I know you all are dealing with DDoS and how that goes. I run DDoS mitigation for some juicy targets and do a lot of on-call response to handle those issues, so believe me when I say I know what you are dealing with.
However, that being said, it appears you are blocking tor exit nodes with a 403, likely at your web termination point (nginx, apache, whatever), and this kind of sucks.
I get that tor can bring some attacks, and I fully support a modulated response to those attacks, preferably one with a reasonable time decay, but please don’t just block all of tor
Alternatively, be one of the cool kids, and setup an onion service for lemmy.world!
An onion service would be interesting.
On mobile, so have to be short: I don’t want to leak my IP to every random site that hosts am image and shows up in my feed. I use tor for everything, and turning it off to browse lemmy.world is pointless.
Tor is useful for more than just getting around your work firewall.
Look into tor browser, tracking cookies is only the beginning.
Sorry, I cannot possibly match your asymmetric post length in my replies. I’ll simply leave it at: I want to use Tor, for a lot of different reasons, not all of them are you going to eventually uncover with your argumentation, because I don’t plan on talking about them, not because they are illegal. If you don’t want to use it, then fine, its not for you. I was Tor today to get past some train internet, which is heavily filtered. Its very useful, but annoyingly I could not get to lemmy.world because tor was blocked. That ruined my enjoyment of my trip :)
I do not agree with you that using tor actually compromises you, but if you do, then go ahead and keep believing that. Seemed to work fairly well for Snowden, and quite a lot of others who depend on it daily.
Defend yourself against tracking and surveillance. Circumvent censorship…
Governments use the internet for social control, through both surveillance and censorship. Many countries, such as China, Iran, and even the United States practice active surveillance of the social relationships of everyone. They then sell that data to companies, and then that data gets sold to the US government to work around 4th amendment protections (https://www.wired.com/story/odni-commercially-available-information-report)
Internet service providers happily cooperate with government repression, they practice intrusive monitoring of your traffic through deep packet inspection, they track your DNS usage, and they get people thrown in jail, expelled from school, or banned from the internet, sometimes just for ‘copyright infringement’.
Corporations have discovered how to make money from the internet: surveillance. By tracking your online habits, advertising companies build detailed profiles of your individual behavior in order to better sell you junk, Every single major internet ad company now uses behavioral tracking.
Tor isn’t the only way to get around these things, but it is one tool in the arsenal. The fediverse is a step in the right direction, and the fact that I can run my own lemmy is a huge plus, which is what I probably will be doing if lemmy.world continues to block Tor, but that is a selfish solution, and doesn’t help my friend’s in countries with restrictive internet.
I’m not interested in stopping doing stuff on lemmy because the government doesn’t approve of it. Political repression doesn’t mean I should also be profiled or have my speech restricted. I want to be able to help people find abortion support in my state, where it is illegal, and I want to do that without worrying about ending up in some kind of purge list because the GOP becomes full fascist sometime in the next couple years.
The fact that you are assuming someone wants to use Tor on Lemmy to do something illegal shows that you have fallen prey to the idea that Tor itself is illegal or meant for illegal activity, it’s the driving force behind many of the pushes to block Tor or even to attempt to extinguish it.
Fact of the matter is Tor is a tool, a tool that like any is not inherently evil or illegal. Tor’s purpose also isn’t to facilitate illegal activity, its purpose is to provide privacy and anonymity to people who want it. It sounds to me like you have been listening to a lot of those “scary” deep web videos or assuming people use Tor for those reasons and not for legitimate privacy and security reasons, (like for example did you know that Lemmy doesn’t proxy images?). This is one thing I really hate about those types of content, they portray the idea of privacy and security as if it’s evil or nefarious, or that the idea of hosting your own hidden service is creepy or wrong, it’s really gross actually, all for clicks and views, but they push it as if it’s real, it’s harmful to services like Lemmy which are currently outside of the mainstream and probably are associated with Dark web contend just by virtue of not being Big tech products, for a while I’d heard similar stories about linux too (people talked about how linux is for criminals, glad that one didn’t catch on).
TL;DR you shouldn’t be assuming that people want to use Tor (a privacy and security tool) for nefarious or evil purposes due to it’s reputation with nontechnical people, especially when those people are known for spreading misleading or even wrong information about the subject itself.
As an alternative, you can run your own instance of Lemmy and funnel all the non activitypub traffic via the clearweb and all your browsing via tor.
I doubt admins will unblock tor because the amount of shit that gets yeeted out vastly outweighs the few users who legitimately use it. I worked for an ISP for almost a decade and use tor for data validation but the amount of other crap coming from exit nodes is unbelievable.
If you could reduce your arguments to smaller, digestible chunks that can be engaged with, then I would. Your format for engaging, with huge long argumentation, is just too exasperating to bother to attempt to reply. It is not the content, or arguments, I’d happily discuss those with you in person or by email like this, but this isn’t email, or usenet, and there is no way way to reply in line, quoting what you said, so I can reply to specific points. Instead, you write a kind of essay of points that stops any meaningful reply. I tried to engage that way, and I’m frustrated that I can’t actually, and properly, reply to you, especially the points that are wrong, or specious argumentation, but this message alone took me so long to write, and I’m just talking about how I am only really writing this point and not engaging with your arguments, that I’m not going to continue in this venue, in this way.
If you would like to exercise your arguments, maybe bring them to the Tor forum, where it is designed for this kind of structured discussion, or the mailing list.
Typical infosec fallacy: letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
