Agreed. Clearly it must do simply what is said on the tin, otherwise why ban it?

Is tiktok ok?

I kinda disagree - that's not to say that they don't usually do so for illegitimate reasons (or that these bans are legitimate), but there's plenty of valid reasons why a government would want/need to ban a platform

X, for example, has been giving the UK a whole lot of good reasons why they may wish to consider it (restoring the accounts of people like Tommy Robinson, allowing misinformation, the owner of the platform himself actively spreading that misinformation)

We should allow the US surveillance giants into all countries, and let US companies control all world social media and communications platforms. Signal too, since it's a US-hosted centralized service that must follow its NSL laws /s

But they are not as secure as Signal

I don't think anyone took those seriously as private messengers. On another note, I think Maduro cracked down on WhatsApp as well, and called Venezuelans to cancel Meta altogether. Or something.

Matrix has the unfortunate problem right now where all the big clients have matrix.org set as the default homeserver. Yes, it is a decentralized and federated protocol, but I wonder how many users are registered on matrix.org vs other servers.

Matrix is nice

You can just as easily identify servers of a decentralized platform and block them. The disadvantage of a central service would come into play if say the US were to intervene, though Signal has already said they would move abroad if that was the case. For network level blockage it makes no difference if the service is central or not

Their own solution is actually better than a VPN for this use case. It's an encrypted proxy which anyone can download and run, so it's much harder to block.

oh they're working on it too

• VPN access at risk in Venezuela ahead of elections - here's how to get around it
• Russia says Apple blocks 25 VPN apps in Russia, IFX reports

There are already many signal proxies available, plus an unlimited number of VPNs to choose from (or self-host yourself on a VPS)