Comment by winrid

For a self-hosted VPN, you'll need to use a protocol that is specifically designed to be resilient to censorship. VLESS, for example. Things like WireGuard and OpenVPN are very easily detected.

Maybe it's changed recently, but I knew a lot of locals just using the VPN stuff to use the outside internet (though, like a couple other countries, they have a big enough homegrown market to where for most people not having fb or whatever is a no-op)

My experiences in the country using VPN stuff was pretty interesting though... it _really_ felt like depending on where you were physically in the country that you were going through completely different censorship pipes. And things like Apple push notifications would just get through no problem so you could at least receive stuff via push from banned apps.

I wonder what kind of detailed explanations of the mechanics there are, because I don't have a mental model of it that works beyond "censors just tell each regional office of national operaors to do stuff and they all do it slightly differently"

They work but you have to put in some effort to find the right ones.