I am a software engineer living and working in Belgrade, Serbia. My hobbies contain a lot of things including cycling, bikepacking, photography and quantum computations.

All the photos in my posts are made by myself (if not specified other) and are shared under CC-BY 4.0.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2023

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  • I heard that in USA Telegram is used mostly by conservatives, trans-haters and drug dealers. But in Russia where I was born and where I have been living until the war, Telegram was a single source of alternative news and the main tool for opposition to putin. I had a talk with an Iranian guy recently and he told me the same: in Iran Telegram is the only source of non-state-propaganda news.

    I do not care that Durov is just a billionaire who makes money on the trend of privacy. But I remember how Telegram successfully fought against attempt of blocking in Russia in 2018 by providing regular updates and using different techniques to avoid blocking. An attack on Telegram for me is an attack on the latest opposition to putin, khamenei, lukashenko and others.













  • While that is true, the missing part is the following. As I understand registration process in zone .ru / .рф is done by a russian legal entity (Coordination Center for TLD RU) and under the jurisdiction of russian courts. As a citizen of Russia I can say that russian courts are far away from the Rule of Law and under the strong pressure of russian government. So, even if the actual website may be hosted anywhere, russian court may make a decision to take back a registration and, theoretically, the row in DNS may be replaced (the link will be the same but may tend to a different, potentially unsafe hosting). That is the risk that I see.






  • Maybe my opinion is biased. But in Russia where I was living until the beginning of 2022, only in Telegram you was able to find channels on independent media and bots, like “smart vote” (the project of russian opposition about coordinate voting against ruling party). And I understand that if opposition leader can easily create bot that would be very hard to block, then anyone, including spammer, can easily create such a bot that would be very hard to block. That is the reason why I still like Tg and thier approach to the business, when they allow almost everything to almost everyone on their platform.