The Telecommunications Bill, 2023 is a deathblow to democracy in India - you can read more about it over here.
The bill allows the government to take over, manage or suspend telecommunication services or a network over national security.
Federated apps are not censorship-resistant, right? I’d like to believe that this should not cause issue over federated web-apps, but at the same time, will it force VPS vendors to comply with the rule of the state, and therefore, restrict apps?
I’d like to think of how could such arrangements be bypassed? Lemmy’s documentation mentions about running it as a Tor-hidden service.
If your local censor is not effectively blocking Tor, then you can just use Tor Browser to access lemmy.ml’s normal address via an exit node. Onion services don’t particularly help with circumventing censorship that is performed by the ISP of the user.
Onion services are useful for removing load from the exit nodes (since connections to them don’t need to go through exit nodes) and for having a self-authenticating address that doesn’t immediately reveal the location of the server. However, the location-hiding properties of onion services are not actually very strong at all (note that they used to be called hidden services and mostly aren’t anymore) and should not be relied upon. There are many adversaries who can locate a “hidden” service in a relatively short period of time. So, onion services are only potentially useful for resistance of censorship at the server’s location in the short-term and/or against weak adversaries.