cross-posted from: https://ttrpg.network/post/27970929
Recently the server staff received an e-mail telling them to moderate the Discord server and the server chat on what they deem to be “appropriate.”
Below is a message from owner of the server.
Free Speech Under Attack
Dear friends, I don’t often post announcements of this sort, but I feel it’s very important for you all to know what’s currently going on.
From the very start, over 15 years ago, one of the key founding principles of MinecraftOnline has been free speech. What started out as an uncontroversal, common sense policy, has proved to be a cornerstone of this increasingly unique community. As time has passed and Western society has wavered back and forth in its political leanings, free speech has repeatedly come under attack for political reasons. It has now become common to see arrests for posts on social media in countries such as Britain and Germany, in the name of political control, which have overtaken the numbers even of traditionally totalitarian countries such as China and Russia - a truly dystopian nightmare for freedom of expression and personal liberty.
Throughout this decade and a half of change, MinecraftOnline has held steadfast to its libertarian principles, and remained an oasis of freedom and openness in an increasingly closed and controlled internet. That is, until now.
Microsoft, through their subsidiary Mojang, have issued an ultimatum to MinecraftOnline. We have been told to do away with our free speech policy (which long pre-dates Microsoft’s acquisition of Mojang), within 7 days, or face a a permanent block. If that happens, nobody will be able to play on MinecraftOnline again, and the 15-year history of this beloved server will come to a sudden and bitter end. The full email we have received today, signed facelessly only as “Mojang Enforcement”, is included below.
The email makes extremely vague claims about “harmful interactions” and “harmful comments”, and we are asking Microsoft to clarify what specific interactions and comments they consider harmful. In the meantime, please spread the word, share this info on social media. Defend free speech.
-SlowRiot
I’m confused - how can Microsoft enforce this? Aren’t individually hosted Minecraft servers outside of Microsoft’s direct control?
If this server is hosted on azure or something they would have control over, then yeah, I suppose they have to comply with Microsoft’s rules.
Several actions on a server ping Microsoft’s servers for authentication, I couldn’t login to my self hosted server because of the azure outages yesterday
Interesting, I gotta look into that more.
I’d prefer if my server for my friends didn’t phone home
That’s called offline mode. It’s a setting you can choose in the server configuration. The drawback is that there is no official account validation (because of course there can’t be, since it’s not reaching out to the authentication servers), meaning you have to basically “bring your own security”, installing a client whitelist or some other authentication method otherwise it’s open season to trolls, and that’s why it’s not as common as you might imagine it would be.
There are custom ways of validating account
There’s an “online mode” setting you can set to false, but you also won’t have skins, and if your server was online, your inventory will be reset, and so will your spawn point
“you also won’t have skins” is fucking wild if true given those are just tiny, local assets.
They’re not tiny local assets, they’re tiny assets tied to your account and downloaded on demand from official servers, including if you don’t even join a server and just have your player head/skull spawned in in some way.
It would be nice to be able to officially have skins in offline mode, but that’s not how the game is meant to be run, and a minor enough thing I don’t really see it as an issue.
They are tied to your
MojangMicrosoft account, though.Yup
You’re technically bound by the Minecraft/Microsoft EULA. As others have noted, the game phones home for authentication, so Microsoft can control that.
That said, if they’re hosting the Java edition it is absolutely trivial to defeat the authentication. This is technically a license violation, but if I were these guys I would just become a pirate server and build Microsoft a nice 128 block tall obsidian and sea lantern middle finger.
How is it a liscence violation if its already coded in and you just have to change from block to allow?
Every Minecraft server uses Mojang’s authentication servers, so every login attempt has to go through Mojang. That’s how they can enforce these things.
I’d imagine disabling authentication prevents this - but also makes a whitelist probably impossible
you can still use the whitelist, technically, but I’m pretty sure anyone could just spoof an account id in that case.
so if your server is on the open web, that’s a bad idea.
if you’re running on a private network via VPN or something similar it doesn’t matter, since authentication is handled by joining the network instead of the server.
we just use zero tier for our servers; nice and hassle-free, private connection, no mojang servers necessary! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(technically the server doesn’t even need an internet connection, just the VPN interface)
Most offline servers just have a password system
oh right! forgot that’s a feature! good point!
I have no idea how MC is handling it. Some people are talking about phoning home. That might be the only method. However, it could also be baked into the client to not connect to certain banned IPs. It wouldn’t be hard to remove this, but it would prevent any unmodified clients from connecting to them.
it’s probably 2 ways:
first: every public server (and really every server) needs to include an acknowledgement of the EULA that comes with the server files, or the server won’t even start. so this is something that the server host has already agreed to. if they are in violation of the EULA, then they can probably be forced to comply with a cease and desist or similar legal action by a court order.
second: if the server is discoverable in-game via mojang hosted services, i.e.: if you can just search “Minecraft online” on the multiplayer menu in-game and find the server, then they can kick them off that service. pretty sure that’s the IP ban they are talking about, but could be something else too (don’t know enough about how big Minecraft instances are managed, i just play with friends on self-hosted servers where all of this is irrelevant, since they are private anyways)
apart from that i guess general lawsuit shenanigans against the hoster, which could mean either the Minecraft online team, or, if they are using a hosting service to run the servers, the hosting service itself.
