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.
A 502 status code does sound more like an error from the server, yes. The correct HTTP status code for a block by the government would be 451. But I’m not sure if countries that try to block social media respect this, they probably want to hide the fact that that website exists entirely. So they might go for a 404 error instead.
404 is still a server response, so I imagine no response at all would be the way to go.
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.
I like that the code is 451, but yeah no one is going to explicitly use it when they’re blocking things. A little too on the nose.