this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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39
Please stop blocking VPNs for established accounts (lemmy.world)
submitted 7 months ago by Zak@lemmy.world to c/support@lemmy.world
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I often use a commercial VPN service, which I suspect is not rare among Lemmy users. Most of the time, I'm able to post to lemmy.world, but on occasion I am not. The default web UI provides zero feedback, just a spinning submit button forever, but if I look in the browser dev tools, I can see it's being blocked.

I understand that some limitations are necessary to prevent spam and other abuse, however this is a very blunt instrument. The fact that I have a 10 month old account with consistent activity should outweigh any IP address reputation issues.

Perhaps the VPN limitations could be narrowed in scope to cover only account creation and posts from young accounts.

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[โ€“] Zak@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

That's definitely a concern. I selected my provider (Mullvad) because I know someone who worked there, and I have fairly high confidence they don't do that.

[โ€“] Rooki@lemmy.world 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Instance admins chose to block vpns simply because of mullvad and then increased liability, because if there is comming a malicious actor through mulvad and they dont have any logs all liability goes to the instance admin, and then gets questions "Why didnt you just blocked vpns?" etc. etc.

[โ€“] Zak@lemmy.world 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I think this is a misunderstanding of the legal situation at least for the US and EU. Platform immunity and safe harbor provisions are pretty strong in those jurisdictions, and the fact that the trail goes cold with the IP address (because it's a non-logging VPN) does not shift liability back to the platform operator.

[โ€“] Rooki@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

But then still the questions comes up "Why didnt you blocked vpns? or TOR?" we will be not the main liability holder, but we will be accountable for those accidents.

[โ€“] Zak@lemmy.world 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

An investigator asking a question is not liability, and I don't believe any of the safe harbor or platform immunity laws in the EU or USA condition their protections on denying service to users from IP addresses belonging to providers that don't provide a certain level of assistance to law enforcement. I'm nearly certain you can't get in any kind of legal trouble for not blocking privacy-protecting services like Mullvad.

That's separate from the operational concern: you don't want people to post CSAM. I don't want people to post CSAM. Nearly everyone else doesn't want people to post CSAM, and most of us are willing to accept some level of inconvenience so that you can prevent or limit it. That said, once Lemmy offers more fine-grained tools, I hope lemmy.world will adopt a more fine-grained policy.

[โ€“] Rooki@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago

We still want to be on the safe side as we all arent lawyers ( and we dont have much money for it ).

And in the end we will see where mod tools go on lemmy.