Nepal bans social media(Facebook, X, Reddit, Mastodon, Discord, Signal, YouTube and more) for failing to register with the government; Only 7 to be open(Viber, TikTok, Telegram and more)
(en.setopati.com)
from Pro@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world on 04 Sep 17:50
https://programming.dev/post/36877328
from Pro@programming.dev to technology@lemmy.world on 04 Sep 17:50
https://programming.dev/post/36877328
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36863320
Comments
- Reddit.
Viber, WeTalk, TikTok, Nimbuzz, and Poppo Live are already registered.
Similarly, Telegram and Global Diary are in the process of registration.
Social media platforms to be blocked:
- Facebook Messenger
- YouTube
- X (formerly Twitter)
- Snapchat
- Discord
- Signal
- Threads
- Quora
- Tumblr
- Clubhouse
- Mastodon
- Rumble
- MeWe
- VK
- Line
- IMO
- Zalo
- Soul
- Hamro Patro
Other Sources
- Associated Press; - The Hindu.
threaded - newest
Signal:
Settings -> Privacy -> Advanced -> Censorship Circumvention
Signal is a social media platform?
It’s in the “to be blocked” list posted.
I guess that centralized server thing is working out real well then. /s
Mastodon is also blocked, I don’t think they cared if services are centralized.
Do you think they will be blocking every single Mastodon server in existence?
If it’s federated it’s easy to block. If it’s not it’s too small to care about really.
And if you just remove the ability for federation to function in your country you have fundamentally broken the system making it basically unusable for your people.
The federvise is extremely weak to censorship for your avg joe because it’s strongest point the federation system is also it’s biggest Achilles heel.
With out federation it’s just a series of less useful forums and blogs.
The system is designed to prevent corporate ownership from destroying it. But the idea that you can prevent a government and those in control of the infrastructure from blocking it? Is laughable.
You can in small ways wrong around it but you don’t need 100% censorship to win the game of cat and mouse. Even 50% of the biggest instances wins you the game.
signal has stories now, so I’d say yes
Bah, more reason to avoid Signal. For private communications I want an antisocial network, not the opposite.
eh, just dont use it. beats a lot of other alternatives at the moment
I think it’s a silly feature for a messaging app, but it has no impact on me if I ignore the feature.
It does say something about the mindset of the vendor, which is a legit reason to decide not to use an app. From what I can tell, Teslas are pretty good cars despite some issues here and there. But Elon’s antics are enough to make me decide not to buy one.
Use whatever software you want, more power to you, but I’m not totally convinced that “chaired by a fascist transphobic multibillionaire oligarch who actively subverts democracy at every opportunity” and “introduced a feature I don’t want to use into my free secure messaging app” are even close to equivocal?
I’m bothered mostly by the default Signal app’s inability to use a self-hosted server instead of signal.com’s own server. I’ve been skeptical towards Signal because of that. The social media feature is something I hadn’t heard of til just now. It reinforces my skepticism but it’s just another issue. Both tell me that Signal is out to somehow monetize (and maybe spy on) other people’s private relationships in a captive userbase, sort of like, you know, Marc Zuckerberg. I’d prefer to avoid dealing with people like that, especially where privacy apps are concerned.
I’d be more interested in Signal if I could use my own server without having to get people to install modified clients.
I don’t like the centralized nature of it either, but until someone makes a decentralized option that’s polished and reliable enough that nobody will be mad at me after I talk them into using it, Signal will be my go-to for messaging.
Ideologically, I’d like it to be Matrix. I use Matrix on occasion, at least when Element web isn’t taking up 10% of my laptop’s RAM, ElementX isn’t crashing on load, and whatever native desktop client I tried last is actually performing key exchange so I can read my private messages. I would not try to talk someone into trying Matrix right now unless they were ideologically motivated or interested in the technology.
In fact that option already exists, it’s Signal itself, except that they deliberately made it harder to use that way. The client and server code are (from what I understand) both downloadable. So you can run your own server, modify the client to connect to your server instead of to Signal’s, compile the new client, and get your friends to use your new .apk instead of using the one from the Play store. Of course Signal could perfectly well have just made the server address a user configuration field in the first place, like Nextcloud does.
