When I search for “PieFed” on DuckDuckGo, I get the expected results. https://join.piefed.social/ is the first one, of course.
On Google, the first result leads to a 403, and the second one is a Reddit discussion. https://join.piefed.social/ is nowhere to be seen.
So weird. The only thing I know about networking is that the answer always turns out to be DNS (/s… I think? hrm, perhaps it really is the case? :-P)
Maybe someone else “near” you (in the IP sense) used a similar address that triggered blocking of the entire range that includes you.
Either way you could try playing around with a VPN, making sure to set it to a variety of different geolocations?
But the fact that it sometimes works - for many of us - while sometimes not working, for others, is definitely odd.
It’s not really the point of my post. This site isn’t officially related to PieFed and shouldn’t be the first result of a search engine.
Fair, though Rimu already addressed that (his anti-AI scraping countermeasures likely caused that), so I was offering the additional fact that the site worked for me rather than generating a 403 error as it did for you, and a way to further test why that error came about.