Comment by shadowgovt
6 months ago
Meanwhile, nothing has changed on Mastodon.
(I personally don't think Bluesky is a bad idea and I'm glad for more things in the ecosystem. But the point of decentralizing isn't just to protect against editorial constraint by the service owner; it's to protect against government pressure too. Mississippi could go after Mastodon service providers, but it'll cost them a lot more to find and chase 'em all).
If you think technology will protect you from censorship look at China. They can stop all but the most persistent users. It is just a question of how much they care to; they have the means. And most users are closer to Homer Simpson than Edward Snowden.
Mississippi would have a hell of a time convincing every ISP in the US to put up a firewall too.
They could try, but not even China could build an impregnable firewall.
They don't have to go after all of them, they just have to make an example of one. See: qwest's Joseph Nacchio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
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If you get 75% coverage (or let's say the 5 biggest ISPs here, comcast and so on) you don't need to really chase the long tail of small providers that hard. It would effectively be unavailable to non technical people at that point.
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six months ago I would have said the same thing about US universities.
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> They could try, but not even China could build an impregnable firewall.
They can learn from Russia. Censorship in Russia now surpassed China. TSPU are now in every ISP facility. They pass all traffic through them and allow arbitrary bans of specific resources/protocols/etc in specific cities or whole regions.
I heard from a friend that went to China and the hotel staff right away asks if they want to VPN their room.
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They don't need to. If only 1% of the people are able to access censored content and therefore hold censored ideas, the majority will treat them as crazy pariahs.
It's the same mechanism that makes us consider the 1% of flat earthers crazy. Sadly the mechanism works based on how many people believe a thing, not whether it's true, so it can also block true things if only 1% of people believe them.
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Then we need to make every user the most persistent user. How many governments have given up because Tor Browser ships anti-censorship defaults?
technology does not work unless you use it
What does that mean?
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On a side note I have very credible source telling that China might want open up the Internet "in a matter of days"
idk how "open" would this mean but drastic changes are coming.
That would be a big change considering things appear to be getting worse not better: https://securityboulevard.com/2025/08/great-firewall-china-w...
Would be great for the Chinese if true though.
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Mississippi can’t unless they can establish personal jurisdiction over a specific Mastodon operator. Which if that instance’s owner/operators don’t live in Mississippi, probably requires a novel application of the Zippo test [1] that’s a bit questionable for how noncommercial Mastodon tries to be.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_jurisdiction_in_Inter...
Or they pick a few and make an example out of them.
I believe the example would be "Good luck with that I'm in Germany."
That would be mastodon.social, yes, but there's lots of instances that are not.
Like I run one and I'm in Louisiana and I sure do not have the funds to mount a legal defense.
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> the example would be "Good luck with that I'm in Germany”
Mississippi is a red state. Bluesky is liberal. I could see the White House turning the dispute into a tariff or defence spat.