As it has been mentioned before, establishing a Telegram channel as a major matter of communication for Russian-speaking OSM community is a questionable step itself since it creates an additional fragmentation and benefits only a certain group of people within this community.

However, this situation got some development recently. Russian communication regulator authority, RKN (actually, the government censorship agency) officially started blocking Telegram messenger communication protocol. Ironically, at the same time, iD got Russian OSM Telegram channel listed on its sidebar, above the link to OSM Russia forum section (which was always the main method of communication), giving a hint of its greater importance.

So, from now on, only those Russian users of those rare internet service providers who haven’t started following the order of RKN or those who are able to set up and use network tunneling services (soon they will be illegal in Russia too) will have an access to Telegram.

Most likely, some commenters might argue that it is so easy to set up a VPN and so on, but that’s not the point. The point is that any random OSM user from Russia should not have to violate (obviously, stupid and unconstitutional, but still existing) law or learn how to be an IT specialist to have an access to community communication channel. It doesn’t mean that some people can’t keep using that channel privately if they want to, but it should not be listed anywhere as a major or preferred channel of communication.