With the blocking of Instagram in Russia placed by Roskomnadzor, the State Agency that deals with censorship and the media, the Kremlin would be thinking about the launch of a similar platform developed internally and managed by the country: here is Rossgram, a service that copies Instagram and searches independence from Western social networks.
The Rossgram site is already active and accessible even to non-Russian users with a presentation page which states, thanks to the translation offered by Google, that the Russian analog of Instagram will be launched on March 28, “with the usual features and mobile applications for Android and iOS “. To this will be added other unpublished features never seen before on the Meta platform such as access to payment methods for the proposed contents, crowdfunding options and more. In an initial phase, Rossgram will be accessible only to bloggers, business partners, sponsors and investors, while from April 2022 it will become open to all users.
But who is behind Rossgram, exactly? There is talk of Alexander Zubov, “former schoolmate of Pavel Durov” (ie the founder of Telegram and VKontakte) and digital marketer for 15 years, and Kirill Filimonov, entrepreneur and general manager of the “Real Football” football schools.
It will be interesting to understand if this platform will actually remain open to the Western public as well, or if at launch it will become closed exclusively within Russian borders to avoid problems related to the management of censorship. Furthermore, it will be important to understand how successful it will be compared to the counterpart signed by Meta. We’ll see.