Fediverse is tens of thousands of instances. You may need a VPN to access your home instance (e.g. if it is blocked in your country), the rest of the network can be accessed from there.
I never heard about instances doing KYC (which is usually done by payments processors). If your home instance requires KYC, you can always move to another instance that doesn't require it, because there are so many of them all across the world.

VPNs are not much different from the Fediverse, by the way. It's just servers, they can be blocked by ISPs, and they can geoblock users. This is also true for Nostr relays, IPFS gateways, Tor relays, etc.

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