I can confirm Lemmygrad is accessible. Hexbear is, but loads VERY slowly in my experience. No such issue for Lemmygrad.
By the way, the firewall varies slightly in different provinces. That being said Lemmygrad seems accessible everywhere.
ps: most sites are accessible. Only big American tech sites that don't want to follow local law (Google, Facebook, etc.) are blocked. Many other websites are not blocked but just load really slowly. Not certain why, part of it may be the websites throttling IP address from China.
About Google, they still have a (valid?) ICP license ICP证合字B2-20070004号 registered to their company in China 北京谷翔信息技术有限公司, and ICP record 京ICP备13004732号-2 for google.cn that was last reviewed in 2020.
The following are basically just the .cn mirror versions of the .com counterparts with some minor differences (like hints for links that may not be accessible in China).
https://developers.google.cn/ https://source.android.google.cn/ https://developer.android.google.cn/
Microsoft's Bing (and other products) is legally operating in China at https://cn.bing.com (registered to 微软移动联新互联网服务有限公司), and they display the relevant licenses at the bottom of the page:
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You can look up the ICP records of domains operating in China at https://beian.miit.gov.cn/, a handy service provided by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, either search by company name, domain name or ICP record.
As for why no American social media services are operating in China, they just can't handle the regulatory burden of upholding socialist values.
Edit:
Just remembered that Microsoft's Skype is still working in China, that counts for American social media... or at least American chat software. Discord is partially blocked (see my definition of "partially blocked" in my main comment here: https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/3886144) but I couldn't get it to work without a VPN because they use WebSocket. Matrix works but matrix.org is partially blocked, so you'd have to use other non-blocked homeservers like genzedong.xyz.
Hexbear got banned because there's a crypto currency called hexbear
Hexbear servers are located on French soil and everyone that uses it is a lib spreading liberal propaganda.
They really are located on French soil, though.
If these tools are are accurate, lemmygrad is accessible but hexbear isn’t. Don’t read too much into that, though, because lemmy.world is also accessible. I have no idea how these decisions get made.
yeah this one's on me, sorry everyone. I posted a picture of winnie the pooh bear so Xi posted this picture
on the great firewall captioned "do not let in this bear!!1!!"
lemmygrad.ml is working fine, hexbear.net and lemmy.ml are partially blocked. Side note: prolewiki.org is also partially blocked.
When I say partially blocked, it means that the IP addresses aren't blocked, so I can still connect to them without a VPN by doing some HTTP trickery with a custom Firefox extension. Fully blocked means the IP addresses are blocked so you must use proxies like VPN/IPFS/Tor to connect.
In other news, here's a list of US government sites (and one IBM subdomain) I encountered that blocks Chinese IPs:
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Lemmygrad works, hexbear doesn't.
Lemmy.ml got blocked while I was there, it stopped working one day back in July/August, I forgot.
Lemmy.world was working last time I checked.
It doesn't really matter though since you can see posts on hexbear from lemmygrad.
