Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none.
Discord is a close second. But the quality and polish of telegram blows me away to this day.
And it’s lots of small features and details such as built in translation for messages in a foreign language, all the smooth animations, quick look and summaries of channels with aggregated links media etc, a super fast and responsive UI etc. And their stickers are actually ridiculously fun to play with (I used to not be into that, telegram converted me).
Just yesterday I accidentally found out that it’s possible to replace a picture you have sent, with a new or different one - I sent a photo, realised it would have been better cropped, and just edited the message as I normally would have.
And with all that it’s the only popular messenger that is actually easy to programmatically interact with. (And cheap! WhatsApp has a business offering and it’s ridiculously expensive)
> Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none.
That is precisely because they don't give a shit about security. While others like Whatsapp bother with e2ee and resulting device sync problems and inability to do server-side search, Telegram just stores everything on a server without (meaningful) encryption and boldly claims that 'it is the most secure messenger'. And, imagine that, users just believe that it is the most secure! (I did talk to MANY people who repeated this word for word, 'Telegram is the most secure and encrypted messenger app!', and yes, nobody of them used Secret chats, - it doesn't nicely sync, and nobody needs disappearing messages anyway.
Pretty much no one does any sort of identity verification anyway on any E2EE messaging system. So that means that the people running the servers can MITM if they feel like it to get the content. So in practice Telegram might be the best of something or another for all it matters. It's sort of a con. Yes our E2EE encryption app is perfectly secure assuming you do this thing that we know you won't bother with and will not be able to figure out anyway.
Study based on Signal, but applicable to pretty much all of them:
> Pretty much no one does any sort of identity verification anyway on any E2EE messaging system. So that means that the people running the servers can MITM if they feel like it to get the content.
The fact that anybody can verify keys raises the stakes of attempting a MITM attack significantly and thus protects the majority that doesn't verify keys themselves.
Sure it is a good feature to have, but this sort of attack is going to be targeted. You don't do it to everyone. In the unlikely event you do get caught then you can act dumb in almost all cases. Blame Pegasus or whatever...
I have no illusions about being able to keep a nation state attacker off my devices, but not having all of my correspondence shared with all kinds of third parties by default sure feels nice.
Except that if your target finds out, it would undoubtedly increase their paranoia level, making future attacks against him harder and compromising future operations. There's a reason why law enforcement keeps wiretap warrants sealed.
> Pretty much no one does any sort of identity verification anyway on any E2EE messaging system.
Even my tech-illiterate mother asked if I was hacked or just got a new phone (I got a new phone). The study you link is from 2018, I think it's not a bad assumption to say that people have had some education since then. In 2018 I just started using Signal, nowadays everybody is on it, in my various circles.
> Pretty much no one does any sort of identity verification anyway on any E2EE messaging system. So that means that the people running the servers can MITM if they feel like it to get the content.
Signal makes some cruddy decisions that makes identity verification happen way more often than necessary. Keybase did it better, too bad Zoom bought them just to kill them. Here's their blog post: https://keybase.io/blog/chat-apps-softer-than-tofu . TL;DR:
> Is there a good solution, one that doesn't involve trusting servers with private keys? At Keybase, we think yes: true multi-device support. This means that you control a chain of devices, which are you. When you get a new device (a phone, a laptop, a desktop, an iPad, etc.), it generates its own key pair, and your previous device signs it in. If you lose a device, you "remove" it from one of your remaining devices. Technically this removal is a revocation, and there's also some key rotation that happens automatically in this case.
> The net result is that you don't need to trust the server or meet in person when a partner or teammate gets a new device. Similarly, you don't need to trust the server or meet in person when they remove a device, unless it was their last. The only time you need to see a warning is when someone truly loses access to all their installs. And in that case, you're met with a serious warning, the way it should be:
The problem is that these messengers don't encourage it.
People are more likely to do verification if the app has an inbuilt process giving visual incentives for verification, see Element and Threema.
People care about these features. Tell you what: I care about these features! And I also care about e2ee but I care more about all the things I can’t do with e2ee enabled.
When it matters, I enable secret chats. In the early weeks of the war I used secret chats a ton to organise things (and I echo your observation that most people don’t know about them).
But it doesn’t matter all the time.
Messenger also has e2ee secret chats; they’re awful and don’t have 1/10th the features telegram’s chats have. Hell even telegram’s secret chats are more featureful than WhatsApp chats (which are all e2ee)
I care more that my intimate chats and pictures aren't stored plaintext in corporate and government servers for them to do god knows what than I care about some (cue soyjak face) heckin' stickerinos. But to each his own.
I can't use secret chats because they're only available on mobile, possibly macOS (and Unigram if you use Windows 10), not Windows or Linux, and I like accessing my chats across devices and typing on a physical keyboard.
Telegram is not a tool for sensitive communications, there are far better options if you don't trust some company or have serious adversaries (Signal comes to mind).
But it does aggressively surface the P2P AES256 text chat feature, it does P2P AES256 encrypt voice and video by default (unless I'm badly mistaken), it's got the cute emoji key-verification affordance in voice and video, it does aggressively surface features for allowing people to contact you or not, which is the exact opposite of what a "growth-hacker" PM would do.
How it stands up to a serious security audit is beyond my pay-grade, Moxie seems to think it's weak-ish, and again, that makes it a bad choice if you have credible adversaries.
But I've worked in privacy-hostile settings. Telegram is not privacy-hostile.
Still seems like a good thing. I can use the same app with the same contacts for e2e chats too. Also the calls are e2e encrypted. For now: Telegram is fast with good UX, many contacts, works just fine and is reasonably secure (with their own "credo"). The mentioned above WhatsApp is a closed source client program that can do whatever it wants on your phone, who said that it is not secretly sending any word you type to some telemetry address, while e2e encrypting your chat traffic...
