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Hisham @hisham_hm

Mastodon instance talk: China? Show more

Mastodon instance talk: China? Show more

Mastodon instance talk: China? Show more

@hishamhm I haven't seen any news of it other than a couple of articles [1][2][3]. I do know there's a zh-HK translation [4] that made it into Mastodon though, and the only Hong Kong instance I know of is mastodon.hk

[1]: http://www.cnbeta.com/articles/soft/606085.htm
[2]: https://www.oschina.net/p/mastodon (seems more like a tech overview)
[3]: http://news.qq.com/original/dujiabianyi/mastdon.html (which is more like a translation of http://mashable.com/2017/04/04/mastodon-twitter-social-network)
[4]: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/pull/1544

@bvtsang thank you for the information! As far as I can tell these are all based in TW and HK, right? Nothing in CN yet, it seems.

@hishamhm As far as I tell, none of them are hosted in China. And even if they were, I would expect the Chinese government to crack down on them or something (or run their own). China does have the tendency to run its own versions of services:

- baidu is Chinese Google
- renren is Chinese Facebook
- weibo is Chinese Twitter

@bvtsang I'm aware of these companies. I expect the govt to look closely at any Chinese instances, of course, but it may become a game of cat-and-mouse, like P2P piracy. But then it becomes something for geeks (who run proxies etc) not the general public, I guess?

@hishamhm I totally agree with the cat-and-mouse conclusion. Realistically, I think only TW and HK instances will join the broader fediverse, while Chinese instances (if there are any) will isolate themselves.

I'm not too well acquainted with the state of the Great Firewall and attempts to tunnel through it, but I did learn that the firewall might be using machine learning, which I thought was interesting. http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewall-of-china/