ЯRUS

» see yarus.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

ЯRUS was not planned for long. Dmitry Ilyukhin had been running analytics services out of Nizhny Novgorod, selling process optimization to very small businesses, and the machinery he had built to parse YouTube and other sources turned out to be most of what a content feed needs. The team moved to St Petersburg in 2020 and assembled a working social network on top of it in a few months. It was in the App Store on 9 February 2021 under the name AI TI Servis, and in Google Play on 21 March with a different company, AO Dialog, listed as the developer.

The pitch was the "personal tiers" the name plays on: you picked your interests and the platform filtered text, video and audio from a claimed ten thousand sources to match. You could post with timestamps and geotags. There was an events listing for Russian cities and a children's section in development. None of it was novel, and for the first year none of it mattered much either.

Then February 2022 happened, Instagram and Facebook were blocked inside Russia, and a domestic replacement was suddenly a strategic product rather than a startup. By March 2022 ЯRUS was in the top ten most-downloaded social apps in the country. A manager from Gazprom Neft, Ivan Dobrovolsky, took over running it that year.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the coins ~

Creators monetized through Monetki, ЯRUS coins. You did not have to buy them. Every user got five a day for nothing and could spend them supporting authors or rating posts, and authors cashed theirs out for real money. It is an inversion of the ordinary tipping model: the platform funded the tips itself and let the audience decide where they landed.

The first account to clear a million rubles through it was an animal shelter in Sverdlovsk called Khvostatoye Schastye, Tailed Happiness. That is the one line in the whole record that concerns the people who were actually using the thing.

~ june 2023 ~

On 16 June 2023 the network counted twelve million registered accounts. Eight days later Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wagner column started up the highway toward Moscow and then turned back. On 29 June the ЯRUS press office said support for the project had been suspended due to the political situation, and that it needed large amounts of investment to keep running and was looking for new investors. The servers were switched off at three in the afternoon on 30 June.

Prigozhin was never listed as an owner. He had praised the platform publicly more than once as an alternative to the services Russia had blocked, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Dossier Center had reported it was built with his money. The shutdown notice is the strongest evidence anyone published: a product with twelve million accounts does not stop in six days over a funding gap it did not know about the week before.

~ the domain now ~

yarus.ru still answers. What it serves in 2026 is a small page reading "Ярус, be Russian", which has nothing to do with the social network and is not trying to pretend otherwise. The old app was never archived in any usable form, and the Wayback capture from January 2023 is a three-kilobyte shell of a page whose title is the only thing left to read.

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