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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • When people are blocked for using a VPN it’s usually because that IP was used in an attack at some point and added to a blacklist and since no one really owns it its never been contested, or its been used in multiple attacks and considered permanently added. Since a VPN provider’s entire purpose is to hide what you’re doing it’s difficult for a provider to keep its users from abusing that IP.

    So while it’s possible to get a list of IP’s that are owned by VPN providers and proactively block them it’s generally only intended to block IP’s known to be abusive.

    Lemmy instances are just blocking IP’s used in abuse, Reddit is actively trying to prevent robotic scrapers to keep their data more valuable to sell to AI companies so they are only interested in blocking VPN’s they suspect are trying to scrape data and not a logged in user who happens to be using a VPN because if they know the user and are using a VPN and start scraping they can just ban the user.

    Tl;Dr its about intent; Lemmy is preventing abuse vs. Reddit is protecting the value of its data for sales.


  • Microsoft certainly tries it’s best to keep you locked into their ecosystem by making it inconvenient but not impossible to leave though that’s not the real reason, it’s security. Businesses and especially governments are scared of nation state hackers contributing malicious code to open source products and falsely assume it’s safer to use closed source software because those incidents aren’t public. There’s so much great software out there I’d love to use and the first question I’m asked when I bring it up is can you prove China hasn’t contributed code?


  • Yes, I’m comparing the threat level based on the maximum potential akin to the likes of “those apps”. Permissions are straightforward and will protect users just like ad blockers, decentralized static frameworks (JavaScript/CSS/fonts), and clearing cookies. But on average users are not well informed and aren’t considering permissions, add-ons, or even which browser or app they use so I compare based on the potential threat level.