so there’s quite a few ways, all except the second would effectively kill the server.
all that said… I’m very suspicious about the entire exchange:
the words “libertarian” and “free speech” are almost always code for bigotry.
and the mojang email is super weird too; why is there zero concrete examples of what the problematic content actually is? it’s absurdly vague and impossible to comply with.
which would also make sense if the first assumption is true, that it’s a server full of bigotry, then mojang might feel that there is no need for examples, since they assume the hoster knows exactly what they’re talking about…
anyways…very, VERY weird situation.
one of the two is definitely dishonest, but i can’t say for sure which one… although I’m leaning towards the server hosters for now…seems suspicious…
Minecraft doesn’t have a server browser, you have to input the hostname directly.
The way it works is Mojang publishes a text file of all the banned hostnames and the client downloads this when it starts up. If the server it tries to connect to matches any entries in the blacklist, the connection attempt fails with a cryptic network error.
It’s very shady.
shady and it sounds extremely easy to circumvent: just replace the file with an empty/blank one…
do forge servers also download the blacklist? cause it can’t remember ever seeing one, and I’ve set up a lot of servers…though i never went looking for the list either…
re: server list; you can search for servers though, right? cause i seem to remember that mojang used to provide a service to have servers searchable without the IP address, kinda like a DNS service in-game.
am i misremembering?
I could be misremembering, because i haven’t played anything other than heavily modded MC for like 10 years… and always on self hosted servers, where you always need the IP anyways…sooo… that’s one part of Minecraft I’ve never really interacted with…
Unless it was added in the past couple of years, Minecraft Java Edition does not have a built-in server browser. You can save servers to your list manually, but there’s no central list of them.
Yes, you could of course modify your client to connect to the server anyways, but that requirement would prevent all from the most dedicated players from joining a server and essentially kill the server’s player base.
no, hasn’t been added; I’m just misremembering!
like i said: exclusively played on private servers…guess i just assumed there’s an easier way to join, but apparently not!
Great point about the eula=true flag.
Yeah the whole thing seems odd to me. It’s gotta be discovery on the in game browser they are referring to.
But why mention discord? How does Microsoft even know what discord channel is related to what server?
good question!
i think it might have to do with Intellectual Property law:
since the discord server, presumably, uses the name “MinecraftOnline”, that means they are using Mojang’s trademarked name.
which means Mojang can probably take legal action, if they feel like the conduct surrounding either the discord or the Minecraft server is damaging their reputation.
and i think that’s not even necessary, since i doubt Minecraft Online has an agreement in place to even use the name “Minecraft”, so I’m pretty sure they can be nuked via cease and desist at basically any point by Mojang for any reason…
something else I’ve realized since the previous comment:
i read in a different comment that apparently Minecraft servers authenticate against Mojang’s server at login/join to a server…that seemed really weird to me, since i know for a fact all of my servers run just fine without any internet at all!
…then i remembered that i exclusively play heavily modded (neo-)forge packs, and forge comes with it’s own server binaries, so i guess that’s why I don’t have to worry about authentication much!
(the user profile/MS account is cached in the launcher, so i do have an official account, it just doesn’t need to authenticate at every login and certainly not when joining a server. don’t know if that ever runs into a timeout though…maybe it does need a connection to mojangs servers every X days or something? dunno…)
The biggest issue here is the server using the trademark “Minecraft”. This feels like a threat to take actions for using that name if they don’t align with what Microsoft wants. Which is reasonable, the server calls itself “MinecraftOnline”. Microsoft does have a reasonable right to put a stop to that usage if it reflects badly on their branding.
Once the server stops using their branding, then Microsoft loses a lot of it’s teeth, especially outside of the game itself (like on discord). Even in the game, if it is java edition and requires a direct IP connection Microsoft has very little ground to stand on, but they could kick them off Realms, if they are present.
That’s one thing I miss about old games. Anyone could run a game server, and you could always directly connect to them even if they weren’t listed on the server list, or gamespy was down.
Did Microsoft mention their branding though? I could understand if they just said “please stop using our branding” but it seems different than that
Your right, that’s not mentioned here, but that is pretty much their only legal tool to enforce this request. If I were the server in question, I’d drop the Minecraft branding off my server name real fast.
So what I gathered:
Microsoft told them they were a partner server (they aren’t)
Microsoft said they disobeyed community guidelines (Which were for users only. They were also written after the server not only released, but it’s running 1.12, which was released before these “guidelines”)
The server has been using the term “Minecraftonline” before Minecraft was even trademarked
Someone asked someone on Microsoft’s moderation team and they cited a screenshot of a message from a banned player talking about masturbating in the shower.
Source: https://youtu.be/7R7toMRMz3s
It sounds like this might be similar to delisting - MinecraftOnline won’t be allowed to authenticate users against the server,
and presumably won’t be discoverable through whatever server discovery Minecraft uses. I assume Microsoft controls those.They don’t have server searches, it sounds like it’s all about authentication - without this, they need to set up their own whitelists, and custom skins won’t transfer.I’m a little shocked “Thank you for your attention to this matter” is used seriously…