So I read the other day that Russia has banned Facebook/Twitter/et al and it made me wonder, are sites like Reddit and Lemmy banned too? How much do these bans matter to the average Russian, do they just do a VPN anyway and generally no consequences, or what is the deal?
Reddit isn’t popular at all because of a language barrier and existence of similar local resources. There was a motion to ban it but it was silently dismissed so I doubt anyone noticed it. Lemmy, with it’s multiple instances, while even less popular is more ban-proof I believe. I have seen like 5 accounts saying they are from here and I’m not sure if it’s 5 different persons.
Free VPNs don’t work as good as they did after the Iranian protests (maybe they partnered up on that one), paid are hard to obtain since SWIFT was cut. Their sites or download links are sometimes banned too (not the appstore pages tho). It’s usually the line that stops most people. And, if they really want to get information, there’s this shady Telegram app but also dedicated news apps with workarounds and email newsletters. Even Youtube isn’t banned, and I think it satisfies any interest, especially since we don’t have ads and virtually nothing gets banned here these days.
Consequences happen in a semi-random fashion. Yes, they have black boxes on each ISP server, they do listen to traffic and probably can tell packet sizes, protocols, maybe even content itself, but I’m yet to hear it becoming the leading cause of persecution. You need to first get someone’s attention IRL or on social media for them to involve tech methods. Like, having a big oppositional channel and putting someone to shame, or being snitched on by a random observer. Then they’d start to dig things up. Last tech thing I’ve heard is them tracking the protesters by their phones pinging closest cell towers, but that was more than a year ago and I’ve yet to see something as advanced.
As someone who is on Lemmy, thus a minority in the minority, I encounter random sites being blocked from our side or from theirs. It’s not a big deal for me most of the time, but this barrier makes lazier, less tech-savvy majority isolated from the global web, and it doesn’t help our society at all. If anything, it makes them boil in the pot heated only by our propaganda, unchallenged. It shows that you need to make it slightly inconvinient in order to kill russian international blogosphere and they did just that. In their minds, they get the full picture from russian media alone. Good for them they aren’t involved with anything like programing or science. They could’ve become very upset at the perspective of being cut off.
Other than that most people don’t care or even a bit angry about being denied foreign services and needing to buy foreign currency for them. Sadly, that’s the limits of their world ):
So I read the other day that Russia has banned Facebook/Twitter/et al and it made me wonder, are sites like Reddit and Lemmy banned too? How much do these bans matter to the average Russian, do they just do a VPN anyway and generally no consequences, or what is the deal?
Hi there.
Reddit isn’t popular at all because of a language barrier and existence of similar local resources. There was a motion to ban it but it was silently dismissed so I doubt anyone noticed it. Lemmy, with it’s multiple instances, while even less popular is more ban-proof I believe. I have seen like 5 accounts saying they are from here and I’m not sure if it’s 5 different persons.
Free VPNs don’t work as good as they did after the Iranian protests (maybe they partnered up on that one), paid are hard to obtain since SWIFT was cut. Their sites or download links are sometimes banned too (not the appstore pages tho). It’s usually the line that stops most people. And, if they really want to get information, there’s this shady Telegram app but also dedicated news apps with workarounds and email newsletters. Even Youtube isn’t banned, and I think it satisfies any interest, especially since we don’t have ads and virtually nothing gets banned here these days.
Consequences happen in a semi-random fashion. Yes, they have black boxes on each ISP server, they do listen to traffic and probably can tell packet sizes, protocols, maybe even content itself, but I’m yet to hear it becoming the leading cause of persecution. You need to first get someone’s attention IRL or on social media for them to involve tech methods. Like, having a big oppositional channel and putting someone to shame, or being snitched on by a random observer. Then they’d start to dig things up. Last tech thing I’ve heard is them tracking the protesters by their phones pinging closest cell towers, but that was more than a year ago and I’ve yet to see something as advanced.
As someone who is on Lemmy, thus a minority in the minority, I encounter random sites being blocked from our side or from theirs. It’s not a big deal for me most of the time, but this barrier makes lazier, less tech-savvy majority isolated from the global web, and it doesn’t help our society at all. If anything, it makes them boil in the pot heated only by our propaganda, unchallenged. It shows that you need to make it slightly inconvinient in order to kill russian international blogosphere and they did just that. In their minds, they get the full picture from russian media alone. Good for them they aren’t involved with anything like programing or science. They could’ve become very upset at the perspective of being cut off.
Other than that most people don’t care or even a bit angry about being denied foreign services and needing to buy foreign currency for them. Sadly, that’s the limits of their world ):