Lemmy.ml is supposedly blocked in China

emacs.ch Gene Pasquet :emacs: (@etenil@emacs.ch)

#mastodonsocial and #lemmyml are both blocked however

Funny if true.

171 comments

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.
- I've only seen Taiwanese on Mastodon, especially as they're leaving Twatter due to Chinese bot activity.
- Wouldn't they just use a VPN? I know they're technically illegal in China but from what I've heard lots of people still use them regularly.
  
  VPNs are not illegal in China. And one can use it to circumvent any restrictions.
  
  I feel like I should say that a VPN isn't a magic bullet. Even if its configured correctly to totally obfuscate the data and the final endpoint of the traffic it's still blatantly obvious that a VPN is in use. Given that the CCP monitors all of this stuff it wouldn't surprise me to learn that if you run a VPN long or often enough without providing stating why that it'll either end up blocked or you'll end up in trouble.
  
  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.
- any Chinese
  💀

It's like when your dad doesn't love you
- how will we ever recover from this epic pwnage 🥱
- Everyone to the left of you is a russian/chinese bot; a child's guide to political discourse on the internet

I imagine that the dynamic here is reminiscent of the western media's self-censorship. Western journalists learn to conform to certain standards and topics because they understand what kinds of articles are more likely to be published and advance their careers. This is largely influenced by the preferences of media company owners and advertisers, creating a selection pressure for content producers to conform to these expectations.
In contrast, in China, censors strive to identify potentially politically sensitive content and tend to err on the side of more aggressive censorship. This is due to the understanding that being overly cautious in such matters will not result in negative consequences, encouraging a more conservative approach to content regulation.
- Wow, stop saying sensible things. Be less correct. Thanks!

Does anyone know a reliable site for checking? This is just a random one I found: http://www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=lemmy.ml
lemmyworld seems to not be blocked. I have no idea how they make these decisions 🤷
Edit to add: FWIW Wikipedia has a short list of test sites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_mainland_China#External_links
- Seems like hexbear.net is blocked as well
  
  But chairman Xi what about our emotes!?
  
  Oh SHIT THE LAYOFFS GOT TO US
  
  Interesting. It wasn’t when I tested it yesterday or several weeks ago using this: http://www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=hexbear.net
  But I have no idea if these tools are any good. This one seems to indicate that it’s accessible but very slow https://www.dotcom-tools.com/china-firewall-test/
  
  Well yeah, why wouldn't China block a site full of libs?
- It might be discussion of piracy/VPNs or something like that. China's got rules about that stuff too AFAIK. Maybe if one of the admins can read/write Simplified Chinese they could reach out to the relevant government bureau and request clarification.

Please, someone tell comrade ~~Stalin~~ Xi that this is all just a terrible mistake!

The Western 'free' population is one of the most information censored/restricted populations in the world, and yet they are flabbergasted that China and many many other nations won't allow propaganda from western oligarchs into their country. It doesn't matter that an information firewall is the single most important military defense against the Capitalist information war. That's btw why the western world are propagandizing their population for 'free speech', so we all can see that wevil China don't want free propaganda, sorry, speech.
The most amazing and Incredible is how hateful attitudes can be bought for a few propaganda dollars in the western for profit information market. So western people actually believe all the hateful things the western oligarchy says about China (and ALL the other enemies of the oligarchs).
How convenient and completely coincidental that the western population have the same opinions about nations and world leaders as the top elite.. Could it be that.. nooooo.. no no.. Western news are the BEST, and no Capitalist elite would lie about something like that to their own population, oh no no..
- 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
  
  wikipedia
  Katherine Maher used to be the CEO of Wikimedia. Her resume is riddled with US military-industrial complex:
  A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Maher worked for UNICEF, the National Democratic Institute, the World Bank and Access Now before joining the Wikimedia Foundation. She subsequently joined the Atlantic Council and the US Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board.
  Meet Wikipedia’s Ayn Rand-loving founder and Wikimedia Foundation’s regime-change operative CEO
  Wikipedia formally censors The Grayzone as regime-change advocates monopolize editing
  lemmyml, and mastodon.social
  Largely unwittingly. Most of us are labor aristocrats of the imperial core who have been propagandized our entire lives in liberal imperialist ideology.
  Then there’s the media.
  Joseph Kahn, the managing editor of the NYT, is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, as are the CEOs of NPR (here’s Katherine Maher again) and PBS. These are just ones I know off the top of my head. The Council of Foreign Relations is a place where the government and the capitalist class hash out the media’s agenda. On its founding, Walter Lippman was its head of research. The title of Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent came from a quote in Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion.
  A couple more I can think of: CNN’s Anderson Cooper was born into money and interned at the CIA. MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, who was also born into wealth, was Obama’s and Biden’s press secretary.
  
