Might be a stupid question, but why is it always Telegram that gets talked about? Are other secure communications services like Signal, Keybase, etc already blocked?
He is a kind of a rebellious figure in modern Russia, and, as younger generation generally dislikes the regime, he is viewed favorably, and a lot of Russians use Telegram because of that.
So blocking Telegram would be a "we're stronger than you" move by the government.
This is a big overstatement.
Telegram received an initial traction from the vk.com userbase. It has very little to do with either the functionality (except may be the channels) or an ideological stance of he creators. VK simply advertised the messenger actively at launch.
Practically all other IMs (except the earlier WhatsApp and Viber) have almost no userbase in Russia.
By the way, how do you exactly know where the user got to know about your service, and, specifically, that this spread didn't involve VK?
Initial source was never VK and Russia. Russians is ~1% of Telegram userbase or something like this.
How? By the number signups with russian phone numbers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%9318_Iranian_protes...
As far as I've heard VK and Telegram have never had a very cozy relationship, certainly never going as far as VK actively promoting Telegram.
In case anyone is curious to see what sites are interesting to the authorities, here is a copy of the registry in Russian [1] and a machine-translated version [2].
The first ones added to the registry in 2014 were a dating website (mamba), Russian social network VK, email services (Yandex and Mail.ru) and IT news websites Habrahabr and Roem. Probably developers and sysadmins are considered dangerous people so they need supervision.
Also there is a website snap.com operated by Snap Inc.
[1] https://reestr.rublacklist.net/distributors/
[2] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=y&prev...
Telegram has channels - it is like a microblog where the owner can post messages and images, and everybody else can only read them.
And in Russia Telegram is well known (unlike Signal) because its founder (Durov) is also a founder of social network VK.
Judging by screenshots, Telegram and Signal UI look similar (well, almost every IM app looks the same).
As I understand Signal, as Telegram, requires a phone number for registration and therefore doesn't provide much privacy (the government can easily track your location and identify you). I wouldn't give a real phone number to any of them.
Telegram is in the news because the Russian government picks on them so much. Russian government concentrates on Telegram because it's popular with the generation of Russians born after the collapse of USSR.
Russians are the very best at memes, the memes get spread by Telegram.
Telegram has this concept of 'Channels', which are basically an easier to use Twitter.
A person makes a channel, a Telegram user can easily subscribe to it.
Many popular Russian politicians, entertainers and media figures have Telegram channels that are subscribed to by 10s of thousands of users.
I don't know how Telegram makes money, I cannot remember ever seeing an ad in Telegram.
The updates you get in your Telegram channel are easier to deal with than just following someone on Twitter.
1) Telegram Channels has channels among other features. This is like streaming rss feeds right to your IM. Channels quickly became a most useful thing for media that is opposed to the regime or just shares the information that would be censored otherwise
2) Telegram has no censorship, the do not block those channels either
3) Their security might not be perfect, but it was enough for the said media to deliver information withough being caught in any way. Some of the media actually switched to Telegram Channels completely.
All of this (and some other minor things) goes agains the will of the regime obviously.
Not being able to see or hear what people say about you is on thing, they can deal with this like they did years ago. But they can't stand the fact that they can't controll the flow of systematized information.