Last weekend I visited China, for the first time in eight years.
I was planning to systematically go through a bunch of popular and less-popular Fediverse sites to see what’s blocked by the firewall these days. But life stuff got in the way.
I did try out a few though. Mastodon.social seems to blocked, and bsky.app is definitely blocked. Wandering.shop was blocked. But aus.social was fine, cloudisland.nz no problem. There didn’t seem to be any strong pattern, but larger sites did seem to be blocked. Friendica.exon.name was fine, and everything I self-host was fine. That included my self-hosted VPN. Wafrn.net, bizarrely, is not blocked. We’ve all heard the rumours that a certain individual likes to unwind after a hard day president-for-lifing with some furry yaoi. Personally, I think that’s a coincidence.
It’s only supposed to get worse, right, never better? The bar in the video above is still bringing the tone down in its prime location on the embankment opposite the CBD. But I went on a walking tour of my old haunts, and so much has been shut down. In at least two cases, that’s because “a video went viral”, and the authorities closed down the venue immediately. Social media matters in China, exceptionally so. The government isn’t going to loosen its grip.
It was hard to escape the feeling of being watched. My friend gets into her apartment complex by just looking at the camera at the gate, barely stopping on her scooter. Myself, I didn’t have to show my passport when boarding my flight from Guangzhou. The camera knew who I was. Out for dinner, a woman told me a delightful story about finding her lost dog. She went to the police, and a kind policewoman spent hours with her reviewing security footage, with great success. Yay, I thought to myself. Yay.
A decade ago I spent quite some time experimenting with VPNs. PPTP worked fine, presumably due to the long tail of ancient corporate Windows laptops still loose in the wild. But OpenVPN was detected and blocked. Worse. They would play an evil trick on you. OpenVPN was a pain to set up. Once you got it working, you celebrated and started browsing the forbidden web. And 15 minutes later, suddenly it stops working. In fact, the whole web is gone. Busted! Shit. Difficult to explain what happened to flatmates. Half an hour after that though, the Internet is back, minus your server. Let off with a caution. But they know, and you know that they know. I did a lot less experimentation after a few rounds of that.
So surely, in 2026, the net would be tighter than ever? It seems not. The country is stuck with a mindset of big social media. The same thing shows up with other protocols. Matrix.org is blocked, but my own XMPP server is fine. Detecting XMPP with deep packet inspection can’t be hard! But they just don’t bother with small fry.
I first started using Friendica in 2011, the same year I moved to Chengdu. That’s not a coincidence. Facebook had been blocked for a couple of years, and it was clear it wasn’t coming back. BBC news, my primary news source at the time, was blocked. I didn’t intend to hang out with the nerds of GNU social, but I wanted a reliable way to get articles from RSS feeds. So I was motivated.
But I also had a second idea in my head. Chinese people don’t much like being stuck behind a firewall either, especially my new friends in the underground music scene. Surely they would be just as interested to find a way out?
The answer was no, and it was a difficult lesson to learn. It turns out, you don’t need to make it impossible to bypass the firewall. You just need to make it irritating. If you see an amazing live performance, you want to share it with your friends right now, when you’re in the moment. No-one wants to fidget with VPNs or authentication. Just make sure there’s an easy-to-use app right there that sends 99% of the messages you want to 99% of the people you want to talk to. Tilt the playing field in the direction you want, and watch the bulk of the players migrate where you want them. From there, network effects lock down any part of the population that matters. I never met a single person who seemed the slightest bit interested in distributed social media back then, and it was no different last weekend.
It’s depressing, sure. But the knife cuts both ways.
China could have cut off the Internet entirely, Afghanistan-style. They could have implemented a true Intranet. They could have built their own better protocols to replace TCP/IP and DNS. But they didn’t do those things. They made the decision to expose their society to the “real” Internet, out there in the world. They just told their population that they were censoring harmful material, same as every other country does. No big deal. And now, that’s what Chinese people have come to expect.
The result is, if you want to infiltrate and undermine this system, you don’t have to resort to elaborate technical subterfuge. You don’t need to make it impossible to detect and block you. You just need to make it irritating. Make it so that any measure that would catch you, would also catch a substantial number of legitimate users. If ordinary Chinese people going about their uncontroversial day-to-day business find themselves blocked, they won’t complain. They’ll use a VPN. And then the censorship regime falls apart.
So in the never-ending debate about what counts as centralisation, I’d like to offer this as one alternative criterion. A criterion with the powerful advantage of being empirically testable. Does the system work in China? You may be decentralised at the protocol level, sure. Are you, as a matter of practical reality, decentralised enough? After all, what happens first in China, happens second in the USA, and third the EU.
The results are in. The Fediverse and XMPP are on one side of that criterion. The ATmosphere and Matrix are on the other.