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.
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
41 points (95.6% liked)
Privacy
32947 readers
315 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
I just reconnect and hope for an unflagged IP lol
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.
I believe Lemmy.world blocks VPNs. You could try a different instance which doesn't have that policy
I comment on Lemmy.World all the time via a VPN though. Maybe they don't allow it for accounts on their instance?
You are commenting on a lemmy.world community, but your connecting to sh.itjust.works, who then talks to lemmy.world. Your VPN isn't connecting directly to lemmy.world
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...
Does .World think it’s their content?
It's hosted in their servers. Dunno about the content licenses, if any.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or better, run your own instance, rather than a VPN.
Yup, good point. One can run a private instance for “selfish” reasons.