[vasu_man]

For a country ruled by a 'dictator', I'm surprised the Belarus' government hasn't blocked access to Telegram yet. Non-authoritarian democracies (well, at least on paper) such as Brazil and India, in past, have blocked WhatsApp to contain protests and spread of (mis)information.

[samat]

Telegram is notorious for censorship circumvention. They have successfully defeated such an attempt to block telegram by Russian government. Russia used sophisticated DPI, nuked substantial portions of AWS and Cloudflare IP subnets for Russian users and still failed. This guys know how to do censorship circumvention and they are motivated.

[wruza]

Telegram was inaccessible or unreliable for many users after the first block. For a while we used third-party vpn services (these in turn grew like mushrooms after a rain of previous website blocks — e.g. rutracker for drm violations, pornsites for cp, and vue.js for its extremist nature). Then tg implemented proxy switching over socks or something, which is indistinguishable from a regular ssl and could be set up in minutes by anyone. In last years you could use it without any setting, out of the box (but not the web client, which still required a vpn for obvious reasons).

Russia basically trained tg and more importantly it's users to work this way to the extent when further blocking would harm the network infrastructure itself.

[ffpip]

They espaced Russia's ban. They are very good at doing this. Harcoding IP's of Googz and Apple servers, proxies, etc.