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Use a VPN. Even if the current environment of aggressive puritan censorship weren’t happening, everyone should use one.
Here are two of the best.
+1 for Mullvad.
Just mentioning that Mozilla VPN uses Mullvad, and with their Firefox extension you can exclude individual websites from VPN protection or set preferred server locations for specific sites. So you can stay on a UK server for UK banking sites but switch to a different country server for a social site.
Only works on Windows for now. But maybe useful given this situation.
Wow, today I learned, that's handy.
Will need an alternative if you need to port forward, but for general use you can't fault them
ProtonVPN has Port Forwarding, it works great.
Mullvad is the best.
https://www.torproject.org/download/
Probably a good idea for things other than Lemmy, too, the way that things are going.
thx!
What happened? Is it the instances fault or UK's?
UK is implementing law for age verification on nsfw content, that's the jist of it.
Some services are choosing to simply not serve the UK rather than deal with the faff and/or the privacy concerns. lemmy.zip where I am from is one of them.
Blame lies squarely with the UK gov & Online Safety Act. It's a shit law made to pander to the 'think of the children' types that are incapable of parenting, also coming with the bonus of grift and doxxing concerns by companies that move in to provide the service.
I don't blame any site operator that chooses to simply not play. VPN goes on, normal service resumes.
“It's a shit law made to pander to the *'think of the children'* types that are incapable of parenting”
This.
UK has always been a nanny state. Surprised it took them so long.
I lived there for 10 years from 2000, it seemed to come uo every year or two whil I was there - fuck them
Whenever someone says that there law is to protect:
- the children
- old people
- the vulnerable
- ..
You know that it's full of hidden shit.
It's also several hundred pages long. Fair few web forums are closing because of it if they are UK hosted too.
It would be interesting to get a legal opinion on what about it actually impacts lemmy instances tbh. Obviously one option is to go "lol fuck off" if the UK complain and you are not in the UK.
They can notify the hosting company that the server is violating UK law, the registrars, and payment services. This is the fear for sites not hosted in the UK. There are inter-country agreements to support civil actions.
Doesn't that sort of thing take quite a bit of time though? And they need to find out about it too.
That said I don't know if the free and open internet has much time left.
I highly doubt the US government would look fondly on a US-based service taking down a US-based social media site because Ofcom complained to them about them not adhering to local laws. Especially under this administration. It would be seen as foreign interference. And for that reason, I very much doubt Ofcom would ever do that. They'd just block the site violating OSA.
Quite a few have suggested the OSA is intended to further centralise the internet. Looking at the impact so far and they are not wrong...
What do you mean "centralise"? Into larger websites?
Big companies can follow the vast regulations while small ones are pushed out.
The UK enacted age verification, the instance said fuck that. So, more or less, the UK's fault.
UK, this is hitting basically all websites. Any site hosting adult content has to verify user ages for anyone in the UK, and instead of doing that many smaller sites are just geoblocking the UK. Easy to get around with a VPN, still absurd it’s happening.
There is a lot more to it than just age verification for porn too. I do wonder what this will look like after several months and if they will push it or if the law just gets ignored in the end.
Tunnelbear has a free 2GB a month one - not enough for a lot of use probably, but an easy to test if a paid VPN will do what you need.
If you want to be part of a bot net sure.
I've not had any issues with them. It's a pretty user friendly VPN app, and having a small allowance you can test it with before buying is pretty handy. Most other VPNs you have to pay up before you can test them AFAIK.
The point is not about the app not working, the point is that many free VPN apps rent out your own IP address, often malicious.
Look for "residential proxy providers" and somehow these providers can offer you millions of IP addresses.
Windscribe also has 2Gb free or 10Gb free per month if you provide and email and let them spam you.
Theoretically if you would host your own Lemmy/PieFed server then you would be able to access everything (as long as you host it outside of the UK I guess). And then you could keep being moderator on those communities with your new account on your own instance.
That only helps you out though, if the communities were UK specific ones and other people from the UK meet to participate then there is no other way than moving them to a UK friendly instance.
There are some moderation actions you can do from a different instance, I'm not sure which ones don't work or if they've all been fixed
You should create an account on a different instance and appoint yourself as moderator, at least for times when you don't want to get on VPN, like using an app on your phone
Done, thanks!!
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
136 points (100.0% liked)
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