social.coop is based in Europe. They fund themselves through Open Collective with a minimum fee of £1/month or £12/year (~$1.30/$16)
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2025
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Boycott US
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149 users here now
Overview:
The community dedicated to boycotting the US until they stop fascism, restore full democracy and start following international law.
Americans have a moral obligation to resist Donald Trump and project 2025 at every turn.
America is a flawed democracy currently being ruled by oligarchs. Stop the backslide! Dont let America become the next Hungary.
America needs to challenge the court rulings of citizens united v. fec and shelby county v. holder, protect the media, implement independent district drawing, and the single transferable vote so they don't end up having people stay home in life-changing elections because they cannot vote for their favourite candidate.
Join 50501.chat to fight back!
Related communities:
Boycott:
!buycanadian@lemmy.ca
Activism:
!antitrumpalliance@lemmy.world
founded 8 months ago
MODERATORS
Thanks for the info
mstdn.ca (Canadian general purpose)
I'll just say to you that "effective moderation" and "not subject to censorship" can be a fine balancing act, you can't have both in a way that always pleases everyone. But perhaps you mean subject to external censorship.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Yes, I should have made that clearer.
- By moderation, I mean by instance moderators/admins according to their own (hopefully decent) values
- By censorship, I mean by government (or mods worried about government reprisal)
https://mstdn.social/ is one of the biggest instances, and it is based in Europe.
Thanks, I'll check it out.
Lets say, hypothetically, something had made me want to use a website that wasn't hosted in Europe or other countries allied to the US in the past couple of years. Where would I go instead?
My blog and pseudo-random email addresses are hosted by hosthero.com a Canadian host.
Australia, Canada, RoK, Japan, etcetera, they all have the same problems.
Sorry I miss read your comment. I have a pihole that blocks a lot of ads and trackers, you could use it to block US companies if you want I guess. I use it to block Chinese and Russian, among a few other TLDs, pages (it does not block companies that use other TLDs from those countries).
The Google sells most of the ad space, so blocking ads is a good first step. I use a pseudo random email address for everything so when companies sell my email address to Google, Google gets nothing. I used to pay for YouTube premium to avoid ads, Google makes more off of ads than YouTube premium and my pihole doesn’t block YouTube ads. I no longer pay for YouTube premium but use Unwatched on my iPhone or iPad and stream it on my TV using my Apple TV. When a hacker breaches a company and gets my email they get nothing. I have a sticker in my Canada post mail box that asks for no flyers so the only ads I get from them are political ones and ones addressed to me, the ones addressed to me I typically send an email to saying this person no longer exists so please stop sending letters to. My ISP started using an exchange server for email, so Microsoft would likely see some of my email stuff. So I have moved all my emails to my domains pseudo random address (or a private professional email with my domain). The pihole started prior to 2024 but my blog and emails were moved in December of 2024.
I was an Apple fan girl prior to Trump’s 2nd term so I had; iCloud storage, the password manager, hide my email, TV, and whatever else was hosted by them, along with many devices. I have moved my cloud storage to a Canadian host, yes it cost a little more up front but over the year it costs less. I have moved all of my things over to stormweb.cloud. I use 1Password as my password manager now, sure I dislike that some times I have to actually use a password instead of biometrics all the time but so be it I guess I have a random email saved on my devices. I had a thing against pirating media, even though in retrospect I was kinda doing it with my pihole setup as it blocks trackers but now I use prowlarr to just schedule different shows and movies to be downloaded. I am in the process of building a raspberry pi setup to replace my Apple TV, I have all the parts, I just need to put them together and hook it up to my TV. I have family members who use FaceTime so I have not changed my iPhone or iPad, and I do not use a desktop but if I did I would be moving it to Linux.
The question was how do I post on a Mastodon instance without being moderated by someone subject to Western internet laws. It seems I choose between a carbon copy IT professional choosing Hetzner, or self-hosting. What can the Chinese and the Russians do to me? I am worried about our goverments. Not sure you can understand my priorities.
So, I'll be frank and tell you the barriers to create a fediverse community on servers hosted in Russia or China, or other smaller countries. It's not a conspiracy.
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Most of the Western countries you listed earlier use English as a common secondary language to communicate, while BRICS prefer their own languages. Places like Brazil have Mastodon servers, but they are catering to Portugese users, and Chinese servers would be mostly for Chinese writers and Russian for Russian. An English community wouldn't take off there or in other countries with a different local language. Perhaps India.
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Hosting in Russia or China, you will not be able to federate with anyone outside of other servers in those countries. A handful of other countries have their own restrictions.
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You will be at the mercy of the local government's rules whether your server can stay online. A somewhat related issue that affected Lemmy was when Mali took control of freely given .ml domains, lemmy.fmhy.ml went offline.
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If the local country is too poor to host their own infrastructure, then chances are a US, European or Chinese-linked company helped set it up and so that government has a degree of control on what is hosted by that server. So you're still not effectively free of the big powers' grip.
Said nothing about hosting in China or Russia. The guy I was speaking to began monologuing about how he uses UBlock to disable all Russian and Chinese websites in the "Boycott US" community, I found it incredibly out-of-touch. Russia is not that hard to host in, you've clearly got an exaggerated idea of that. Where a website is actively hosted or what its domain is has little bearing on what languages it uses, as evidenced by the Malian domain basically being wordplay. Maybe I ought not to even mention it, but Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Kyrgyzstan, and a surprising number of places are solid VPS options, but I am not opening a community I just have bots and a few dozen oomphs in a group chat. Nothing I have been getting censored for on western social media is against their laws. I do not have issues on Rednote, VK or Weibo etc. Your side of the discussion is bordering on concern-trolling. I am not even interested in self-hosting a community ActivityPub instance or federating with the communities which are essentially BlueSky lite and use software that cripples essential tools such as searching within a profile and federated aggregation. Was honestly curious if it is as bad as FediMap makes it look or I had missed a spot in what appears to be another boring cluster of semi-personalized websites on the same old datacenters.
One way or another everyone hosting in the west is apparently still comfortable that laws won't change (new issues will come and with them new censors) under their feet and they won't get FISA attention. Worst thing another country's internet host can do is terminate your account, or report you to your own LEO. There are just a zillion reasons why "which country is the most based to me" is not even the right question to be asking, rather: Where are we? Who wants to get to us? How could that change?
You'll be moderated by someone subject to Chinese and Russian internet laws then, so if your goal is to avoid being censored, that's not really any better. If you absolutely want to avoid censorship, your best bet would probably be to find an instance managed by some anonymous person hosting it on a VPS paid via Monero or something.