Of course you can, as long as you pick another instance. I am not in Japan either, and I am currently on 2 misskey instances and one sharkey instance. Misskey is federated with activitypub , and spreaded all around the world. Other public instances can be checked here. As for federation, misskey.io actually is blocked by many instances because it has underage content
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Misskey is also a federated and decentralized platform like Lemmy. There are a bunch of other instances of Misskey other than the one in japan.
Check here: https://misskey-hub.net/en/servers/
Yeah, don't just just join the largest instance. Look at the smaller ones. And that is true for any fedi backend. Be it misskey or mastodon, sometimes smaller is better. Sometimes smaller instance has better local community and better administration.
Yes, they started the restriction a year ago. For a future reference, here's the announcement about the restriction (written in Japanese): https://support.misskey.io/hc/ja/articles/7604557294607
What instance?
Was the big one, misskey.io. I found a federated instance I was able to register at, I just wonder just how federated it's all going to be if the big instance is restricted.
misskey.io is a Japanese instance under Japanese law. With pretty lax rules, and only under Japanese law. Which means that just about everything in the West blocks misskey.io, and I think misskey.io doesn't let Westerners join.
Why?
Because lolicon is allowed on misskey.io.
Thing is, lolicon may or may not count as CSAM by Western standards. Western lawmakers haven't decided about it yet, hence "may or may not". But "may or may not" may mean "yes, it is".
And so, to be safe, Western instances block the hell out of misskey.io to keep what may or may not be CSAM from coming in. Remember that Mastodon caches any and all media. One lolicon post being washed up on Mastodon.social may be enough for Gargron to end up behind bars for "having child pr0n on his Web server".
In Japan, on the other hand, lawmakers have decided. Lolicon is not CSAM, and it's legal.
Thus, misskey.io, being hosted in Japan under Japanese law and only Japanese law, allows lolicon all over the place.
I can't help with "now" but it definitely wasn't locked the whole time. I used to have an account on Misskey.io without any issues or need for VPN (that was before they changed the registration rules though).
I don't think so. I still have the account I registered a few years ago