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    Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

    1308 points rickybule | 12 comments | 28 Aug 25 16:43 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom

    Indonesia is currently in chaos. Earlier today, the government blocked access to Twitter & Discord knowing news spread mainly through those channels. Usually we can use Cloudflare's WARP to avoid it, but just today they blocked the access as well. What alternative should we use?
    1. jszymborski ◴[28 Aug 25 16:59 UTC] No.45054454[source]▶
    Mastodon is not easy for regimes to completely block, and most instances won't block you for using Tor. Mastodon saw a huge migration from Brazil when X was blocked there.

    https://joinmastodon.org/

    replies(2): >>45055329 #>>45056178 #
    2. barbazoo ◴[28 Aug 25 18:25 UTC] No.45055329[source]▶
    Wouldn't it be easy to block the individual servers, e.g. https://mastodon.social?
    replies(2): >>45055592 #>>45055689 #
    3. evulhotdog ◴[28 Aug 25 18:47 UTC] No.45055592[source]▶
    There are many instances of Mastodon, and due to its federated nature, you can use any of them to access it, and even host your own.
    replies(1): >>45056010 #
    4. kragen ◴[28 Aug 25 18:56 UTC] No.45055689[source]▶
    Sure, but if you have an account on a different server, you can still see things posted on mastodon.social if you have followed someone there.
    replies(1): >>45086655 #
    5. Ray20 ◴[28 Aug 25 19:24 UTC] No.45056010{3}[source]▶
    What's stopping them from just blocking them all and continuing to block new ones?
    replies(2): >>45056083 #>>45056852 #
    6. evulhotdog ◴[28 Aug 25 19:30 UTC] No.45056083{4}[source]▶
    Nothing is stopping them, but like most things in blocking free speech, it’s a game of cat and mouse.
    7. int_19h ◴[28 Aug 25 19:38 UTC] No.45056178[source]▶
    It would be easy to block on protocol level. Countries that block VPNs usually progress to that level pretty fast once they discover that simple IP blocks don't work.
    replies(1): >>45056667 #
    8. jszymborski ◴[28 Aug 25 20:26 UTC] No.45056667[source]▶
    The traffic looks like any other web page.
    replies(1): >>45056887 #
    9. mayneack ◴[28 Aug 25 20:47 UTC] No.45056852{4}[source]▶
    The long tail is very long
    replies(1): >>45059367 #
    10. int_19h ◴[28 Aug 25 20:50 UTC] No.45056887{3}[source]▶
    I doubt that is the case once you do statistical analysis of it.

    Advanced VPN tunneling protocols, for example, have to take a lot of special measures to conceal their nature from China's and Russia's deep packet inspecting firewalls.

    11. beeflet ◴[29 Aug 25 02:23 UTC] No.45059367{5}[source]▶
    It's not that long. You could probably these servers with an automated process.
    12. barbazoo ◴[31 Aug 25 20:14 UTC] No.45086655{3}[source]▶
    That’s the context I was missing I think.