П.Дуров. Цифровое сопротивление – Digital Resistance Спасибо за поддержку и преданность Telegram – вместе нам удалось пережить первые 24 часа блокировки.
Как показали последние сутки, в своей войне с прогрессом надзорные органы России готовы блокировать миллионы IP-адресов облачных хостингов, не считаясь с потерями посторонних проектов.
Помимо этого, власти России борются и с независимыми сервисами proxy/VPN, многие из которых перестают работать (если это произошло, отключите прокси в настройках Telegram и попробуйте найти другой).
Хотя российский рынок не составляет существенной доли пользовательской базы Telegram, он важен нам по личным соображениям.
В рамках Цифрового Сопротивления – децентрализованного движения в защиту цифровых свобод и прогресса – я начал выплачивать биткоин-гранты администраторам proxy и vpn. В течение этого года буду рад пожертвовать миллионы долларов личных средств на эти цели. Призываю всех присоединяться и участвовать – настройкой прокси/vpn серверов или их финансированием.
https://vk.com/durov?w=wall1_2307813For the last 24 hours Telegram has been under a ban by internet providers in Russia. The reason is our refusal to provide encryption keys to Russian security agencies. For us, this was an easy decision. We promised our users 100% privacy and would rather cease to exist than violate this promise.
Despite the ban, we haven’t seen a significant drop in user engagement so far, since Russians tend to bypass the ban with VPNs and proxies. We also have been relying on third-party cloud services to remain partly available for our users there.
Thank you for your support and loyalty, Russian users of Telegram. Thank you, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft – for not taking part in political censorship.
Russia accounts for ~7% of the Telegram user base, and even if we lose that entire market, Telegram’s organic growth in other regions will compensate for this loss within a couple of months. However, it is important for me personally to make sure we do everything we can for our Russian users.
To support internet freedoms in Russia and elsewhere I started giving out bitcoin grants to individuals and companies who run socks5 proxies and VPN. I am happy to donate millions of dollars this year to this cause, and hope that other people will follow. I called this Digital Resistance – a decentralized movement standing for digital freedoms and progress globally.
https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=@durov200,000,000 Monthly Active UsersMarch 22, 2018
Within the last 30 days, Telegram was used by 200,000,000 people. This is an insane number by any standards. If Telegram were a country, it would have been the sixth largest country in the world.
We owe reaching this milestone to you alone – our users. We have never promoted Telegram with ads, so all these 200 million people are on Telegram because you invited them to join.
This is why you – our users – have been and will always be our only priority. Unlike other popular apps, Telegram doesn’t have shareholders or advertisers to report to. We don’t do deals with marketers, data miners or government agencies. Since the day we launched in August 2013 we haven’t disclosed a single byte of our users' private data to third parties.
We operate this way because we don’t regard Telegram as an organization or an app. For us, Telegram is an idea; it is the idea that everyone on this planet has a right to be free.
Above all, we at Telegram believe in people. We believe that humans are inherently intelligent and benevolent beings that deserve to be trusted; trusted with freedom to share their thoughts, freedom to communicate privately, freedom to create tools. This philosophy defines everything we do.
This was the reason why Telegram became the first messaging app to roll out end-to-end encryption to tens of millions of users in 2013. This was also the reason why Telegram became the first mainstream messaging app to fully open source its client code, and why Telegram became the first popular messenger to provide 100% open APIs for third party app and bot developers.
Over the years, our unconditional trust in people allowed us to do things other apps were hesitant to implement; things such as support for insanely large group chats, unlimited broadcast channels and a free user-generated sticker platform. In all these cases, our belief in people yielded extraordinary results, and users put these tools to great use.
What inspires us most is that, judging by the rapid growth of Telegram’s popularity, this belief might be mutual. While we unconditionally believe in people, it turns out 200,000,000 humans also believe in us.
Thank you for this – we will always have your back.
https://telegram.org/blog/200-million