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To my surprise, even sophisticated means of traffic masking like amnezia and vxray get disrupted frequently, requiring hopping around self hosted solutions and updating ones setup periodically. That's waaay beyond what most people are capable of. I am fortunate to have some tech worker acquaintance who live next to my family members, otherwise there'd be no way for me to for example guide them through setup and re-configuration remotely. Still, this setup gets disrupted every month or so requiring manual intervention.

That might satisfy message-privacy and connectivity, but it seems it'd be vulnerable when it comes to identity-privacy and detection.

I suppose you could use an LLM on each end to write superficially plausible messages and use stenography, although then there's still the problem of "Weird, this user types at 500WPM without sleeping."

I do both in real life, and it's quite clear that what you say is false. Remember that media and online spaces are not a reflection of the reality on the ground. Your own link even discusses one of the reasons for that: dissident media tries to fill the gap avoided by loyal media, of course all that seems similar and manipulative as a result, because they don't write about anything else. Some do understand that, but they operate from abroad - try covering anything mundane about Russia in Latvia, where e.g. Meduza resides, and see how it goes. Naturally people grow tired of the media that feels the same. (Meduza in particular making a lot of stuff up doesn't help). Online spaces are simply suppressed, you can't even give a thumb up without facing 20 years and likely being sent to the meat grinder head-first.

I always doubt statistics based on self-reporting, when there are such strong incentives not to be caught supporting the opposition. If you say the wrong thing, you may get prison, or very accidentally trip and tragically fall out of a window.

> If you talk or write with Americans, its quite clear that they don't care. A majority of them are not following any kind of news, and the ones that are follow pro government stuff.

Case in point: totally-not-a-war with Iran.

It's hard to get accurate numbers when there can be very real consequences for saying you do care about these things. I'm not saying I know one way or the other, just that it's hard to know what people really think in a situation like this.

But this isn't corporate censorship.

This is Russian government censorship. Where "constitutional rights" don't really apply, either. And probably quite a bit less sueable than Cloudflare.

Correct. As there is nothing stopping the electorate from passing laws and electing officials to change anything about how Cloudflare works.

Of course they may not, but the option is there unlike autocratic government censorship.

Not to disrespect you personally, but as someone originally from Russia I'd argue the "cure" of state censorship is worse than the disease of centralisation.

The outcome here is still centralized control, which is why people don't like Cloudflare eating the internet. The Russian government doing it instead is the same outcome.