Thank you for the detailed response! Tor only works when wrapped by a VPN first, but as I stated ones that work are hard to come by.

I admittedly haven’t tried SSH/SOCKS because my primary need for VPN is for unblocking VoIP like discord and I’m not sure how to do that unless I route all traffic through that proxy, but that’s likely to get picked up by DPI and scrambled.

Bit smuggler looks super interesting 👀. I’ll have to look into it.

The only thing I’ve managed to get to work consistently is ExitLag ironically. I’ve been paying for it for years. I think whatever form of VPN they’re using with their whole dual route system manages to evade DPI better than any paid or DIY approach I’ve tried over the years and is stable enough to stream YouTube at high bit rates. I think the fact that they don’t even advertise themselves as a VPN has also helped them.

Yeah I def understand that my DNS activity is probably feeding their black list, but in the case of blahaj.zone I think the domain was auto blacklisted for containing too many trigger words like LGBTQ, trans, etc. It’s too small of a site to have been manually blacklisted imo. Especially when lemmynsfw.com remains unblocked.