  Well, they're all methods by which culturally-bankrupt, ideologically-hued art and tech from the West could potentially slip past, ESPECIALLY where settler techbros are concerned regarding github and NSApedia-- I mean wikipedia; but you're being a deliberately-obtuse settler sinophobe right now, so of course you're not going to absorb that.
  One of these days, y'all
  gonna learn the "Great Firewall" y'all mald about is for your protection
- Reporter: [REDACTED]
  Reason: Breaks Community Rules
  You’ve been subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
  
  I fucking love that guy. If you're reading this, please never stop reporting.

Isn't lemmy.ml full of tankies?
- More like strangulated by libs who need to move back to .world. Iunno how dessalines or nutomic tolerate some of these mfs.
- I made an account a long while ago when it was the only instance with any content but I'm just a lurker looking for memes and tech news. Feeling like I should change instance these days...
- average sh.ithead. Fucking nazi instance.
- lemmygrad is full of full-on tankies, the type who would willingly send birthday greetings to comrade Stalin while imprisoned in a gulag, lemmy.ml once was a default instance and thus has random folks on it but is admin-wise run by tankies and generally seems to serve as the preferred instance for lemmygrad folks to have alts on. Stay away from political communities there e.g. their worldnews community is a silly place. Hexbear is hit and miss, not so much hardened tankies there but wokescolds and random lefties who don't quite realise who they associate with, why that kind of social dynamics is no good. Might have some inane takes, occasionally prone to dogpiling, but at least you can have a conversation with them.
  
  Using alt-right terminology should get you disqualified from any reasonable conversation.
- If you mean communists that support capitalist states like China, then yes, unfortunately. Better than being around nothing but liberals or anti-communists though.
  
  capitalist states like China
  China isn't a capitalist state.
  
  That’s not what they mean
  
  Used to mean someone who would support sending in tanks to crush capitalist rallies like in Hungary (which most people who get labelled "tankies" these days obviously don't), but nowadays it's just an anti-communist term for anyone that supports any socialist revolution that has successfully built a socialist nation.

some of the gymnastics in this thread are hilarious. critical support is a thing you can criticize china's various Ls while still supporting the chinese people.

It's because China needs help using Emacs. Lemmy needs to rebrand to a Vim learning resource.

Any social networks that have non-censored participants are. Usually, China's presence in social networks outside of its borders are for propaganda purposes.

Why would State Capitalists allow discussions about actual communism? God forbid he people get it into their head to form trade unions..
- I can't quite tell if this is a parody, the trade union bit makes it seem sincere, but the self-importance to think that lemmy is too left for China to allow is just amazing.
  
  What is left about China? They literally murdered people for demanding the right to establish trade unions (see Tienamin Square)
- i'm sure Chinese people need patronizing crackers from the west to instruct them on what communism actually is
  
  What? I stand with the Chinese people against their oppressors. Criticism of an oppressive State is not criticism of its victims.
- To be fair, .ml bans you pretty quickly for discussing anything outside of a pretty narrow stripe of Marxist Leninist orthodoxy as well.
  
  I don't consider myself a Marxist, Leninist, or communist of any stripe and haven't had a problem so far. I'm far enough left that I refuse to call myself a liberal, but I suspect the folks who consider themselves Marxists probably think I'm too far right to self-identify as a leftist. (Although I do.)
  Shitload of downvotes a time or two, but that's about it. I just wanted to be on a Lemmy instance that was honoring the fedipact, and preferred it to have an instance ethos to the left of mine rather than to the right of it.
  I like it here.
  
  This is just a meme everyone repeats until they believe it.
  
  I don't think that's a fair criticizm. After all my dumb ass hasn't been banned (so far).

Is there someplace we can contact to change this?
- Lol
  
  Yea its "taiwan.is.not.a.country@bestcountry.cn"

Must be a new anti-白左 legislation of some sort.
- 谢谢习大大, 爱国者们掌握了局势, 没有共产党就没有新中国
  
  Slight nitpick(a)
  You wrote 西 (xī) which means west. You probably meant 习 (xí), referring to the president.
  Also in "Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China" you wrote 金 (jīn) which means gold, when it should be 就.

Can confirm, I just checked. When I first moved to China hexbear wasn't blocked but it is now. Lemmygrad is still unblocked though
Oh, and a fun fact - I know of a few porn sites that you can view in China without a VPN 😆
- So you can still participate on wider lemmy by finding or spinning up your own instance?