I am doubtful about the agency of the commenters here. Does not seem natural, more like a group of bots / paid russian trolls.

It doesn’t. Russians are still free to use and contribute to Linux development. Just a few people lost their maintainer rights.

The fork has no hope of survival. Are you telling me Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development can maintain a project of this size? lol, rofl even.

So what? The law enforcement knows you have an account and knows the sign up date and last login. That doesn’t affect your privacy whatsoever. Besides, Europe isn’t a monolith. You can absolutely buy and use a SIM card without disclosing your name in some countries.

They have published requests from the law enforcement and their responses to these requests. The only unencrypted data they have is the phone number, a date of sign up and a date of the last login. That is it, everything else is encrypted and they cannot access it whatsoever.

The phone number is not connected to the messages. That’s the only thing they have. It is the best app for privacy.