If I were a dissident then given the choice between whatsapp and telegram, telegram wins
"Secret chats use end-to-end encryption, thanks to which we don't have any data to disclose.
To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data."
https://telegram.org/faq#q-do-you-process-data-requests
Telegram is more convenient by default and it can provide security for those who need it.
You must have missed all the very suspicious information about Durov's close ties with Russian authorities, and that Telegram developers worked from the same office with VK in Saint-Petersburg when he claimed that they are in Germany. [1]
I quickly skimmed through the article (it's pretty long) and its main gist is that the author had a conflict with Pavel Durov's brother about his girlfriend, can you elaborate why you think Durov has ties to authorities? I don't see why working in St.Petersburg makes you a Putin ally.
Only two things matters in the security communication business: is the security verifiable, and the reputation of the service provider.
Of these two, Telegram is hardly verifiable: its clients are open-source, BUT the sources in the public repository are updated very rarely, so if T. wants to slip in some malicious code aimed at a specific user to compromise their Secret messages, they can very well do it in a number of ways.
But, given that the vast majority of Telegram users do not even user the secret chats, they can just accest all their chat history without any efforts. Since you can log in to your chat history with just a login and password, the even if chat history is indeed encrypted 'in storage', it is clear that Telegram can decrypt your messages for you. Consequently, they can decrypt it for themselves or for anyone else. (I personally think that they don't even bother, what's the point of doing extra work if nobody sees that anyway?)
Thus, the only thing that users can rely on is Durov's reputation, as a fearless modest person with few material possessions, who was pressured by Russian government to sell his business to Putin's cronies. And here is the problem:
Rosenberg in his series of posts alleges a lot of things. First, that Durov has quite a few material possessions, of which he lied (not a big deal in itself, but it adds up). Then, Durov has lied that once he launched Telegram, T's developers were located in Germany. But they turned out to be working from the same office as his old business, which was taken from him in a rather hostile way. These allegations were never addressed by Durov, the only comment he made was the attack on Anton's personality ('This man is a jerk', basically), and Rosenberg has even won his case in court, proving that his claims for payments, etc were solid and he really did work for Telegram in Russia. Do you have a feeling that Durov's reputation is kinda besmirched by now?
Then, this famous case when Russian censorship agency, Roscomnadzor, has tried to ban it in Russia, and couldn't. For some reason, the most obvious thing you do when banning an app was not done: Telegram had remained on Google Play and Apple's AppStore. We know that Google and Apple have previously complied with Russian government requests to ban apps (as proven in the case of Linkedin), but with Telegram it wasn't done - and all sources claiming that Roscomnadzor has demanded the ban were sourced to Roscomnadzor's own post (I have personally verified about 40 news articles, they all linked either each other or RCN's post) - and it is unclear if this demand was ever officially sent to Google/Apple, neither of them have ever confirmed or denied it. (btw if somebody has a congressman or district attorney pal, it would be good to send an official inquiry to Google and Apple to put this question to rest! Anyone?)
And then we have the 'unban' of Telegram by Russian authorities. This is in itself is unprecedented, for a russian government agency to back down from earlier demands 'because they were unable to make it stick'. Nothing like this has never ever happened, russian government officials just don't function like that, under no circumstances! And the week after the ban, Telegram's top manager sat on the same board with russian government officials! This alone makes me think that all this 'telegram's ban' was a successful special PR operation to build up Telegram's reputation, at the expense of Roscomnadzor reputation, which is below the lowest anyway.
So we have questionable reputation by Durov whom we know to lie about vital things, and we have very suspicious block-unblock story, and nobody really knows anything about Telegram the company and where it is incorporated, etc.
> To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption
No data (so Signal) is better than whatever legal hoops you're going through to supposedly avoid giving out the data you have. Plus if you look up "telegram data germany", it's not clear that it's actually working and that they're actually true to their word.
Pretty much none of the features mentioned here have anything to do with E2EE security. How did you even try to get to such conclusion (besides really really trying to use it as a segway into your encryption rant)?!
I'm actually very opposing this e2ee everywhere crowd, because we're developing an XMPP app and we're annoyed to death by people who demanding us (ordering even!) to deliver them encryption above anything else and always asking this as a first question.
The comment was more related to a puzzling observation that a reallyseriouspromise of security makes people more happy than actual security. Why bother with providing safety to people if all they need is to feel safe?
> The comment was more related to a puzzling observation that a really serious promise of security makes people more happy than actual security. Why bother with providing safety to people if all they need is to feel safe?
It's called security theater. The TSA is my favorite example of this phenomenon.
While it may not be the most secure, for many casual users the level of encryption provided in cloud chats is good enough for the convenience of smooth cloud sync, which generally doesn't work with E2E messengers and I frequently lose messages when I restore my phone or get a new one. At least they say the encryption keys for cloud chats are scattered across multiple jurdistictions so they wouldn't be able to hand over anything (other than public chats) unless someone got a court order in bunch of different countries at the same time. I would definitely trust them more than WhatsApp even though the latter uses the Signal protocol, but I don't trust Meta to not collect metadata or possibly have other backdoors as well.
Smooth is not the word I would use for them. Though it may very well be only a “frontend” problem and the underlying tech/theory is probably good. But the current implementations are not yet there unfortunately.
The most secure messenger...that just so happens to be developed by a Russian company headquartered in the same building as VK, a known Kremlin-controlled social media network!
WhatsApp is not e2ee. When Facebook displays advertising based on conversations in what’s app. You will never convince me it’s e2ee. It’s fake privacy.
Before being bought by Facebook I would believe it was e2ee. But believe it’s not e2ee between the client and Facebook. They just decrypt analysis and reencypt and forward. Since communication is not peer to peer and goes via FB the key exchange is prob with Facebook not the users.
