Basically the title. I use MullVad, and recently discovered that Lemmy.world is not allowing me to submit new posts or commenting on others' posts if I have my VPN on.
For now I have excluded my Lemmy client of choice (Voyager) from my VPN, so things are back to normal.
As a reason behind this, I read elsewhere that this blocking of VPN is intentional as certain people posted CSAM while behind VPN. This is pretty despicable, so I totally support shutting those people out.
However, on that same note, I think it is fair to assume that every post and comment on Lemmy is stored along with the IP address of the User. Is that right?
Edit : Some readers are confirming that they can write posts and comments in Lemmy.world while on a VPN - and I wholeheartedly thank them. I only posted what I personally (and some other lemmings as well) experienced. I still do not know if this is a widespread problem or only happening to a few.
Admins are doing both. (Am an admin of another instance, not lemmy.world).
Fact is is that the people who ask for privacy behind the VPN are very flippant when it comes to actual attacks. Everyone is pretty quick to forget the CSAM and spam attacks that were happening only a couple of weeks ago.
I used to think "Yeah go privacy, go anonymous", but the fact is that bad actors ruined that for everyone else, so yeah, had to clamp down. For anyone who disagrees, I welcome them to host their own instance where they can allow anyone and anything. They can take up the fight with their respective governments, I'm going to focus on the people who are just here to hang out and chill.
Hmmm, should we universalize that argument? Say, nazis ruined free speech, no more free speech? Criminals ruined the 5th amendment and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, so now cops can beat confessions out of you?
You can spin up a VPN on a server using docker really easy. That IP won't be banned and it won't be (directly) yours. If you create a snapshot of the server when it's functional, deleteing and reinstantiating gets you a new IP for not too much extra work.
It's not truly anonymous, correct. But OP has made an exception with Lemmy and is using his own IP now. So while it wouldn't make it impossible to track down, but it would make it more difficult for non-government agencies to discover the true owner. Personally in the situation where I'm not totally anonymous, I don't completely give up and hand over my actual IP, I take as many steps as I can because it either makes it more difficult, or reduces the number of individuals and companies (not governments) that are willing to track down that information.
Is it only some Mullvad servers that are flagged/blocked? I’ve used quite a few different servers (across North America and the EU) through Mullvad VPN and lemmy.world hasn’t blocked me afaik.
I'm pretty tired of everyone being punished because of the actions of a few bad people. There are tons of legitimate reasons to use a VPN and blocking VPN users is some corporate bullshit strategy, not something I'd expect from the fediverse.