The craziest thing is it's working. I live in Brazil (unfortunately, I guess) and yet the only place I even see discussion about this is on Hacker News of all places. The Telegram block is pretty good tech-wise, it's not just DNS-level like some other countries do, to circumvent it you _have_ to use a proxy.

It's also crazy this is happening almost at the same time the US has the EARN IT act back. The west has some serious threats to digital freedom right now, and the solution (for now) is not more technology, it's protest and democracy (if that's even a thing nowadays).

Anyway, it's a good time to teach friends and family how to use tor, VPNs, Fediverse, maybe even crypto (if your currency completely collapsing is possible).

We, as an industry, should have from the start built the internet to be decentralized, secure, private, by default. It's too late for that now, the boat has sailed, but there's still time to prevent it from getting even worse.

Oh yeah, and if you're reading this from anywhere in the world where this kind of thing is not a worry right now, please consider:

https://snowflake.torproject.org/

https://support.torproject.org/