>They just decrypt analysis and reencypt and forward. Since communication is not peer to peer and goes via FB the key exchange is prob with Facebook not the users.
Do you have any evidence for this, or is this your "better safe than sorry" assumption for every e2e messenger that doesn't allow you to verify keys?
After FB bought WhatsApp I’ve had multiple occasions where shortly after having conversations with people about products I haven’t searched for. The only place I’ve discussed it. Is in a whats app conversation. I got advertising in Facebook for those products.
For example when looking for an apartment I told my agent (non business account) that I wanted safety catches on the windows. I immediately got advertising for safety catches and window gates.
I don’t own cats but in a conversation with a friend who owns cats I said she should get one of those cat tree things and scratch poles. Right away Facebook starts showing me adverts for cat toys.
This is not stuff I’ve searched or googled or anything. Just mentioned in WhatsApp. Maybe WhatsApp whats differently in America but in Singapore I get advertising in Facebook from conversations.
That's... not really good evidence. Your story sounds almost identical to the "facebook/google is eavesdropping on me" stories that frequently make the rounds on popular discourse. Unfortunately, that's basically the Sasquatch of the privacy world (ie. there are many people with anecdotes claiming it exists, but very little in the way of actual evidence like network captures or decompiled binaries). If anything, it's worse than Sasquatch because at least with Sasquatch you could claim that there aren't many of them and/or they're actively avoiding humans so they're hard to photograph, but the "facebook/google is eavesdropping on me" stories implies it's happening to everyone so capturing an instance should only be a matter of technical skill rather than luck.
Can you explain why advertising shows only in facebook, for keywords only used inside an apparently private conversation?
Unless WhatsApp is audited completely, not just looking at some source code but also how all information passes through facebook and back to a receiver. Then we can only assume the e2ee is just marketing fluff and not something that is done in favour of privacy.
> Can you explain why advertising shows only in facebook, for keywords only used inside an apparently private conversation?
obvious explanations:
1. coincidence/luck + confirmation bias. this can also be aided by demographic/interest factors. For instance, suppose there are 10,000 "interests" that facebook tracks. You'd think that for a given conversation that contained such a topic, the chance that you'd see ads for it was 1 in 10,000. However, if the conversation topic was "mechanical keyboards", and facebook knew that you were male, 18-35, and are interested in video games, then it might be able to infer that you're much more likely to be interested in mechanical keyboards and therefore show you ads for mechanical keyboards 1 in 50 times rather than 1 in 10,000 times.
2. the other side ended up leaking the information to facebook (eg. through a search or clicking on an ad)
1. So it's coincidence luck that I get advertising for 'window safty latch for children', as an 'interest' for '18-35'? They knew that I was looking for an apartment and had a kid that was 1yo and thought 'oh you know what that guy needs, window safty latch for his kid'
2. So facebook leaked information that a conversation happened between me and a friend and they thought, oh you know what, Phillip had a conversation with X, and X just search for 'cat toys' so Phillip must want cat toys right now!
> 1. So it's coincidence luck that I get advertising for 'window safty latch for children', as an 'interest' for '18-35'? They knew that I was looking for an apartment and had a kid that was 1yo and thought 'oh you know what that guy needs, window safty latch for his kid'
It seems doubtful that you can hide the fact that you had a 1 year old kid from facebook, unless you're a very sporadic/careful user. Besides, it's not too hard to imagine one of your friends outed you to facebook (eg. posted photo of you with a baby, or mentioning the fact that you have a baby on a post/comment somewhere). From there it doesn't seem too implausible that "had 1 year old kid" was a targeting factor for "window safty latch for children". As for the "looking for an apartment" part, I don't really think that's necessary for sending you ads for safety latches. Even if you live in a house you'd need latches to secure room windows that are on the second floor.
>2. So facebook leaked information that a conversation happened between me and a friend and they thought, oh you know what, Phillip had a conversation with X, and X just search for 'cat toys' so Phillip must want cat toys right now!
e2e provides zero assurances about metadata/social graph. that's been the case since PGP days.
1. I was never hiding that fact. But if those ads showed without any pre-discussion on whats app, i wouldn't care. The point is. Those ad's did not show until shortly after the whats app conversation. That suggests that Facebook is aware of the conversations that occur on whats app that are not business accounts. So e2ee is false.
2. Again, those ad's never showed until shortly after the conversation occurred. I'm talking within ~30m of the discussion.
Majority of people I talk to are Messenger, LINE, and Telegram. So I only have a few people on Facebook. The Business accounts 100% cause me to get advertising on facebook. For example last week the butcher I used to purchase from in Singapore messaged me from his business account advertising arrival of new meat. Boom I get advertising for meat products in Singapore and Taiwan.
The issue is, I have only 3 chats happening in WhatsApp in the last 2 years that are non-business chats. And all 3 have had conversations resulting in advertising.
Business account chat logs are read by Facebook because the chats are sent via other means than WhatsApp. I don’t believe you can verify identity on business accounts either anyway so that’s moot.
As for your other examples, as I said, it’s all very circumstantial and coincidental. Not evidence. Your accusation is more serious than you think, and serious accusations need serious evidence.
I have absolutely no problem accusing Facebook. It's not like they will try to prove me wrong or anything. We only assume that WA is using e2ee, but the reality is they have told us. Never proven it.
>Majority of people I talk to are Messenger, [...]
>The issue is, I have only 3 chats happening in WhatsApp in the last 2 years that are non-business chats. And all 3 have had conversations resulting in advertising.
you realize that Messenger is owned by facebook? I find it baffling that you think the leak must be from whatsapp, when in reality both Messenger and whatsapp are both owned by facebook.
My point is because everyone I know uses other messaging apps, not what’s app. My sample size is very small because I’m not having daily conversations on what’s app. Conversations are happening in other apps.
