Admin team of LGBTQIA.Social Mastodon instance received abuse email from Russian censorship agency, where they demanded to remove an account. The account in question represented a small group that ran a collaborative blog for LGBTQIA youth and adults in Russia.
Shortly after refusal to comply with agency’s demands, the instance was blocked and is now unreachable from Russia.
All previous blocks of Fediverse instaces in Russia were related to hosting CSAM.
If it’s a DNS block I guess Russian instances just need to direct the domain to the IP address in their hosts file
It’s always IP + DNS + Deep Packet Inspection. To access blocked websites, you have to use some sort of proxying.