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Use a VPN. Even if the current environment of aggressive puritan censorship weren’t happening, everyone should use one.
Here are two of the best.
+1 for Mullvad.
Will need an alternative if you need to port forward, but for general use you can't fault them
Just mentioning that Mozilla VPN uses Mullvad, and with their Firefox extension you can exclude individual websites from VPN protection or set preferred server locations for specific sites. So you can stay on a UK server for UK banking sites but switch to a different country server for a social site.
Only works on Windows for now. But maybe useful given this situation.
windscribe $1/month.
Mullvad is the best.
https://www.torproject.org/download/
Probably a good idea for things other than Lemmy, too, the way that things are going.
thx!
What happened? Is it the instances fault or UK's?
UK is implementing law for age verification on nsfw content, that's the jist of it.
Some services are choosing to simply not serve the UK rather than deal with the faff and/or the privacy concerns. lemmy.zip where I am from is one of them.
Blame lies squarely with the UK gov & Online Safety Act. It's a shit law made to pander to the 'think of the children' types that are incapable of parenting, also coming with the bonus of grift and doxxing concerns by companies that move in to provide the service.
I don't blame any site operator that chooses to simply not play. VPN goes on, normal service resumes.
“It's a shit law made to pander to the *'think of the children'* types that are incapable of parenting”
This.
UK has always been a nanny state. Surprised it took them so long.
I lived there for 10 years from 2000, it seemed to come uo every year or two whil I was there - fuck them
Whenever someone says that there law is to protect:
- the children
- old people
- the vulnerable
- ..
You know that it's full of hidden shit.
The EU is also adopting similar regulations.
Are you talking about chat control?
It was rejected once, and will be rejected again. At least if people mobilize a bit against it. There's a long way from Commission proposal to law.
Equating the proposal of a law with the adaptation of it is highly misleading. The EU is a complex institution where different bodies are pulling in different directions.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_1339
Everything regarding enforcement is early stages but what they're aiming for is much more specific than chat control and is based on existing wording in the Digital Services Act.
The Commission has no law-making power on its own. They can open proceedings before the Court of Justice of the European Union to verify compliance with existing laws, or they propose legislation that will have to go through other EU institutions (the Parliament, which is elected, and the Council, which consists of representatives from Member State governments).
The job of the Commission is to propose laws. The job of the other institutions is to reject these laws if they are stupid. The Commission opening an investigation does not mean that the EU is "adopting similar regulations" - it is an extremely long way away from that.
And even the Commission itself is likely to contain a wide spectrum of opinions within it - it tends to be a strange political constellation. So until there's a Commission proposal (as happened with chat control) there's really nothing. After the Commission proposal, we need to make sure it's stopped by pressuring national governments (Council) and elected MEPs (Parliament).
It's also several hundred pages long. Fair few web forums are closing because of it if they are UK hosted too.
It would be interesting to get a legal opinion on what about it actually impacts lemmy instances tbh. Obviously one option is to go "lol fuck off" if the UK complain and you are not in the UK.
They can notify the hosting company that the server is violating UK law, the registrars, and payment services. This is the fear for sites not hosted in the UK. There are inter-country agreements to support civil actions.
Doesn't that sort of thing take quite a bit of time though? And they need to find out about it too.
That said I don't know if the free and open internet has much time left.
If the surface web gets bad enough, there is still the dark web.
Maybe it's too tinfoil hat but I worry they will push for a whitelisted internet at some point.
I highly doubt the US government would look fondly on a US-based service taking down a US-based social media site because Ofcom complained to them about them not adhering to local laws. Especially under this administration. It would be seen as foreign interference. And for that reason, I very much doubt Ofcom would ever do that. They'd just block the site violating OSA.
Quite a few have suggested the OSA is intended to further centralise the internet. Looking at the impact so far and they are not wrong...
What do you mean "centralise"? Into larger websites?
Big companies can follow the vast regulations while small ones are pushed out.
The UK enacted age verification, the instance said fuck that. So, more or less, the UK's fault.
UK, this is hitting basically all websites. Any site hosting adult content has to verify user ages for anyone in the UK, and instead of doing that many smaller sites are just geoblocking the UK. Easy to get around with a VPN, still absurd it’s happening.
Tunnelbear has a free 2GB a month one - not enough for a lot of use probably, but an easy to test if a paid VPN will do what you need.
If you want to be part of a bot net sure.
I've not had any issues with them. It's a pretty user friendly VPN app, and having a small allowance you can test it with before buying is pretty handy. Most other VPNs you have to pay up before you can test them AFAIK.
The point is not about the app not working, the point is that many free VPN apps rent out your own IP address, often malicious.
Look for "residential proxy providers" and somehow these providers can offer you millions of IP addresses.
Theoretically if you would host your own Lemmy/PieFed server then you would be able to access everything (as long as you host it outside of the UK I guess). And then you could keep being moderator on those communities with your new account on your own instance.
That only helps you out though, if the communities were UK specific ones and other people from the UK meet to participate then there is no other way than moving them to a UK friendly instance.
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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