At best it’s circumstantial anecdotes pointing to Facebook extracting topic metadata out of your convos. This can be done clientside, no decryption necessary. (And it’s easy to prove that it’s being done if that’s the case)
E2EE plus arbitrarily invasive clent-side sniffing/reporting should not be considered "E2EE" by any means. Even if reports to the mothership are strongly encrypted (at which point it becomes harder to determine what's in the reports).
I didn't claim they are. But they can. And without transparency, I have very little inclination to trust. I find it plausible that they'd scan for keywords and phone home when they get hits -- advertising businesses are not known for their scruples and fb has not distinguished itself in that regard. Once that machinery is in place, it's ripe for abuse. I don't claim any proof it's happening, but it would be naive to blindly trust that it isn't.
The person you talked about may have searched for the term, and knowing that you are friends facebook can easily assume that you would be also interested in this thing. It may also operate based on metadata of you have talked recently.
What's more is that the quality of UX manages to be mostly consistent across clients with entirely disparate codebases written in different languages with different UI toolkits.
That's awesome. You have your pick of a massive variety of clients… one of them bound to fit your device setup like a glove. No lowest-common-denominator one-size-fits-all compromises like is so common with cross platform software these days.
It's one of the worst Linux desktop programs I use daily. It gets scaling a bit wrong so all the icons look blurry, scrolling in chats regularly breaks (scroll wheel just does nothing but is fine in all other programs), and the one time I tried to video call in it it crashed. Discord's client is much better.
For what it's worth, Telegram's scaling on windows is also broken. Use it with one 100% and one 200% scaling monitor, on the HDPI everything is too small to read.
Yes their API is one of the best. A simple curl request is enough to send a message and it has been so useful (sentry, uptime, door bell notifications(1), etc).
They also publish a fully functional C library that makes building fully (!) featured 3rd party clients easy. They support everything - from Linux, Windows all the way to Tizen. You compile it into your app and it "just works" with all the features of the main client.
As a result, you have a large set of very good clients for pretty much all platforms.
Imagine if the FLOSS darlings like Signal would make something as amazing as this - a library any plaform (from RPi, watches, etc.) to implement the best possible secure client that fits the user.
Signal's stance on third party clients is so disappointing. Telegram really has them beat there, although it has to be pointed out that Signal actually publishes server source, while Telegram doesn't.
Honestly I found their API one of the worst ones I've ever used. The documentation is lacking, and they have some unintuitive quirks like posting messages with http GET requests and randomly concatenating strings in params (botNAMEOFBOT anyone?).
I didn't enjoy using it without a third party library [1].
Sending a single message is easy, but using the rest of telegram's features is "meh" when using pure API calls.
If you want to see a well designed API, you should take a look at FTX or Stripe. I love those two :)
Of course. Telegram seems to be the clear winner here at convincing the masses to move off of WhatsApp and have them stick around in Telegram. 700M tells us that it is a viable alternative for many users.
Signal on the other hand seems to have failed to stick with the rest of the users and instead of trying to attract users from WhatsApp, not only they can't get backing up messages working properly, they instead were focused on introducing a scam cryptocurrency and wallet only usable on their app that no-one wants, and probably scared everyone off.
Perhaps Signal is only good for getting users to keep using WhatsApp or Telegram, since there are too many missing basic features that the end users keep complaining about when trying it out.
I use Discord for public communications and I don't mind plaintext storage at all - on the contrary, on public chats, I personally value public history.
The last time I've used Matrix actually, usability was a disaster; took me a while to figure out even just how to login, and that wasn't the only problem.
I was asked to login concurrently from two different browsers, every time I wanted to login. It was a very puzzling experience, and took me a while to figure it out, because it was something I've never experienced before in chat systems, and it wasn't spelled clearly, like "you must login from two browsers", in order to compensate for the unusualness.
The UX of communicating with other users was problematic as well. I've tried to establish communications with a certain user, and I have no idea if I succeeded or not (likely not); two separate communications "channels" (I don't know the terminology) were opened with the same user, which is perplexing, since again, this is something I've never experienced before.
I think those two weren't even the only problems I've had.
Did you file a bug? That doesn't happen. Normally you log in. And that's it. On a new device, you can (optionally) verify your account to see previous encrypted comversations. But you don't have to do that.
As for the chat rooms, they work exactly like Discord, which is exactly like every chat client with chat rooms has since the dawn of IRC. You can send a message to one person, or you can join a room and message everyone at the same time.
Do you know how much comments like that help Matrix gain a foothold in the closed source messaging space?
Not all all, that’s how much.
Seriously. Again, huge proponent and financial supporter of matrix efforts here; I think they do an a amazing job. But comments like yours are detrimental to what they do.
People do value that, and they also value a great UX, which Matrix also has. Additionally, matrix, doesn't forcefully associate your plaintext account with your phone number! People with a clue value that.
700,000,000 users disagree with your statements. You can’t make something true by just saying it’s true.
Also your attitude is super toxic. You’re calling people who don’t value the same things you do, “clueless”.
You don’t really get to bullshit people on HN — you can be super smart and skilled in your field, you’ll far too often come across people with vastly more experience than you. I invite you to think about that.
Again, matrix is great, and I see it as the future of messaging. But it’s absolutely not the “present” of messaging; it’s years behind telegram, and the UX of most clients including the more popular ones is garbage.
Its not years behind. That's a lie. In fact Id say it's ahead because you don't need to use a phone number (huge liability), you can choose to use e2e if you want and theyre not storing your data in plaintext!
Oh and all of matrix is totally open source! Wow. That's how you know you can trust it. If they decide to pull a WhatsApp and move to Facebook, you can just fork and get on with your life.
I like that the telegram client is open, but the sever isn't. Which means I don't really trust them. Same problem as Signal.
