Lemmy.ml, the most popular instance fo Lemmy out there, is not accessible in my country unless I use a VPN. But, I can subscribe to any community that exists on lemmy.ml from here and even post on those communities from this account.
I love this aspect of Lemmy.
Yea true, so you would just get a timeout (or an error from the DNS server that the domain does not exist if you use a ‘government approved’ DNS server.
A lot of censorship-happy governments have specific message that show up when a page is blocked telling you quite explicitly that the page you’re trying to access is banned.
In contrast, in China you just get the browser’s default error page like you typed in a url wrong to a page that doesn’t exist, in essence they give you no error or indication info at all, just blank.
You’ll likely get a permanent redirect to some government site telling you access is denied. The same thing happens on a corporate or school network that blocked a domain.