Wireguard protocol works with my home internet provider, doesn’t work on LTE. Shadowsocks just works everywhere.

They do have black boxes but there are protocols they can’t handle yet. It’s just usual sword vs shield arms race.

I live in Russia and with all this “VPN is restricted” fuss I’ve yet to meet someone without VPN on their phone. Most people use free VPN services, some are paying for it, me and my friends use VPN we set up on VPS.

Thankfully I don’t have people I need on WhatsApp, but it took some convincing.

Nowadays I only have dentist and barbershop on WhatsApp, all my folks are on Telegram, including all work communications.

WhatsApp was always lacking features; WhatsApp web can’t replace a full featured desktop client which is a must have for me; and its mobile client is inconvenient in every possible way.

That’s an album cover right there.

Telegram for family, friends, work and actually for everything I can think of.

Discord for gaming with friends, not as a messenger but as voice comms mainly.

Whatsapp for very legacy stuff, haven’t had a notification in a couple of years. Maybe it’s time to uninstall, finally.

FYI you don’t need static IP for telegram bots if you use polling instead of webhook. So if your house connection is stable enough, you can make do with Raspberry Pi.

I’m hosting my stuff on cheapest DigitalOcean droplet (but still use polling for telegram bots). Any stable VPS provider would do just fine and you’ll have system resources left for other stuff, telegram bots are very light.