I used to really like ICQ's floating usernames and email-like modal. A message came in and a little icon appear beside the username (which I used to float in the unused part of my menu bar) along with an audible notification "uh oh!" You double click it, a small chat window opened up with your conversation history and a place to type. You then typed and send your message and the window disappeared until they replied. It was great because you could see who the messages were from without having to use any screen real estate.
Then things like MSN Messenger got popular. Protocols got locked down and screen real estate got consumed. For some reason everyone wanted to use Google Talk (which was horrible but at least spoke XMPP so folks on Pidgin could still chat with their friends). BB messenger taught a few tricks to Apple. Then facebook messenger happened, whatsapp, wechat, etc.
In the background, there were programs like teamspeak and mumble that were trying to do voice chat for gaming reasons. In a way, these were the precursors to Discord who now, for some reason, dominates what people consider a good chat UI. I personally think it's a bloated mess. In my opinion, ICQ had the best chat UI. Because it stayed out of the way.
The translation feature that sends your messages to Google - via an undocumented API and a random selection of User-Agents. This is who you trust your messaging security to?
Who said automatically? You have to enable it. And all it does is save me the round trip to a Google translate prompt anyway so what exactly is the difference?
Seriously, sometimes people are so cynical here it makes my blood boil. Give people some credit, ffs.
Many people are asking what are in Telegram that aren’t anywhere else?
I can provide some answers. Telegram is my primary chat app.
- It offers you to simply share an alphanumeric handle and you can connect with anyone in the world. I can do a voice chat or normal chat really quickly and easily. It is the only famous truly Instant Messenger there is. And I can do it without sharing my name (unlike FB), email address, or phone number (unlike WApp).
- It is the only app where I add any woman to any group outside of family or other close-knit groups. When creepy dudes get women's cell numbers, it sometimes becomes very difficult for the women to handle. In Telegram, you can be part of large or large-ish groups without the women having to share phone numbers or real names. Blocking is really easy and tension-free.
- The video quality in chats is really high. In Android, only Google Duo came close.
- ONLY chat app in market with an excellent desktop app for Linux. Also Windows.
- I love their non-SJW-everything approach to allowed stickers. Emojis can only be PG-13 and "wholesome" (like banning gun emoji and replacing it with water gun- where I live no one owns guns - and guns are irrelevant to my politics and everyone else's). Telegram's stickers are really fun and creative.
- UI/UX is excellent. Really love chat themes and how I can edit them. Many components are customizable. Chat bubble colors, radii of rounded corners, etc.
- I like the fine-grained control over notifications from different chats (groups and persons).
- I like the lack of E2EE. I just like logging in and having access to all my chats. I don't have to be with the same device to be on the same chat.
- The simple yet effective image editor is nice. So is the text formatting with no fuss.
- I often use the auto image resize feature to downscale images.
- It is so seamless. It has replaced email when I want to transfer small files to my own devices.
- I am a selectively social person. It's good that even with 700 mn people, not many people are in it. The people with whom I don't want to interact more aren’t yet in Telegram. That's an appeal to me.
- Developing bots is a bliss. So easy and effective.
- SO helped a bunch of HS kids with their Bio study before a big test, the quiz feature was great. SO is not a technical person, and it was easy for her to set up a group, no phone numbers, create quizzes and so on. She loved it.
WhatsApp Mac app is not native on Mac, it quickly inflates into multi GB RAM consumption and the UI starts lagging even on M1. Very few things bring down this machine to its knees and one of them can be WhatsApp.
Telegram is not like that, channels with tons of videos and pictures continue to work smoothly.
> I like the lack of E2EE. I just like logging in and having access to all my chats. I don't have to be with the same device to be on the same chat.
Same. I've seen enough people get burned by losing messages because of the E2EE of WhatsApp to prefer to use Messenger and/or Telegram.
> - Developing bots is a bliss. So easy and effective.
Reason I am using Telegram more these days. I'm house hunting and needed a way for my scraping script to notify me and my partner about houses that the script finds: Telegram works perfectly for this. Just create a private chat group and send a HTTP request to Telegram.
> Emojis can only be PG-13 and "wholesome" (like banning gun emoji and replacing it with water gun- where I live no one owns guns - and guns are irrelevant to my politics and everyone else's). Telegram's stickers are really fun and creative.
I appreciate stuff like this too. I hate being treated like a child.
Sometimes I want to express "just shot me" with an emoticon, which a watergun ruins.
If you didn't want to be treated like a child, why not just post an image macro of whatever you want, instead of leaning on the app's internal clipart library?
> - It offers you to simply share an alphanumeric handle and you can connect with anyone in the world. I can do a voice chat or normal chat really quickly and easily. It is the only famous truly Instant Messenger there is. And I can do it without sharing my name (unlike FB), email address, or phone number (unlike WApp).
Has this changed? Last time I looked, you needed a phone number to sign up.
I don't understand. I've been using telegram for some years. Could you explain how you would go about using telegram without "signing up"? And by "a number" I understand it to be an option of "not your phone number"? How does the verification go then?
I think from the reply that they're talking about "Your contacts do not need your phone number, they can message you with just your telegram screen name", but this is different from "Telegram needs your phone number" and "People with your phone number can find your Telegram account from their contacts".
Discord drowns me in notification I neither need nor care about, is not customizable and doen't have native clients. Their "haha see we are a gamer community" is very alienating.
DMs work just fine. I use both Discord and Telegram btw :)
"Gamery" features like voice calls, video calls, videostreaming an application or videostreaming your desktop?? :D
Servers where you can talk/do/post whatever? And just drop in?
Now I use both but Telegram feels more like Whatsapp to me with 1 to 1 convos and Discord is more of the Teamspeak/Mumble philosophy where its a voice room/server.
