In the summer of 2020 the website of lifestyle publication KYKY was going to be blocked by the Ministry of Information. Many of its team members fled the country due to fears of being arrested. The impact was immediately felt when the website was blocked. Romanova says that before blocking, they had almost five million visits a month. A group of people fell off a cliff.
The magazine got into a fight. With readers in Belarus unable to access the website, it began to register new, unblocked domain and host the articles on them. Romanova says that they started buying silly names. The websites massandry.net and netetabletki.rip were named to mock Alexander Lukashenko's government.
Romanova says that KYKY would buy a new domain and wait for censors to find it and block it. The domain name was living for a week. Romanova says that moving to new domains became expensive and unsustainable.
A new anti-censorship tool that automatically syndicates news articles has brought back a lot of KYKY's readers. Samizdat Online makes blocked websites visible to people and doesn't require any technical knowledge.
Yevgeny Simkin is the founder of a software engineering firm and the co-owner of Samizdat Online. "Putin's propaganda operation is probably the only competent thing that they have," says Simkin, who left Soviet Russia when he was a child. At least at this point, it's not complicated.
Around the world, countries that block websites frequently do so using a technique called DNS blocking, which basically means that websites can't be accessed by typing their domain names. Samizdat Online was first covered by Business Insider. Simkin says that they create and register a lot of random looking domains. Samizdat Online refers to them as "Soss-Links".
The organization has permission from a number of publications to syndicate their content. It currently lists websites that it is syndicating, but from next week it will suggest articles from publications it syndicates to their websites.
Samizdat Online will show the website of The Moscow Times on different websites. The sfzgohtwrm.net domain is where I am shown when I open the home page. The rest of the URL is made up of a long string of characters and letters which contain information about the page you are on. When I click on an article at the top of the home page, I'm taken to a website called Raul.help. A second click leads me to the website: uvsoxmqdcu.net.
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