this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Threads usage drops as Meta blocks VPN access in EU::Move comes as Meta tries to avoid violating privacy laws.

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 2 years ago (3 children)

I still hate the fact that the same people who said that no one is going to adopt a whole new social network in regards to mastodon suddenly changed their minds when the zuck made a worse version of it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

The marketing of the fediverse is not as good as Zuck's

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Someone needs to piggyback off Metas marketting machine and create a glorified Mastodon instance for Europe called something like OpenThreads. Licence a Mastodon client and customise it to look (and behave) like Threads and federate with Threads.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

How do you know it's the same people?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

I follow them on Twitter :/

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 years ago (2 children)

As someone who doesn't use threads, how does it stand up to something like Lemmy or Reddit? I doubt it's worth using a VPN to use Threads, but that's just my assumption.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 years ago

About as well as Twitter does. It’s literally a Twitter clone. Not really good for micro blogging.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Omg your avatar nearly gave me a seizure.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's just red squares for me what does it look like to you?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

The squares are his display name. His avatar was a rapidly shifting rainbow of colors. It looks like it was slowed down now. Not as seizure inducing.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

I'm in the US, and I hate Meta, so this doesn't impact me, but can you disable location access on your phone to circumvent this?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 years ago (1 children)

They check your IP address for geofencing, and it's not something you can "not give a permission to look at"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Doesn't a VPN give you a different IP address?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago

Yes, but those IPs are fairly simple to identify for a company the size of Meta.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

yes but those address are assigned to countries so a vpn can give a US device a Swedish ip address

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Without a VPN your IP will indicate your location, irrespective of GPS settings. In layman's terms, a VPN will allow you to appear to be using [in this case] a US IP, regardless of your actual location.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Incredible how thirsty europeans for the Zuck are that they bypass good intentioned privacy laws...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Meanwhile I'm so happy being in EU and not having this data-stealer app anywhere in my vicinity for the foreseeable future. Life's relatively good

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

Yeah sometimes I'm also glad being an EU citizen.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Is it possible for other apps or sites to block VPN access in this way? I was under the impression (possibly incorrectly) that using one would help to avoid such issues.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

By using a VPN you are essentially routing your internet traffic through another computer and another ISP. So you have one of the VPN provider's IP addresses. So what they have to do is find out which IP addresses are used by VPNs and block those. It's very hard, but for the biggest companies somewhat doable.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

It depends on what type of VPN you have as well, because if you have one that gives you a dedicated IP, chances are it wouldn't be detected. But most of your regular cheap VPN packages will have you sharing the same IP as hundreds (thousands?) of others.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

BBC iPlayer does this all the time

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Smartdns is your friend for iPlayer and other UK geo fenced public tv services. Been using it for years and years..

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

Wouldn't this block VPN access from anywhere, not just EU?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

ok so people want to access treads and will a vpn to do so

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

How does that work? IF (VPN detected) THEN (fail)? Do apps even have access to that information?

Or maybe they have mandatory geolocation, compare that with IP location and if it doesn't match (=VPN), then refuse to work?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Known VPNs use a limited amount of IP addresses, which result of easily being able to flag them as VPN ones. When a bunch of users (like, hundreds of them) use the same IP address to connect to a given social network, either it is a VPN one, either a company’s CEO might have to put a proxy at the office.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago
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