I went through the entire thread of conversations here, and I am surprised that anything related to Telegram is downvoted and the familiar trope of "security" is added.
It's got best-in-class applications with lovely animations. The server now governs reactions to specific messages. Stickers are fun, with premium stickers having additional animations.
From a technical perspective, they occupy least space; is "fast" and have a great ecosystem of third party clients. (I use "Owlgram") that offers additional UI elements without cluttering the experience. Tabbed chats are possible now; on Windows desktop, Unigram offers a stellar experience. Threat perceptions or "privacy concerns" are not in the lexicon of ordinary users like me and I am better off without Signal or WhatsApp. WhatsApp reminds me of what Telegram was 5 years back.
I think it is time to reconsider the association of Russia with the application. Criticism is fine, but much of it directed against Telegram appears biased and coloured. I don't work for Telegram, but am a happy user. I couldn't get my folks to understand XMPP or Matrix, or even get my colleagues to switch from any other competing application. This is fine by me.
Other finely grained privacy options (ability to control who can call you or add you to groups) are critical for my needs. Yes, it could be better, but no other application offers those controls. Besides, it's easy to chat with others using "usernames" without the hassle of handing out phone numbers.
Telegram is criticized because it's way below than the state of the art when it comes to security, while still claiming (official website) that "messages are heavily encrypted" and that it "keeps your messages safe from hacker attacks" even though it does both way worse than e.g. WhatsApp and Signal.
I don't think a potential association with Russia is the main problem; what about E2EE by default, including for group chats? It's mind-boggling that it's 2022 and we still have to trust that whoever controls Telegram's servers doesn't abuse their powers and is diligent enough to protect them.
It's fine to celebrate Telegram for its features, but let's not pretend that this criticism is unwarranted.
I’ve been using telegram since 2013 every single day. I don’t want my chat app to drain my battery, I don’t want it to waste bandwidth and I want to be able to have so little latency that I feels real-time no matter where I am.
Telegram feels like that group of people they warned you about. Sexual and political freedom. Be whatever you want others to see you like. Easy bot API, deep event based td-lib SDK, censorship bypass through MTProto proxies. Delete messages you sent before your crush sees them because you changed your mind. Send messages anonymously in a group if you have multiple admins. Forbid people from clicking your profile when your messages are forwarded. See the people who saw your messages in a group.
Telegram feels like the last place where as a European I’m not dealing with US-identity ideology, where I’m not dealing with copyright censorship, where everyone can speak up no matter how normal or insane.
In this moment I have 17 bots keeping me up to date with all the things happening, and telegram has essentially become the single stream of news and online social interactions for me.
A bot I wrote that, when seeing a voice message, transcribes it using AssemblyAI and finally uses OpenAI GPT3 to summarise it: https://github.com/19h/transcriptbot. (Needs an api key for both)
Finally, a bot that monitors a tcp / http endpoint configured via a yaml file, can be configured to send alerts via SMS (via AWS SNS), Slack or Telegram: https://github.com/19h/zuse.
There's a bunch more but most of them are very specific to my needs.
Looking at the in-app purchase on iOS in Europe, the price seems to be about EUR 5.50 which I find to be quite steep, for these kinds of features. I've been wanting to support TG's development for a while now, but I would have hoped that this would be more in the vicinity of 1-3 Euros per month.
I think that's the main issue with those small subscriptions. We don't have an American salary here. I would happily pay for Telegram premium for 2-3€/month and have only a third of the features they propose. But 5-10€ for every service like this becomes expensive at the end of the month.
I have the same issue with hey.com email provider, but they are too expensive too. I would love to have an email service provider for 2-3€/month, I'm not an hardcore email user so 8€ as they ask is too much for me. For 3€ and less "pro" features I would pay for the email service.
Same for Spotify, I don't listen much, I would prefer to pay only 4€ a month and have only 2 hours a month of listening without ads. But 10€ for listening for less than 2 hours is a lot. And I don't think I'm the only one like this.
The only company I know who is doing an affordable paid service is nextdns. For 2€ a month, I'm happy to pay for the service for having a DNS that filters trackers on all my devices.
Yeah, I too vividly remember that purchase as more wholesome and a way of supporting them, rather than purchasing something. The free version is super feature-rich, and I believe most of those who go premium do it to support Bitwarden.
I’ve been a happy mailbox.org user for 4-5 years now and they’re cheap. Take a look at they’re features, primarily being that they’re hosted in Germany.
I'm starting to feel spammy because I say that everytime it comes up, but have a look at hetzner.de or sth. alike.
Their smallest webhosting package is 1,90 €/month and comes with your own domain. Configuration is done through their web-based interface, so no CLI fiddling and nothing.
I think that's a good deal, you could even run your own NextCloud on that package, if you want to. That way you get a CalDav server, so you can ditch Google Calendar and Contacts, if you want to.
Happy user of https://forwardemail.net for $3/month for unlimited domains/aliases. This is the only subscription I pay that I believe has a fair (cheap?) price.
Read the whole post and I have just one small question... where the heck do I sign up? There is no link, no steps to follow, there is no update available for my clients that would perhaps spawn a subscribe button somewhere... how much does premium even cost? I don't get it.
I want to buy it, I've been wanting to pay for this service for so long (it just feels so shady this whole time, it's gigabytes of (unencrypted) storage for free? WCPGW), I just can't figure out how to buy this.
Oh that "This update is being rolled out gradually" refers to the payment becoming available? I thought it was about the text it belongs with, speaking of "over 100 fixes and optimizations" and other stuff, and that the subscription was available now (since "Today we're launching <star> Telegram Premium" in bold up top). Confusing, but thanks for the reply!