So why didn’t they? The existence of the social media feature tells something about their intentions. The fact that you can decide not to use that feature is irrelevant to what it tells. The idea is a many-to-many system with N users has N^2^ possible connections, which increases the site engagement and stickiness. That is, they are in the eyeball monetization business or are gearing up to enter it. So that’s at best a warning sign.
I have to say I don’t use Signal so I don’t understand what is supposed to be great about it. I have a self-hosted Nextcloud (including Chat) and it was a hassle to install, but hasn’t needed much attention since then. You can use either the Nextcloud app from F-droid or you can use an ordinary browser to chat over it, no app needed. That also means you can use a normal desktop computer instead of a phone. It does voice and video too, though those aren’t so great.
Jitsi Meet is supposed to also be ok for self-hosting though I haven’t tried doing that. I did play with their web client over their public instance (meet.jit.si) and that was quite nice.
GNU Jami unfortunately goes too far and tries to be serverless, and hits a bunch of reliability snags because of that. I tried to use it but just had too little success. I don’t know if it’s fixable without abandoning the underlying architecture. And, it needs an app. I think it’s preferable to support browser clients even if a mobiie app is also available.
I haven’t tried Matrix. I’m enough of a luddite to still use IRC but it has shortcomings for how people use chat these days. I don’t know the web client picture for IRC or Matrix. I can say that Nextcloud Chat isn’t that much different from Slack, from a non-technical user’s perspective, if the user isn’t trying to run a server. You just get a server URL and click on it in a browser. No app, unlike Signal as far as I know, so if anything it’s simpler.
Encouraging the use of alternate servers on which only a handful of people can communicate instead of everyone who uses Signal is probably a net loss. Having to connect to multiple servers or switch servers to communicate with everyone a user wants to talk to sounds like a pretty bad experience. That would be different if it was federated. Co-founder Moxie Marlinspike has argued that federation would make it harder to achieve Signal’s goals of bringing private communication to as many people as possible. I want him to be wrong about that, but my experiences with Matrix suggest he might not be.
I don’t think so, in large part because they’re structured as a nonprofit and have enough funding to last a while. I would think that about a venture-backed startup under similar circumstances.
It’s just another messaging app in terms of UX. The value comes from:
Nextcloud Talk doesn’t have end to end encryption. It’s experimental on Jitsi. It’s hard to justify not having that for a private messaging service in 2025.
This is not a good way to make my phone beep promptly when someone sends me an important message or ring when someone initiates a voice/video call. Browser notifications can be significantly delayed, especially on mobile devices. It’s fine for the sort of public group conversations people have on Matrix and IRC, but a dealbreaker for most people in a primary one-to-one telecommunications system.
Is there even a desktop client for Signal? The mobile app isn’t on F-droid so I can’t easily install it (I don’t use the Play store). Maybe i can get the APK from somewhere.
The other points are reasonably valid though the lack of end to end encryption is somewhat mitigated by self hosting.
I don’t understand why browser notifications are slower than other types of app notifications, but I’m not an Android wizard so maye there’s a reason. Does Signal require Google Play Services to get Firebase messages? I have that turned off too, so that’s another annoyance / privacy invasion that I’d have to enable.
I don’t particularly want Signal to be federated any more than I want all the world’s websites to be federated. I want a zillion separate self-hosted non-federated servers, not like the tragic 1-way internet that we mostly have now. So your contacts file has something like email addresses in it, that tell the client what server to connect to for a given person.
Regardless of Signal’s financial intentions there’s no question that money and eyeballs hypnotize people and warps their minds. This happened to Wikipedia decades ago. They operate just like an internet startup where they obsess over user activity. They abandoned their vision of giving everyone in the world a free encyclopedia (i.e. every computer in the world has Wikipedia on its hard drive for completely private access) and instead focus on running a giant web site that constantly tracks people, gets censored, etc. They are swimming in money and are always asking for more anyway. I see Signal trying to reach a similar future.
