> It seems incredible that people would want to use such a restrictive service when much more open ones exist, but the others routinely have their service degraded by the government so they aren't a viable option.
Do those other options actually exist within China? I thought they were blocked and that's why WeChat is dominate.
I remember at least one of the popular third party chat apps like Signal or Telegram made a big push to squeeze past the Great Firewall by hosting on AWS and being judicious with their traffic patterns. IIRC they even manged to get AWS shut out of China at times.
> I remember at least one of the popular third party chat apps like Signal or Telegram made a big push to squeeze past the Great Firewall by hosting on AWS and being judicious with their traffic patterns. IIRC they even manged to get AWS shut out of China at times.
I think you're talking about domain fronting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_fronting). IIRC, Google, Amazon, and MS all blocked it because they were afraid of getting blocked. Though I also vaguely recall that Russia was blocking big blocks of AWS IPs for a time to try to stamp out Telegram.
I was in China recently, and Signal actually seemed to work on a local wifi network (with cellular data disabled), so maybe they've got some new circumvention technology in place. I didn't thoroughly try to test it since 99% of the time I just used data roaming on a foreign carrier to avoid the firewall.
