There are a few countries out there that people love to hate. Sometimes they choose to block all visitors from those countries to their websites. What is your opinion on the practice? Note that I am not talking about blocking for legal or copyright reasons, or about blocking done by the countries’ authorities or ISPs, only by the websites themselves.

Does your opinion change depending on whether the website in question is a personal website or blog, versus a website for a free/libre/open-source software project, versus a public service (e.g. a Fediverse instance)? Would you stop using your Lemmy instance if you learn that it is blocking visitors from certain countries?

  • Libb@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    28 days ago

    My opinion is two folds.

    1. People should be free to access whatever they want and at the same time publishers should be free to do what they want too (all of that in the limitations of what is considered legal, obviously).
    2. I also know there is not a single website I imperatively need to have access to, need liek it’s a matter of life and death. So, if I was to stumble upon one such site blocking my country IP I would… give up on said site and go elsewhere and I would instantly forget it even existed. Without any regret. ‘The Web is vast’, a poet once said.

    That’s also how I manage any fear of ‘addiction’ to centralized/corporate-owned social media/apps: no matter how much I used to use some of them back then since the day I realized they will never give me that level of privacy and intimacy I’m expecting as the bare minimum, well, I’ve quit using them. All of them. And have never looked back.