>>1556756Nothing is reliable because Roskomnadzor is only getting stricter with the bans, and a whitelist system is inevitable, like what happened in Iran (it's already technically possible and even happens frequently in some drone strike affected regions). Besides, you can only do so much, in the end it's up to your friend to be in the loop, as most of the up-to-date information is only available in Russian, and the situation changes on a daily basis. Different regions and different providers have different sorts of blocking too, what works on one may not work on another.
General tips for your friend, however:
- Amnezia VPN. If you host your own, it's a very simple one button deploy to any VPS (just get a small unknown provider preferably, don't use Hetzner or AWS for this, most of their datacenters are banned already by IP ranges, I use a little-known Nordic provider for this, and it works on most days - however I only visit Russia once or twice a year, so YMMV). You can also buy their Premium service, they are pretty alright at updating to break through the new blockages. At least when it's not a white-list blockage, but even then they have an option to go through some Russian corpo network that sometimes still works.
- Less common protocols like Jabber or Matrix. They may get banned eventually, and voice calls might not work already since almost all messengers use the same NAT traversal protocol for those. But probably more resilient than the likes of WhatsApp. Though I don't think Telegram will be completely blocked in the near term so you can probably just keep using that until it breaks.
- If worse comes to worst, set up a VPN in Russia or use Amnezia's Russian VPN, ask the friend to register a 2nd SIM you'll use for local services, and then use some local shit like VK or Yandex (IM or email) or, god forbid, Max (please only ever use it as a last resort, this is the government chat service that spies on everyone). Or set up some IM server on a Russian VPS.