Yes. There’s also an experimental third-party client for desktop Linux called Flare. I’ve used Flare on some devices that the official client doesn’t support and found it adequate. With some more maturity, I’ll probably prefer it to the official client. Signal officially discourages third-party clients because it cannot guarantee their security but does not attempt to block them except in cases where specific clients are known to be compromised.
Account creation on the mobile app is recommended before using these as it relies on SMS verification. I don’t like that, but it probably cuts down on spam; I’ve received exactly one spam on Signal in over 10 years of use.
Signal encourages installing from Google Play and uses Firebase messages by default, but does work without them. Given your set of preferences, however, you would probably prefer the third-party client Molly, which is on F-Droid and supports UnifiedPush.
That sounds like it ends up with properties similar to federation, but the client has to do all the work. The client would also need some means of identifying itself to all those random servers where there’s a cost to creating new identities, or people would need to do key exchange when they exchange contact information. Without that, this proposed system would be overrun by spam as soon as it got popular.
Server-side federation solves a lot of problems. Why wouldn’t you want that?
You can do that. The download with images is over 100gb compressed, and it expands to several terabytes. It’s not hard to imagine why most people don’t want to use it that way.
I’m not sure adding a questionable social feature to a messaging app is reasonably comparable to the very long list of insane and/or evil shit Musk has done.
Like any messaging system, Signal’s utility is proportional to its userbase. If stories get more people to use it without making it worse for people who don’t care, then they’re a good idea even if I think everything else about the concept is bad.
A bar (place where you drink) is another type of a messaging system. You can meet people in them and have conversations there. That doesn’t mean it’s best to crowd everyone into one giant bar claiming that increases utility, compared with letting people freely open their own bars. Especially if the avowed purpose of the bar is enabling private conversations (giving you and your friend Bob a private place to talk, as opposed to creating a meeting place for strangers).
I can understand visiting a giant bar if I want to mingle with randos in public. If I want to talk privately with my friend, I want a small, private bar, preferably one whose existence is not known to anyone outside of my friend group. If the giant bar operator is going out of his way to prevent me from doing that, I have to say he is up to something not so good.
Sorry about the strained analogy but at least it didn’t mention cars. Well, until just now.
You can turn the feature off entirely, or just not talk to people who post them? It’s not something like tiktok where you get pushed a bunch of random videos, it’s stuff that people you know are sending you.
The analogy between a private messaging service and a bar is not just strained; it’s nonsensical.
It might work for a chat system that’s mainly public and discoverable like Matrix, IRC, or Discord. A community having too many people, or any people who don’t follow certain norms can make it unpleasant. As long as it keeps out spammers, Signal having people I don’t want to talk to on it won’t affect me at all; I just won’t give those people my phone number or username.
I just use that for sharing memes with whoever sees it.
It’s completely removable with one setting. No nags or anti-patterns or design holes.
If it stops a few from sticking with whatsapp because signal lacks that “feature”, I’d say it’s worth it.
You can remove ot from your view and then you forget it is even a thing
Depends on how you want to look at it. They have “stories” which could most certainly be considered that.
Nepal went full iron curtain. Hope the EU, US, and UK don’t get any ideas…
I wish them luck banning Mastodon, Lemmy, and Nostr… Oh wait, they cant
I am curious how they are planning to ban Mastodon. I am assuming they are going to block say the top 25 instances?
Blocking the domains connected to it is one way I can think of.
Because that works so well with the pirate bay. And with Mastodon or Lemmy, just having access to any one of the instances would enough.
And as we all know, that would not ban it entirely. They’d have to block every instance, every new instance that comes online, the main web page, the code repository, etc., to even have a hope of banning it.
Mastodon’s main code repo is on GitHub, a government could just pressure MS to take down that repo, although that isn’t going to account for anyone self-hosting an instance and also hosting their own git repos outside of any of the major hosts.
In order to take down self-hosted instances, they’d have to raid people’s homes and take out their physical servers assuming they have physical servers in their place.
