Social media app Telegram is profitable for the first time after paying down “a meaningful share” of some $2 billion in debt, Chief Executive Officer Pavel Durov said in a post on X Monday.
Where did you get the info? Signal and Viber are indeed blocked but usable via VPNs that a lot of people have anyway. Whatsapp was never even attempted to be blocked and remains absolutely dominant together with Telegram. Matrix is a protocol rather than a platform so can’t really be blocked, but even matrix.org was never blocked either. Simplex was blocked a while ago, but again, it is a protocol, so they could only block the central servers and apparently port 5223 too. But both were quietly unblocked a short time after, no idea why.
Doesn’t matter if something “cannot be blocked and is still usable”, the point is that they WANT it blocked. They want to block everything except Telegram. There was one magical moment when they stopped a big war with Durov and decided that they don’t want it banned anymore, and it will be the only free platform in Russia. What happened? :)
Ok, maybe the ban of Matrix servers was in my dreams (or was blocked for a short time for some people), but everything else was not. Yeah, apparently WhatsApp is not blocked yet, but they are threatening to do it (it’s too widespread I guess).
Yeah, Matrix is possible I guess but I’ve seen ZERO news on that. You might be confusing it with Simplex, which was blocked for a very short time but silently went back to being fully operational. Not heard any plans for Whatsapp either.
By the way, I am also 100% convinced Telegram is actively cooperating with them. Not sure if the “blocking” was theater from the beginning or just incompetence, but the result is the same. I think there were many cases when Telegram took down undesired channels at least, and I believe it was confirmed it helped with “investigations”.
Where did you get the info? Signal and Viber are indeed blocked but usable via VPNs that a lot of people have anyway. Whatsapp was never even attempted to be blocked and remains absolutely dominant together with Telegram. Matrix is a protocol rather than a platform so can’t really be blocked, but even matrix.org was never blocked either. Simplex was blocked a while ago, but again, it is a protocol, so they could only block the central servers and apparently port 5223 too. But both were quietly unblocked a short time after, no idea why.
Doesn’t matter if something “cannot be blocked and is still usable”, the point is that they WANT it blocked. They want to block everything except Telegram. There was one magical moment when they stopped a big war with Durov and decided that they don’t want it banned anymore, and it will be the only free platform in Russia. What happened? :)
Ok, maybe the ban of Matrix servers was in my dreams (or was blocked for a short time for some people), but everything else was not. Yeah, apparently WhatsApp is not blocked yet, but they are threatening to do it (it’s too widespread I guess).
Yeah, Matrix is possible I guess but I’ve seen ZERO news on that. You might be confusing it with Simplex, which was blocked for a very short time but silently went back to being fully operational. Not heard any plans for Whatsapp either.
By the way, I am also 100% convinced Telegram is actively cooperating with them. Not sure if the “blocking” was theater from the beginning or just incompetence, but the result is the same. I think there were many cases when Telegram took down undesired channels at least, and I believe it was confirmed it helped with “investigations”.