I certainly won’t miss them. My biggest concern isn’t even the data privacy issue, but the way they have effectively killed most discussion forums which were actually designed to make communicating clear and effective, as opposed to the unsearchable stream hell of facebook groups.

we could switch to VK. try it, it's fast, and has a ton of pirated movies.

Yeah, and a comrade major from the FSB has easy and unlimited access to all your conversations and data

A vast majority of political prosecutions for online extremism in Russia were carried out using info that VK subserviently provided to police and special services.

yeah i was being ironic.

As for access, i assume there are server farms on quite a few countries looking for all kinds of patterns in chats. Until E2E encryption becomes extensively spread, it 's a joke to pretend there 's some kind of user privacy

If you run your own XMPP server (can be done dirt cheap now), you don't really need e2ee and all the problems that come bundled with it.