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.
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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+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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Windscribe also has 2Gb free or 10Gb free per month if you provide and email and let them spam you.