See my update in the post, now everything makes a little more sense and it is for sure related to the split tunneling feature.
good to hear that I am not the only one and it is reproducible
again, this doesn't make sense as the NordVPN Firefox extension is using the same IP address ranges. Also I tried different VPN server in different regions, even the "IP obfuscating" ones
No I am not sure, I don't really see any error message, just a timeout. Not sure how an error of the DNS resolver looks like compared to any error caused by a timeout. However the DNS resolution should indeed be returning a different error, at least when entering a random non existing URL Firefox returns "server not found" instead of "problem loading page"(and NS_ERROR_NET_TIMEOUT in network debugging consoel). But what else could it be? It is so strange that the combination of Firefox and NordVPN extension does work, so it seems that the routing through the vpn network generally works, so it actually has to be something with the windows client interaction I guess.
That doesn't make sense, why would it only cause google.com to break? Also I tried turning it off completely, didn't work.
There are indeed many Lemmy instances that have captcha protection, it's really up to the instance admins if they want to protect or not. Many of those "spam" instances do get quickly defederated by the serious ones.
For years Reddit and Twitter were coexisting peacefully and it should be clear for everyone by now that each format has its pros and cons and they are used for different purposes. Was is a bit interesting though is that the active users gap between Mastodon and Lemmy seems to be much higher than it was/is with the corporate originals.
There are a lot of forks of Misskey which are more popular in the "West". I recommend you to have a look at Firefish, Iceshrimp, Catodon or Sharkey. Firefish used to gain a lot of traction but there was some personal drama going on with the original maintainer, causing the project to feel unmaintained for a while. Luckily the do have a new maintainer now. Anyway partially due to this problem some folk like the former community manager created a new fork Catodon. Iceshrimp also another direct fork of Firefish. So a bit of trivia from the FOSS Mastodon world. In the you might as well just use Mastodon if you are fine with the UI. But I love that we have so much variety in the FOSS ActivityPub World.
I think you should all chill out a bit in the comments. It is totally fine to hint at problems for disabled persons. Of course Op could have used different wording but I think their noble intent is clear. Now of course it would be nice that Op already presented a set of solutions to the problem they noticed but it is totally fair to not have them. I'm sure there are decent alternatives to visual-only captchas. So instead of telling Op to "fuck off" you could all be either ignore this request or try to actually be a decent human being and offer possible solutions. Now of course the admins have to decide it those other options are technically feasible. You have to keep in mind that many small instances do not have resources to those kind of technical experiments when they don't work out of the box.
Normies get confused by file systems, Apple is smart enough to understand the mind of the normie masses 😅
yeah cameras and their software is pretty much one of the few vendor specific aspects left in the android world that is worth comparing and maybe worth paying for. Of course flagship models like Pixels and the S series from Samsung certainly can deal with QR codes these days
See my update in the main post, please check if you also had split tunneling enabled. Still a weird behavior but now it is narrowed down to this feature.