A couple of days ago i noticed something off with blahaj.zone. I couldn’t see images posted by users on blahaj, so i thought it was a problem on their side.
Well guess fucking what? After 3 days, it was STILL broken, so i opened it and…
Blocked. They fucking blocked blahaj.zone. Actually beyond parody🤦♂️ Why? What was the point? there’s trans content literally everywhere on lemmy. what’s next, block them all? So now if i want to see a post by a user on blahaj, i have to turn on my VPN (protonvpn.com is also blocked in saudi, jfc) just to see it. Fuck this place. 🙄
I swear a couple of days ago it worked. This is a mild annoyance (hence the community) but still.
It’s so over guys, MBS said no more 196 😔
As someone from a jurisdiction with some of the most sophisticated VPN blocking technologies (Russia), consider hosting your own VPN - it can be as easy as firing up a VPS anywhere and inserting one string, like with Outline for example.
Be really careful since you could easily be arrested for bypassing censorship.
Ideally you want to have a very little evidence against you. Spending money abroad to bypass censorship is highly suspicion behavior. Financial transactions are heavily tracked plus the state can see that you are connecting to one single IP all the time.
The best option would be to use Tor with snowflakes. I like many others in countries with low censorship run the extension to help people in places like Russia. You can download Tails to a USB so that it is hard to trace and doesn’t leave behind to much evidence. The thing to keep in mind is that Tails in itself is highly suspicious. I would spend time reading stuff from the BBC and non Russian Wikipedia.
Sorry that your country is slowly turning into China.
Thank you for your compassionate answer and don’t worry, I am aware of Tor and by extension Tails/Whonix/Qubes. Massive kudos for bridging! It really makes the difference - Tor access was pretty poor at times.
Also, as things stand, using a VPN is not illegal inside Russia, despite all the pressure - there goes the suspicion that the government itself uses VPNs heavily, and there are several records of local governments actually adding VPNs to official purchases (lol).
As for payments, some of the VPSes accept anonymous crypto like Monero, and some of the foreign ones accept ruble payments, although this is obviously more reckless.
Thanks for the advice (And my condolences for being in russia, too 😔). I’ve been thinking of setting up a VPN on my router, but the performance be too costly. We’ll see how it goes, i guess.