As the comment there says, the surprise is that not every instance is blocked yet.
But I've seen hardly any Chinese on the fediverse, so they probably don't care that much. And it's not just that I've stuck to the English-speaking parts, there's been lots of Japanese and various European languages. I suppose even if it otherwise would have a chance to catch on there, Chinese users know that if it did it quickly would get blocked.
I feel like I should say that a VPN isn't a magic bullet. Even if its configured correctly to totally obfuscate the data and the final endpoint of the traffic it's still blatantly obvious that a VPN is in use. Given that the CCP monitors all of this stuff it wouldn't surprise me to learn that if you run a VPN long or often enough without providing stating why that it'll either end up blocked or you'll end up in trouble.
I'm sure lots of people do, it's a big country. But for the vast majority I imagine that the risk of getting in trouble for it, plus the risk of the one you paid for getting successfully blocked, plus the difficulty of finding out which ones are allowed to operate only because they share all your data with the authorities, plus the cost, plus the usual difficulties in finding a good vpn outweigh any desire to communicate freely with foreigners.
I made an account a long while ago when it was the only instance with any content but I'm just a lurker looking for memes and tech news. Feeling like I should change instance these days...
lemmygrad is full of full-on tankies, the type who would willingly send birthday greetings to comrade Stalin while imprisoned in a gulag, lemmy.ml once was a default instance and thus has random folks on it but is admin-wise run by tankies and generally seems to serve as the preferred instance for lemmygrad folks to have alts on. Stay away from political communities there e.g. their worldnews community is a silly place. Hexbear is hit and miss, not so much hardened tankies there but wokescolds and random lefties who don't quite realise who they associate with, why that kind of social dynamics is no good. Might have some inane takes, occasionally prone to dogpiling, but at least you can have a conversation with them.
If you mean communists that support capitalist states like China, then yes, unfortunately. Better than being around nothing but liberals or anti-communists though.
Used to mean someone who would support sending in tanks to crush capitalist rallies like in Hungary (which most people who get labelled "tankies" these days obviously don't), but nowadays it's just an anti-communist term for anyone that supports any socialist revolution that has successfully built a socialist nation.
I don't consider myself a Marxist, Leninist, or communist of any stripe and haven't had a problem so far. I'm far enough left that I refuse to call myself a liberal, but I suspect the folks who consider themselves Marxists probably think I'm too far right to self-identify as a leftist. (Although I do.)
Shitload of downvotes a time or two, but that's about it. I just wanted to be on a Lemmy instance that was honoring the fedipact, and preferred it to have an instance ethos to the left of mine rather than to the right of it.
The Western 'free' population is one of the most information censored/restricted populations in the world, and yet they are flabbergasted that China and many many other nations won't allow propaganda from western oligarchs into their country. It doesn't matter that an information firewall is the single most important military defense against the Capitalist information war. That's btw why the western world are propagandizing their population for 'free speech', so we all can see that wevil China don't want free propaganda, sorry, speech.
The most amazing and Incredible is how hateful attitudes can be bought for a few propaganda dollars in the western for profit information market. So western people actually believe all the hateful things the western oligarchy says about China (and ALL the other enemies of the oligarchs).
How convenient and completely coincidental that the western population have the same opinions about nations and world leaders as the top elite.. Could it be that.. nooooo.. no no.. Western news are the BEST, and no Capitalist elite would lie about something like that to their own population, oh no no..
Yes, that's a perfectly good explanation for why they need to block wikipedia, deviantart, archiveofourown, github, bandcamp, lemmy.ml, and mastodon.social: they're all just fronts in the Capitalist Information War
Largely unwittingly. Most of us are labor aristocrats of the imperial core who have been propagandized our entire lives in liberal imperialist ideology.
Then there’s the media.
Joseph Kahn, the managing editor of the NYT, is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, as are the CEOs of NPR (here’s Katherine Maher again) and PBS. These are just ones I know off the top of my head. The Council of Foreign Relations is a place where the government and the capitalist class hash out the media’s agenda. On its founding, Walter Lippman was its head of research. The title of Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman’s Manufacturing Consent came from a quote in Lippmann’s book, Public Opinion.
A couple more I can think of: CNN’s Anderson Cooper was born into money and interned at the CIA. MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, who was also born into wealth, was Obama’s and Biden’s press secretary.