I have family in Russia and it's a sad state of affairs. Our ability to communicate with them is slowly degrading to the point where now I am looking into self-hosted communications.

>It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.

If that's true, then it was really stupid of them to allow things to get to that point. Look at the US -- they had no tolerance for a major social media app (TikTok) to be outside their own control, and they weren't even in a major war at the time. It seems obvious that if you ARE in a major war, you wouldn't want your main social media and messaging app to be under the control of somebody (Pavel Durov) who was recently arrested by a member (France) of the military alliance you're fighting against (NATO), when it is unclear what deal he may have made with that government to be released from prison. It seems obvious to suspect that the price of his freedom may have been a backdoor that allows the opposing military to read all the messages your own people are sending.

The real failure of Russia's is that, unlike the US, they have been systematically unable to keep its own top tech talent supportive of their own government. The top US tech companies have been only too eager to do almost anything their government asks of them, with only some rare and tepid pushback (such as that by Anthropic recently), that seems to get severely punished when it does happen. So there has been no need for the US government to go to the extents that Russia is going to now, simply because they were able to coopt their top talent into working for and with the state (with some rare exceptions like Snowden, and I'd say the "damage" from that has been pretty successfully contained).

The Chinese government may have had some issues with that as well, considering what happened with Jack Ma (though I don't know much about it).

That explains why I can't seem to access VKontakte anymore from outside.

Not a huge loss as it rightfully suffers the same fate as Facebook, but still.

> It's kind of funny because Telegram is used by Russian military to coordinate a lot of things, so they complain a lot about the block.

This plus the starlink cutoff blinded them so badly Ukraine was able to counterattack and retake a bit of area north of Huliaipole, with armored vehicles (which normally attract immediate drone response these days) last I checked operations are still ongoing, so it’ll be a bit before we know the extent of what they were able to do.

Russia seems to be executing CCP’s playbook. They even trying to push everyone to their version of WeChat, which is called Max.

VPNs didn't help?

What do they use, instead?

It's not like they don't want any videos online.

> youtube is slow

Maybe they're using Windows Phones?