alt Hacker NewsRussia has been slowly cracking down on popular communication and media platforms. First they slow down connection to unusable speeds. This happened to YouTube at some point last year. At first they even said that it's something wrong with Google and it's not them. I think the intention is to slowly get people off the platform without completely blocking it. Then eventually they block access completely. Same happened to messaging apps, like WhatsApp and Telegram. Telegram is still working for messaging, but not calls. 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.
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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.
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.
> youtube is slow
Maybe they're using Windows Phones?
What do they use, instead?
It's not like they don't want any videos online.
Russia seems to be executing CCP’s playbook. They even trying to push everyone to their version of WeChat, which is called Max.
> 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.