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Lemmy has nothing in its code that blocks VPNs. Unfortunately a lot of instances use cloudflare and other man-in-the-middle services that do block VPNs.
Because so many bad actors use VPNs for ban evasion or span sources, blocking the VPN endpoints from posting or commenting is a low hanging fruit way of dealing with some spam. This is Lemmy.World stance.
There are many others instances that work over VPNs so in the spirit of decentralization you can use another instance to access lemmy.world content.
It also prevents normal people from using Lemmy at all...
lemmy.world is NOT "Lemmy"
Hell, during the great reddit migration, if I recall correctly, lemmy.world had to cap sign-ups.
It is a massive portion of Lemmy. And it doesn't just stop people from signing up, it stops people from participating in any way.
You yourself aren't even using a lemmy.world account. Your take on the matter is backwards and bizarre.
...please re-read the comment you just replied to.
Did you?
Does .World think it’s their content?
One of many reasons to change instances
Lemmy.dbzer0.com for the win
That's where I went when I left .world. :)
Why did you leave .world, if you don't mind my asking, and just out of curiosity?
Dbzer0 was a better fit for me. I like the way it's ran.. just all around a better experience for me.
Not OP but I left because of the proposed change in moderation policy to allow "free speech" that basically would negate the anti-hate-speech policy.
It might depend on the lemmy instance you are posting to (lemmy.ml) and/or where you have your account (lemmy.world), because I don’t think that this is built into the AP protocol.
I suspect at least one of these uses some kind of filtering mechanism that blocks VPN users, like cloudflare’s CDN.
btw, I think you may have mixed up the instances. The user is on .world and the post is on .ml
Other than that, you're probably correct
Oh yeah, hahaha.
Thanks, I’ll fix it.
Aye good to know some instances block VPNs , didn’t know that. As a user from China who has to use a VPN always that would be problematic. Guys I got lucky with my instance.
Shit really just works
I used to have the same issue with lemmy.world - it’s the instance
This is it! Instance blocks it.
.world is a fickle bitch in general. It would be good if more users and communities balanced out amongst other instances.
Get a free VPS from Oracle cloud in whatever region you want, run Wireguard on it. There, now you have a VPN that you control, and since it’s hosted by Oracle, and not a VPN company, there’s no way to “detect” it.
Like basically all cloud providers, Oracle publish their public-facing IP address ranges.
https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/General/Concepts/addressranges.htm
Many services block these because, as you are pointing out, standing up VPN tunnel routing on a cloud instance is sort of trivial. Cloud providers publish these ranges specifically so anyone can block them easily. If lemmy.world is not blocking Oracle Cloud already, it's only because they just haven't come around to it.
I assure you that's detectable. The VPN detector I know, classifies all cloud providers as VPN as a matter of course, because no normal user would be coming from a cloud network.
Or better, run your own instance, rather than a VPN.
Yup, good point. One can run a private instance for “selfish” reasons.
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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Privacy
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