The online school Coddy spoke of problems due to the blocking of Discord in Russia

“It all started with the fact that teachers couldn’t log into Discord, this was even before the news that it was blocked. We immediately understood what was happening. Discord blocking caused serious unrest among teachers at our school. The service has been used as an effective tool for teaching classes due to its video calling, screen sharing, and chat capabilities. One of the main advantages was that group classes could be taught without time restrictions,” Selendeeva said.

The school quickly began considering other options for holding classes and attempted to log into Messenger via VPN.

“For some it worked, for others it still hasn’t. But the option with a VPN is not entirely convenient, since the free one does not always work well and they are also often blocked. It would be stressful for teachers, parents and children. We did not consider the paid VPN option as not all parents would agree to purchase it. As a result, many decided on Google Meet; “This platform has proven to be the most convenient so far,” said the founder.

According to Selendeeva, at the moment the search for a platform for online lessons continues, in addition to Google Meet, the school is considering Zoom, as well as its Russian analogues.

“One of our teachers even tried to conduct a lesson in the VKontakte messenger, but noticed that the screen display was interrupted if there were no active actions,” said Selendeeva from Coddy.

According to the founder, teachers and school principals actively communicate with students’ parents and test new platforms before classes to find the most suitable replacement for Discord.

Roskomnadzor blocked Discord in Russia on October 8 for not removing recognized prohibited information and for not paying a debt of 6 million rubles by court decision, RB.RU reported.

• On October 1, RKN stated that they demanded that the site remove 947 materials with prohibited content. The same day, the FSB announced the arrest of nine teenagers who were preparing attacks through Discord.
• On October 8, State Duma Deputy Chairman and New People’s Party deputy Vladislav Davankov promised that he would send an appeal to the RKN asking it to reconsider the decision to block the messenger. On the same day, Davankov, citing data from Mediascope, reported that in Russia between 25 and 40 million people use Discord. The deputy added that the messenger is used by teachers and students, not just players.
• “It is necessary to be able to work with the Internet and not prohibit everything. Without competition we will never have analogues and we will become the country of the winning VPN,” said Davankov.

Among the services that can replace Discord, experts interviewed by RB.RU named Revolt.Chat, guild, Element, Mumble, VKontakte, Telegram, TeamSpeak, Skype and Hyperbeam.

“The story of the Discord messenger reminds one thing: Russia needs to actively develop its high-tech stack. After all, one of the founders of Discord, Stanislav Vishnevsky, is from Russia,” Konstantin Tserazov, economist and former senior vice president of Otkritie Bank, told RB.RU.

• On October 10, Roskomnadzor reported that it saw no reason to unblock the Discord messenger after several Telegram channels published information that Discord, after being blocked in Russia, had become available again for some users.