The question was how do I post on a Mastodon instance without being moderated by someone subject to Western internet laws. It seems I choose between a carbon copy IT professional choosing Hetzner, or self-hosting. What can the Chinese and the Russians do to me? I am worried about our goverments. Not sure you can understand my priorities.
So, I’ll be frank and tell you the barriers to create a fediverse community on servers hosted in Russia or China, or other smaller countries. It’s not a conspiracy.
Most of the Western countries you listed earlier use English as a common secondary language to communicate, while BRICS prefer their own languages. Places like Brazil have Mastodon servers, but they are catering to Portugese users, and Chinese servers would be mostly for Chinese writers and Russian for Russian. An English community wouldn’t take off there or in other countries with a different local language. Perhaps India.
Hosting in Russia or China, you will not be able to federate with anyone outside of other servers in those countries. A handful of other countries have their own restrictions.
You will be at the mercy of the local government’s rules whether your server can stay online. A somewhat related issue that affected Lemmy was when Mali took control of freely given .ml domains, lemmy.fmhy.ml went offline.
If the local country is too poor to host their own infrastructure, then chances are a US, European or Chinese-linked company helped set it up and so that government has a degree of control on what is hosted by that server. So you’re still not effectively free of the big powers’ grip.
Said nothing about hosting in China or Russia. The guy I was speaking to began monologuing about how he uses UBlock to disable all Russian and Chinese websites in the “Boycott US” community, I found it incredibly out-of-touch. Russia is not that hard to host in, you’ve clearly got an exaggerated idea of that. Where a website is actively hosted or what its domain is has little bearing on what languages it uses, as evidenced by the Malian domain basically being wordplay. Maybe I ought not to even mention it, but Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Kyrgyzstan, and a surprising number of places are solid VPS options, but I am not opening a community I just have bots and a few dozen oomphs in a group chat. Nothing I have been getting censored for on western social media is against their laws. I do not have issues on Rednote, VK or Weibo etc. Your side of the discussion is bordering on concern-trolling. I am not even interested in self-hosting a community ActivityPub instance or federating with the communities which are essentially BlueSky lite and use software that cripples essential tools such as searching within a profile and federated aggregation. Was honestly curious if it is as bad as FediMap makes it look or I had missed a spot in what appears to be another boring cluster of semi-personalized websites on the same old datacenters.
One way or another everyone hosting in the west is apparently still comfortable that laws won’t change (new issues will come and with them new censors) under their feet and they won’t get FISA attention. Worst thing another country’s internet host can do is terminate your account, or report you to your own LEO. There are just a zillion reasons why “which country is the most based to me” is not even the right question to be asking, rather: Where are we? Who wants to get to us? How could that change?
Singapore has a bunch on Fedimap, somehow more servers show up for me (on mobile) when you zoom in. They are English speaking which is in line with what I said. China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have a handful too. Six Mastodon instances in Chile. The topic is non-US Mastodon hosts, so the discussion has been centered around where federated social media is hosted rather than the best place to hold a small online group chat (and your original reply was about posting to Mastodon).
Most people would rather not have to figure out a second set of rules when hosting, on a server halfway across the world, and having to pay currency exchange fees, and liase with a foreign company’s support page etc.etc. Each thing is a little bit of friction that makes people avoid that if they don’t need to. For having to go through the hurdles of hosting in a vastly different third country, what is it that you gain? Apparently I haven’t gotten a clear grasp of what you are averse to about hosting in Europe, Canada and similar, or if it’s just a matter that you want to take the road less trodden.
It’s the political culture of extreme paranoia, global domination, trying to ban encryption, sophisticated torture camps, IP insanity where they haul pirate site guys away for years, killed a guy over downloading academic papers off JSTOR, etcetera (no really, ETCETERA, it goes on and on) for me. You’re right about fedimap, I will see if there is more going on than I looked at last year. Plus, stuff like that and Fedidb is opt-in, which is why I was hoping there was more stuff lurking around. You’re right about friction but it’s easy for me to turn stuff like this into a game.
You’ll be moderated by someone subject to Chinese and Russian internet laws then, so if your goal is to avoid being censored, that’s not really any better. If you absolutely want to avoid censorship, your best bet would probably be to find an instance managed by some anonymous person hosting it on a VPS paid via Monero or something.