I’m betting GitHub is not the only place that the code repo is mirrored. Sure, it might be there, but something tells me it’s on a bunch of people’s computers as well, for people who work on it, or have just forked the repository. And there’s probably even copies of it on other mirrors, such as Code Bird, etc. in private repositories.
I don’t know when Microsoft would cave, but Nepal asking them to remove it probably isn’t going to that level. Maybe they geoblock but I can’t see them removing it for a everyone.
Nope, in that particular case they just have to hand over a strongly worded letter (and a small bribe) to the ISP.
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There are sites dedicated to listing all federated lemmy instances. Knowing the FOSS nerds, surely there’s even an API already.
Some might slip, but very few large ones. That’s if the government cares about lemmy
The problem is that if you can access one, you can access all of them. It doesn’t even matter how you access the one. Even if you access it over tor, as long as you can get to one instance, you’re in the Federation.
The fact it’s interconnected makes it easy to just worm your way though banning everything.
Doesn’t matter if it’s all independently hosted. The greatest strength of the frediverse is the fact it’s federated.
That also it’s biggest fuck up point. These arent wholely independent forums.
And if the frediverse has to fully defederate everything to prevent itself from being scrubbed away. It defeats the entire fucking point.
Cause at that point just fucking go back to forums.
I think they best solution here is just easy to deploy proxies, it prevents banning by DNS or IP. More than that and they might as well just put the great firewall.
Hate to say it but it honestly doesn’t sound crazy hard to just block any instance that pops up. Yes it’s whack a mole but if it’s an automated script, it can just crawl through a backdoor instance and ban any domain it sees.
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Yeah that’s a solved problem. Iran, Russia, China and other countries have gone through this “stages of denial” process years ago. It starts with “haha they are incompetent and can’t block everything” and 10 years later half the Internet is blocked and you have prison sentencing for accessing “illegal” information (for the flgood of the people of course). Anyone who claims that internet censorship is not possible is a naive person fortunate enough to live in a place where it’s not a thing.
“IT people/programmers are furry gay liberals” is a myth. There are plenty of bootlickers among them, like in any large enough group of people that’s not defined by a specific ideology/political affiliation.
Does a recursive DNS not get around all of this though? I’ve got to be missing something
They will block all instances except the ones registered. They just want a point of contact for when there is illegal activity. Yes it becomes a problem if they make criticizing the government legal but it is a democracy for now.
As someone who is friends with many furry gay liberal IT dudes and dudettes.
I can’t name a single one that wouldn’t bend the knee the moment their job is threatened and their option is getting fired and risking their entire career or just being a good cog in the machine.
The people who bend the knee the fastest tend to be the ones most at risk of being abused by the powers that be should they not comply. It’s the very fundamental reason that revolutions tend to be so explosive. There’s a LONG build up of people not pushing against authority because of fear and security.
So till the breaking point where the gay furry liberals have no options and it’s death or do what their bosses tell them. You can full well expect them to work right along with the bootlickers. They just are going to bitch about it more in the break room then the bootlickers.
Well, if they start by blocking the clients, then block any webpage or server sending / receiving ActivityPub packets at the ISP level, they could possibly cut it off. Heck, just spin up a new Mastodon or Lemmy server, send out a ping, and have every Nepalese ISP & mobile provider block all domains and IPs that respond.
They’re still tor.
Its totaly easy:
No, you will not get the hobby revolutionary this way who really wants to “fight the man”, but you surely will scare away the nepalese version of the average joe and with this effectively killing the networks there for main stream adoption.
Are there any instance administrators in Nepal to jail?
Well… we will see
Not familiar with the other examples, but Lemmy doesn’t need an app. Can get to it via browser. Maybe the others need one?
Websites you can block via DNS - yes, i know that this can also be fairly easy circumvented - but the folks who know this are NOT the target audience for state action like that.
Oh, yeah I know that sites can be blocked easily enough. My comment was more about whether specific apps are needed. For example, I rarely put apps for specific websites on my phone and instead just use the browser. Cuts way down on ads and other bullshit.
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I'm not sure what the big deal is here. They're dealing with a known rise in crime and fraud. this isn't just a bogeyman "save the children" thing, it's that they want to have access to the platform to keep things safe for their people and everyone else.