If you have an iOS device, you can force the app store to refresh and update Telegram. Then once updated, in the app under settings, you can select Telegram Premium and pay with Apple Pay
After Hangouts died (yeah it's still Google Chat now but it's not the multi-function tool it used to be before they chopped it up to announce a piece is migrating to Chat) I switched to Signal. If I were to do that transition all over again I would do Telegram instead.
Signal sounds nice but it's a bit overbearing - backups are somewhere between difficult to impossible depending on the device, there is no web client, and it's only open source in that you can audit source or run your own independent chat network (3rd party clients on the official server are treated as hostile) not as in it's an open community. Despite all of this kind of stuff being defended for contrived hyper-secure hyper-private reasoning you can't send a chat without giving out your phone number and it's ridiculously easy to cause your verification number to change making people numb to all of the protection in the first place.
I did grab a Telegram account recently but only since Beeper supported it and I figured "why not" so I'm missing out on these features but I almost wonder if I would have even been so excited about new things like Beeper had I went Telegram originally.
Interestingly of all the chat apps WhatsApp and Telegram usage seemed to align heavily. Not sure if that was just a quirk of my friend group or a more general thing.
> and it's only open source in that you can audit source or run your own independent chat network (3rd party clients on the official server are treated as hostile) not as in it's an open community
Do you happen to know why there is no Telegram client fork using Matrix protocol? it seems a pretty obvious thing to try given their advantage with UI and Matrix ecosystem's slow progress with friendly clients.
IMO in general Element is probably the least "least friendly" part about using Matrix (and not really half bad itself) and somebody would have to want to fork+maintain and retrofit ~5 Telegram client repos on the basis they really like using a Matrix backend but like the Telegram client so much they think that's the easier path to a better Matrix client than just improving one of the other already working clients like they are trying to do already.
Convenient and secure/private sometimes pull in opposite directions. That’s why it’s great that we have both Telegram and Signal. I keep mine right next to each other.
They’re both great, I plan to support both, they’re just for different things.
I use it for something like 90% of all my social interactions with real-life friends. IMO, Telegram has by far the best UI/UX of any internet chat app. In terms of stuff like group management, working perfectly on any type of device with any OS, including maintaining accounts on multiple devices and keeping everything synced between them, organizing large numbers of chats in the UI, managing notifications, etc. Video and voice messages that just work on all platforms.
It has a lot of good security features too, including support of account passwords, requiring verification of new logins on another device, letting you see all of your login sessions on any device and log out any of them, private groups with detailed controls for join links, etc. A lot of crypto people get mad that it doesn't have E2E encryption outside of opt-in "secret chats", but I don't think that's all that important.
It's also completely free of most of the dark patterns that plague most social media sites. No reshuffling of message order, optimizing for outrage and engagement, or pushing new content to keep you scrolling. No randomly banning or locking accounts for no apparent reason.
I view this paid account thing as an excellent sign that their future plans for the app are for optimizing user satisfaction instead of trying to appeal more to advertisers. I plan to sign up as soon as I can, and hope it goes well and helps us move towards a future where our social platforms see the users as customers to be served, not products to optimize the sale of to advertisers who become their actual customers.
For me, the value of messaging comes 99.99% from availability of people I'm messaging. For work, it's all Slack. For personal it's SMS. I haven't seen a compelling feature in a chat app since 1997.
It's true that if nobody you want to talk to is on it or willing to install it, then it's not of much use. It's also a bit harder to find really compelling features for direct messages. Though even for DMs, outside of Apple's walled iMessage garden, it's hard to get stuff like high quality photos, videos, and audio messages, reactions, stickers, etc that work correctly for everyone on all device types.
Group handling is where all of the apps really shine though. Doing groups in SMS is basically garbage compared to pretty much any chat app ever made.
Everyone keeps saying group. I've never had trouble sending group texts. Both my kids have had their whole classes in a group text for a year. SMS is the one and only "open" messaging platform left so your experience will depend on if you're using iMessage or Samsung or VZ or whatever other ones are out there. But as far as I can tell they're all perfectly fine and nearly indistinguishable.
I started using it because the UI is flawless and because I never installed WhatsApp and I never will. I don't have false hope about the "security" and "privacy" of Telegram that said: but it's a great messaging app which, by now, a huge number of people are using.
At my kid's previous school and at my kid's current school there are parents using Telegram. Sure WhatsApp is still the most common one but Telegram is not unheard off.
700 millions users is quite something.
Hardly a week goes by without Telegram telling me: "xxx joined Telegram". Last week I re-connected with a friend I hadn't talked to in a long time because I saw he just joined Telegram. Said hi to him, sent him a few pictures. I don't know who brought him to Telegram but he ended up using it and he's definitely not a techie.
At this rate in two years they'll have 1 billion users. Maybe it'll even snowball at some point.
This is competition to WhatsApp. 700 million users and growing is not nothing.
I'm using it to communicate with family members and to follow some development-related channels. Why Telegram?
- Telegram vs. Whatsapp is clear, Whatsapp is off-limits due to it being owned by Zuckerberg & Co.
- Telegram vs. Signal is a bit less clear but the user experience offered by Telegram is superior to that of Signal which made it easy to get some of my more computer-averse family members to accept it. The fact that Telegram is easy to use across devices - native apps on mobile and PC, web, CLI, you name it - is a big plus here.
- Telegram vs. XMPP is a battle which has yet to be fought, I have an XMPP server standing by for the moment when Telegram crosses some line which makes me want to switch. With Conversations on Android the user experience is quite good so I consider this to be a serious contender.
I'd love to like xmpp, but every xmpp experience apart from dino (which isn't available on windows) is pure garbage from a ux perspective. For some reason conversations chose to not adhere to any design standards in use on the android platform and instead do it's own thing, which subjectively looks really bad (and cannot be customized). It's also missing stuff like the photo editor, daniel said he's not planning to implement it because android will have a system image editor from android 10 onward. The fact that the editor is borderline unusable and the workflow appears to be: open camera app -> take image -> open image in gallery -> open image with editor -> edit the image (somewhat flaky) -> open conversations -> search for your edited image -> send the image is a major deal braker for me, I never even tried to show anyone conversations as an alternative to telegram because of how horrible it is.
