make sure the computer for managing site management stuff wipes itself on every shutdown sans credential info, has secureboot, and an encrypted drive. As an admin account, only access the site through base Mullvad Browser with a VPN (ideally Mullvad) or Tor Browser on a computer of your choosing.
  You can easily say the site is no longer yours and your payment information will reflect this. This has been done before. Germany can ban the site but it'll be easily discoverable through other fediverse servers, Tor, and VPNs. They would have to ban anything that uses acitivitypub, and again, even in that scenario you can use a VPN or Tor or self host a vps with the instructions above to access it normally anyways.
  
  Simultaneously, you lose all rights to the site and risk a hostile takeover with no possible recourse.
  It's also significantly more effort to retain this level of anonymity from a state actor. I don't even think there's a single Lemmy instance which follows all those steps.
  The thing is, as of right now German censorship doesn't warrant this. Yes, it sucks you cannot freely speak about Israel. But frankly, since it only requires you to adjust your wording minimally without changing the message ("Israel should be destroyed" => "I support a one state solution where everyone in current-day Israel and Palestine can live freely, similar to how South Africa abolished apartheid.") it's really not worth it.
  Should Germany turn fascist and ban all opposition, it is too late for feddit.org and their moderators anyways. If Germany doesn't, feddit will be fine like this and reduce the strictness of these rules as German sentiment towards Israel slowly worsens over the coming years.
  
  Hostile takeover? Not if you don't share credentials. The passwords and so on should be random and encrypted.
  And yes, if Germany is going to execute you for potentially hosting a small social site that occasionally could criticize Israel you've got bigger problems and should choose to fight or flee.
  
  Sorry, I meant either confiscation of the domain or the server provider deciding to take everything down. The latter can be mitigated with backups but it will nevertheless result in long downtimes.
  There's generally no legal recourse or protection if any instance involved in hosting the site decides to break contracts. This sort of uncertainty sucks and has to be taken into consideration.
  
  Confiscation of the domain isn't a big deal. As I've already said, there are many anonymous hosting providers that have been tested on the Israel issue and came out the other side. 1984 is one, ADL served them an injunction in court in Iceland and 1984 was successful in fighting it and also avoiding divulging any info about activists.
  If you wanted to it's also possible to proxy server traffic so that the main server is never divulged which makes it very easy to swap domain names and providers. I consider this overkill for this use case though, would be necessary on a streaming site or something, though that should be hosted in Russia to avoid issues anyways, Russia essentially allows for the piracy of non Russian data.

436 comments