I think it's more than reasonable to have a specific point of contact if there's any issues related to a criminal investigation. And the lack of response from the Big Two is evidence that they don't care.
… Long farting noise
Assocks. They don’t need (backend-level) access to the platform in order to fight that. They just have to do good, boots-on-the-ground detective work. In other words, earn their salaries. We don’t precime-inalize silverware companies because people may use kitchen knives to kill each other.
No, but if one brand of knife is used in the majority of a category of crimes, it's fair that the government should have a clear point of contact with the manufacturer to help identify why it's happening and how it can be prevented.
Realize this: The Nepalese government is being treated the same way as a "normal" person - they're having trouble prosecuting these crimes because they're not being given any access to hidden or deleted posts. They're having to go though the useless fake support chats and the like. What they're demanding, mostly, is that they have a known human being who will cooperate with the government and to whom they have a clear and unambiguous connection. Frankly speaking, I think that ought to be a bare-minimum for any company anywhere. I don't support corporate sovereignty or corporate personhood. If you have a company operating in a nation, that nation should always have a clear point of contact for law enforcement & taxation purposes, as well as more general communication when needed.
Yeah but all that crap you mention is for corporations, for agencies that extract value from a country thus the country wants to see some compensation for it. To my knowledge, I don’t need no stinkin’ legal office representation in a country if all I want is to exchange messages with someone there. That’s what eg.: snail mail services are for. Otherwise it would literally kill the economical feasibility of any such kind of service (yeah, I know, that’s the point).
Cooperate, or “cooperate”? Important distinction, in particular for small platforms.
See, half the entire point of the Fediverse is that it’s not a company - heck, it’s not even many companies! This is all about people using “snail mail BUT ON THE INTERNET” to speak to each other.
You as a person don't need direct representation, usually (though having a lawyer ready us always a benefit). The only way to stop the social media companies from extracting value and facilitating harmful criminal behavior is to stop their actions completely. Yes, that affects people. Yes, that means people won't be able to use an online service. But if all social media went away tomorrow, the only one I'd actually miss would be YouTube.
Fediverse instances have a different structure, and what should happen is that the owner of each instance that wants to operate in Nepal should register with the government, and only federate with those who are also registered. Otherwise, you've lost out on a country that barely us a blip on the Internet radar, with the exception of rich, entitled, jerks ruining Everest and adding to the colossal body count.
No matter what, it's not worth dying for. Protesting in favor of big companies is dumb from the start. Protesting in favor of niche platforms is dumb. Don't risk your life for anything but life-and-death situations.
None of the platforms allowed employs E2E encryption, does it?
Telegram allowed. It does not e2e encrypt by default. How will they make sure that option isn’t chosen by Nepalese?
All Nepal is asking for is registration so that there is a point of contact if there are any complaints. Telegram contacted Nepal after being banned.
Others didn’t respond and deliberately have no contact details online.
I tried to contact Reddit in Sydney about my ban but could only make them down to a multi-client large office building in Barangaroo.
This isn’t necessarily a bad move on Nepal’s part.
Wao, Nepal is another part of the UK. Learning something new every day.
Bye Nepal, see you again after you line up all you tie-wearers against the wall
They only implement DNS blocking so you have to change your DNS and everything will work again — this is also the case with their ban on porn sites. It’s just an inconvenience to the citizens, all because they aren’t competent enough to manage “criminal activites”.
OK so three things:
A number of these sites try hard to Filter out VPN users.
Modern laws rarely if ever have anything to do with what they claim to be changing. Just figure out where the graft is flowing and that’s your answer. There’s no graft to be had with mastodon because nobody is making any money there so at first it’s simply ignored unless it annoys someone in Nepal’s government. If an instance suddenly started getting popular and making money in Nepal then it gets on their radar and they have to start paying bribes to continue operating just like the big guys, and there will be no room at all for a ‘medium guy’ who makes a little profit but not enough to comply with the requirements of corruption.
It doesn’t need to make money, it just needs to be a “Problem”.