That’s just VPN with extra steps. Why not just set up a SOCKS5/Shadowsocks/wireguard/whatever on any hosting and get a lot better experience?

Works fine for me.

Telegram published a statement on X/Twitter that they are not changing any policy. The just removed misleading line in their FAQ, that stated that you can’t report private chats (which you always could).

Short answer: yes, you can do exactly that.

If xmpp and matrix are included, why not include email?

Guy, I visit yandex.ru every day. It is my homepage.

It seems to me that you did not read my message, so here is the repeat:

1. yandex.ru was main domain of yandex for decades.
2. yandex sold some of services to mail.ru group
3. as part of that deal yandex.ru became a redirect to dzen.ru, which contains links to services run by both, yandex and mail.ru

Here is even some proof of that: https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/russia-tightens-grip-media-yandex-sells-homepage-news-rival-vk-2022-08-23/

Actually, yandex.ru is a thing. It was the main domain for yandex for many years and became a redirect to dzen.ru as part of a deal between yandex and mail.ru (another Russian tech company). But dzen.ru still contains yandex search string, so there is not a lot of difference.

VPNs are not categorically banned in Russia either. Just 95% of them. Categorical ban is not actually required here. Government can just create licensing procedure and license only those VPNs, which follow “rules”. I do not see how this is different from ISP bans.

As a guy from Russia, I must admit that vpns are not a big problem for censors. They can be easily blocked, including self-hosted ones by protocol detection. And DNS would not do much with IP and clienthello-based blocks. And most users are not enough tech-savvy to constantly switch to new protocols as old ones get blocked.

Ukraine use ads for anti-putin propaganda. So the russian goverment told Google to moderate ads, or all Google services will be banned. Google decided to just disable ads in Russia completely.

Alternative solution: Since YouTube disabled all ads in Russia, you can just use russian vpn/proxy for the most effective YouTube adblocking possible.