> we block all meta and X properties from our home network, also ads

There's a difference between meta, X and ads?

Good way to teach other members of your house to use VPNs to bypass your censorship regime

I also block Twitter ASN (yes, it is called Twitter ASN), and a whole bunch of IP ranges from not so democratic countries with very bad hostile actors. They don't have rule of law there, so I don't need these.

With regards to X. Blocking it serves as a good reminder to use a proxy, or try and find the source elsewhere (Blue Sky, Mastodon). More often than not, these exist.

Finally, if required I can use Tor Browser. No cookies, no profiling, no ads.

Out of interest, those IP ranges that you’re blocking… is that at DNS level or are you doing some firewall-level blocking too?

And do you use any kind of reference for determining which ranges/countries are wise to block or has this just been something you’ve evolved over time?

Great questions.

Currently, I have IPv4 only (will change end of year to dual stack), and to block AS13414 (NetName TWITTER-NETWORK) blocking 104.244.40.0/21 to block x.com is suffice. However, if you follow [1] you have a more complete blocklist. In a *BSD you can use cron and curl to update these lists based on if a change occurred, OPNsense allows the same in their webUI. In that vein, I also have Tor exit node block list (this is public data), I have a Censys (& Co) blocklist. You name it.

I don't use DNS-based in this instance (I do for example, for porn, cause I have children). I use a firewall-based one in OPNsense. PF (and therefore OPNsense) have a feature called anchors (alias in OPNsense) which basically allows you to use OOP to develop lists.

I'm pretty sure Linux like OpenWrt can do the same, and you can also use DNS-based blocklists. You can even outsource the hosting to e.g. NextDNS. Because these blocklists, whether firewall or DNS-based filtering, they do use some RAM especially. Back when I started w/this in early '00s this was an issue on my Soekris OpenBSD machine. Nowadays, I assign 8 GB RAM to the VM and call it a day.

[1] https://github.com/platformbuilds/TwitterIPLists

Interesting thanks for elaborating. I might need to take a closer look at OPNsense.

“not so democratic countries with very bad hostile actors. They don't have rule of law there, so I don't need these.” Time to add united states to those filters.

meta and X are both heavily censored so I guess it's censors all the way down?

Teenagers know how to use vpns, you know that right?

I'd like to hear more about this. Can you provide an example of censorship on X?

Let me put it another way; can you provide some examples of ideas, topics or opinions that I are likely to be censored if I posted them on X?

How about blocking links to Signal, allegedly since US Government workers are using it to coordinate responses to DOGE requests?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dimitarmixmihov/2025/02/17/x-is...

Lots of screenshots circulating of posting the word "Cisgender" being flagged by Twitter. Not sure if they just flag or remove it though, as I don't use Twitter any more.

This has to be a disingenuous request. X is signaling at free speech, while in practice it amplifies or suppresses content the owner agrees or disagrees with.