I wouldn’t be so hopeless. If this is the only available choice - they’d find a way or will ask their more savvy friends. Like, here even a couple years ago it was unthinkable that every second person would learn to circumvent censorship - yet here we are. Sometimes life forces you to.

Selfhosted git on .onion or .i2p.

It usually works great for me (and when it doesn’t - I help), but it obviously doesn’t work on downloads so I still have to skip some ads manually.

Not just sucks, but is limited. Like, you can’t even register there! To use Signal without a smartphone, you’d need workarounds that are unfriendly to an average person! All while a computer is far easier to make private than a phone.

I’ve used it because it actually allowed me to register, while the registration in the official app broke (my best guess is due to lack of Google services, because that’s the popup the app got stuck on). And if I knew about it earlier, I could’ve used it to register in an Android VM and then tie a desktop client - because unlike the original, it did not force you to use your camera, you could just use a link. Another important quality for me is the ability to use arbitrary Socks rather than Signal’s own - when every protocol has a chance to be blocked, flexibility is important, and having a standalone proxy may be more convenient than a whole-device VPN (that you’d have to keep on all the time to receive notifications).

From what I understand, in my country OpenVPN and Wireguard work fine within the borders, but the protocols are blocked to foreign servers.

Brought to you by Kape Technologies lobby.

How is it privacy if it locks you into using an OS that reports on you?

I am saying this because I saw this happen. Whenever I accidentally peek into a random’s phone on a bus, chances are the homescreen has a VPN app. The blocked social media did have a bit of a decline, but remain very popular, especially Youtube, which was likely the biggest drive for people to bypass the blocks. The lack of credit is more about them often choosing shady VPN services.

I meant because of sanctions they don’t receive anything from Youtube itself. Yet they go on.

I wonder if Tiktok would respond by making their mobile webapp better in this case.

By the way, if the traffic is throttled and not outright blocked - that would mean things like GoodbyeDPI would be likely possible instead of VPNs!

We have a similar situation on Youtube - the site itself doesn’t pay the creators anymore. But everyone who had Youtube as a profession is still there. Some depend on a Patreon-like service, some on their own sponsorships.

Meanwhile the mainstream would probably just download whatever VPNs they can.

I know some people who don’t like their glasses, but dislike how contacts feel more. As for me - I don’t wear contacts that much because they’re a recurring expense.

The people in the echo chamber seem to actually enjoy yelling at people outside of it, though. So it’s not as enjoyable for them either.

I don’t pay for my media now because I’m poor by Western standards, but I did pay for some games unavailable on GOG - bought them on Steam, then downloaded a corresponding DRMless version. Wouldn’t want to buy physical media just to rip, because I don’t want it to occupy space, so I’d have to throw them out or resell. There are some exceptions, though - wouldn’t mind certain CDs as memorabilia.

An HDD/SSD is just as “offline” and easier to write though. No bulky extra equipment required, the capacity is bigger, and you can erase and rewrite over and over. While I underatand how people enjoy CDs as collectables, in a purely practical sense, I don’t see much value anymore.

But yeah, I do have some songs from Soulseek that are specifically from a CD release and don’t exist in the same form on Youtube)

Now that’s how you go against this social media! Not by bans, but by big organizations leaving it, as well as by advertisers cutting ties.

Banning the Three Letter Word is unenforceable too. If you ban Open*** and Wireguard - too bad, China has done that and people developed obfuscation methods. Even if you try to ban talking about them, they won’t go extinct. If there’s a supply, there’s a demand.

Because how would you do that on desktop? Or on a degoogled phone? Or if the download was via an apk from elsewhere?