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.
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.
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.