I don’t mean blanket free speech. I’m fine with people being censored for being complete assholes, for instance. What we have seen is censoring of people with the politics of Ms. Rachel lol
The question was how do I post on a Mastodon instance without being moderated by someone subject to Western internet laws. It seems I choose between a carbon copy IT professional choosing Hetzner, or self-hosting. What can the Chinese and the Russians do to me? I am worried about our goverments. Not sure you can understand my priorities.
So, I’ll be frank and tell you the barriers to create a fediverse community on servers hosted in Russia or China, or other smaller countries. It’s not a conspiracy.
Most of the Western countries you listed earlier use English as a common secondary language to communicate, while BRICS prefer their own languages. Places like Brazil have Mastodon servers, but they are catering to Portugese users, and Chinese servers would be mostly for Chinese writers and Russian for Russian. An English community wouldn’t take off there or in other countries with a different local language. Perhaps India.
Hosting in Russia or China, you will not be able to federate with anyone outside of other servers in those countries. A handful of other countries have their own restrictions.
You will be at the mercy of the local government’s rules whether your server can stay online. A somewhat related issue that affected Lemmy was when Mali took control of freely given .ml domains, lemmy.fmhy.ml went offline.
If the local country is too poor to host their own infrastructure, then chances are a US, European or Chinese-linked company helped set it up and so that government has a degree of control on what is hosted by that server. So you’re still not effectively free of the big powers’ grip.
Said nothing about hosting in China or Russia. The guy I was speaking to began monologuing about how he uses UBlock to disable all Russian and Chinese websites in the “Boycott US” community, I found it incredibly out-of-touch. Russia is not that hard to host in, you’ve clearly got an exaggerated idea of that. Where a website is actively hosted or what its domain is has little bearing on what languages it uses, as evidenced by the Malian domain basically being wordplay. Maybe I ought not to even mention it, but Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Kyrgyzstan, and a surprising number of places are solid VPS options, but I am not opening a community I just have bots and a few dozen oomphs in a group chat. Nothing I have been getting censored for on western social media is against their laws. I do not have issues on Rednote, VK or Weibo etc. Your side of the discussion is bordering on concern-trolling. I am not even interested in self-hosting a community ActivityPub instance or federating with the communities which are essentially BlueSky lite and use software that cripples essential tools such as searching within a profile and federated aggregation. Was honestly curious if it is as bad as FediMap makes it look or I had missed a spot in what appears to be another boring cluster of semi-personalized websites on the same old datacenters.
One way or another everyone hosting in the west is apparently still comfortable that laws won’t change (new issues will come and with them new censors) under their feet and they won’t get FISA attention. Worst thing another country’s internet host can do is terminate your account, or report you to your own LEO. There are just a zillion reasons why “which country is the most based to me” is not even the right question to be asking, rather: Where are we? Who wants to get to us? How could that change?
Singapore has a bunch on Fedimap, somehow more servers show up for me (on mobile) when you zoom in. They are English speaking which is in line with what I said. China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have a handful too. Six Mastodon instances in Chile. The topic is non-US Mastodon hosts, so the discussion has been centered around where federated social media is hosted rather than the best place to hold a small online group chat (and your original reply was about posting to Mastodon).
Most people would rather not have to figure out a second set of rules when hosting, on a server halfway across the world, and having to pay currency exchange fees, and liase with a foreign company’s support page etc.etc. Each thing is a little bit of friction that makes people avoid that if they don’t need to. For having to go through the hurdles of hosting in a vastly different third country, what is it that you gain? Apparently I haven’t gotten a clear grasp of what you are averse to about hosting in Europe, Canada and similar, or if it’s just a matter that you want to take the road less trodden.
It’s the political culture of extreme paranoia, global domination, trying to ban encryption, sophisticated torture camps, IP insanity where they haul pirate site guys away for years, killed a guy over downloading academic papers off JSTOR, etcetera (no really, ETCETERA, it goes on and on) for me. You’re right about fedimap, I will see if there is more going on than I looked at last year. Plus, stuff like that and Fedidb is opt-in, which is why I was hoping there was more stuff lurking around. You’re right about friction but it’s easy for me to turn stuff like this into a game.
You’ll be moderated by someone subject to Chinese and Russian internet laws then, so if your goal is to avoid being censored, that’s not really any better. If you absolutely want to avoid censorship, your best bet would probably be to find an instance managed by some anonymous person hosting it on a VPS paid via Monero or something.
I don’t mean blanket free speech. I’m fine with people being censored for being complete assholes, for instance. What we have seen is censoring of people with the politics of Ms. Rachel lol