Update:
Seems to be related to me being on an Irish server on my VPN. Spoke with the admin, they’re blocking VPN’s due to bad actors in the past.
It says “Join lemmus.org”, but clicking on it returns an error - either the instance doesn’t exist anymore or it’s temporarily unavailable.
Either way, it’s not great. I’m on this reddit thread and people are saying how the whole “choosing a server” is a difficult barrier and was going to show them the join-lemmy site, but… yeah.
How does the join-lemmy.org site determine which instance to send users to?
I can’t help diagnose what went down on your end, but I followed your link and then followed the link at join lemmy and they both work for me:
This is what I’m seeing…
Ok - so when I switch to a UK VPN server, it works, but when I’m on an Ireland server, it doesn’t. So they must have a block on the specific IP for the Irish server I was using or just flat out blocking Ireland.
Classic programming meme, we love it. Dunno what is going on with that instance or how it is chosen, sorry!
I just spoke with the admin, they’re blocking VPNs (guessing via a rule within Cloudfront).
Ah - Thank you for the reminder to turn mine back on!