I really like the simplicity of Conversations. It's unclear to me why every app must implement it's own image editor. This really should be solved on the Android level of things and I think Daniel is right not to include it. Do one thing and do it well, after all.
Also all the other messengers like WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram don't seem to care about interoperability or internet standards and are not XMPP compliant.
Outside of being great for cross-platform messaging, it's awesome for transferring files. Quick, no restrictions on file extensions, and I've yet to hit a size limit. Great for building an APK and shooting it off to my friends + other devices.
It's also great for piracy. There's a channel I'm in with links to updated Nintendo Switch modpacks as well as one for premium STL files.
Telegram actually has full-featured APIs, allowing you to implement both bots and custom clients! You can start here: https://core.telegram.org/ . Unfortunately, I don't have the direct link to the single-curl-request.
One-way media sharing. It's the only chat app that realized how fucking great galleries are, being able to post a ton of pics (or videos) in one message, with smooth full size opening of the media. Not re-encoded into mush, no endless scrolling down or left (cough instagram cough).
Not much in terms of restrictions to message size, or file size, or storage, or bandwidth.
You're not spoon-fed by some algorithm, no recommendations, you only see the channels that you manually joined/followed/subscribed to. Feels very old-school in that regard, but in the best possible way.
It has great desktop app support (I'm not much of a mobile user).
No ads, ever, anywhere.
If you just want to follow some content creators without much interaction, it's perfect (that being said, of course there's regular group chats too, I just don't use any of those).
It's not a large corp who's monetization strategy is selling or exploiting user data. In fact, it's founded by someone who was screwed over by government overreach.
It's not perfect, obviously, but if I had the choice between Durov and Zuckerberg, I'd take the former every time.
Telegram is my main messenger to speak to friends and family. I also use it to connect to the chatrooms of the various open source projects I participate in.
I'm using it to avoid the Meta apps on my phone. It was the easier to convince my mom to use so that we can talk online, the other being Signal.
On the other side, people who I know use it for finding all kinds of uncensored stuff in the groups there. It is not totally dark net style there, but the moderation is lax compared to the more visible social media.
I use it because all my friends are on it. Sometimes I have someone asking me to add them on Whatsapp, but I offer Telegram instead and they end up liking it a lot more. There are also a few public channels I follow that are essentially RSS feeds. Linuxgram and PINE64 News for example.
Censorsip is censorship whether we like the censored or not. Anti lockdown, and anti vax were (mostly illegally) censored, cancelled, stigmatised by governments and other public institutions, is that not good to have tech available that guarantees privacy? Whether those who wish anonymity and privacy are truely actively censored is irrelevant.
We absolutely need tech that enables true privacy. I use Signal and strongly believe it should exist.
I'm not saying that censorship hasn't happened, and I'm not saying I think it should. What I'm saying is that there are a bunch of related groups who are very misinformed about free speech and censorship, and they seem to have flocked to Telegram.
If this stat is to be trusted Telegram is the 2nd most popular messaging app in the UK. There must be an awful lot of anti-lockdown protestors, anti-vax groups, anti-semitic, far-right, and so on in that country to make is so popular.
By the way, where do the far-left extremists go for their messaging needs? Are they on Whatsapp? Signal? Telegram maybe? I may have missed something but for some reason you only seem to list groups which in the media are labelled 'right' or (as you stated) 'far-right'.
Firstly, I think there are a lot of people on the fringe of the extremist groups. Maybe they are only in a "concerned parents" group who talk about vaccines, but it's an on-ramp.
Secondly, I think there are methodological issues with that analysis. Measuring by App Store categories is hard to do accurately, only presents a snapshot in time, its numbers that fluctuate a lot, and it only represents new user acquisition, not active user growth. I wouldn't trust this number at all without more information. Anecdotally, I don't know anyone who uses Telegram, although I do know many people who downloaded it once.
> where do the far-left extremists go
This isn't really something we have a problem with in the UK. I'm sure there are some, but the bulk of our issues are growing far-right, nationalist, and/or authoritarian groups. I don't think a debate over terms is going to be productive, and as this is your third account you might want to be careful with it!
> This isn't really something we have a problem with in the UK. I'm sure there are some, but the bulk of our issues are growing far-right, nationalist, and/or authoritarian groups
Are we talking about the same United Kingdom as the one where Yougov has been doing polls on the subject of extremism [1]? If so I wonder what gives you the impression that the bulk of [y]our issues are growing far-right, nationalist, and/or authoritarian groups given that those who answered those polls come up with the following ranking:
#1 islamic extremism (58%)
#2 right-wing extremism (31%)
#2 left-wing extremism (23%)
Unsurprisingly the results differ widely based upon the political affiliation of the interviewee with left-wing voters placing larger emphasis on right-wing extremism while right-wing voters do the opposite. Nevertheless, left-wing extremism seems to be almost as 'popular' as the right-wing version while both are far less 'popular' than islamic extremism.
Can you show a survey of actual threats which supports the thesis that left-wing extremism is as insignificant as you claim it to be? From what I am able to see there is not that much difference between the two.
Here's a recent report on left-wing extremism in the United Kingdom:
Reading these reports shows that political violence currently is at a low level in the UK but that it is on the rise internationally which has the potential to lead to an increase both on the far-left as well as the far-right side.
I had a successful commercial arc completely built on interactions I had on telegram. I built a profitable company and exited all because I decided to download this app 4 years ago.
Needless to say I will be paying for their premium services.
Telegram has a very interesting development history. They were nomadic for the early 2010's, eventually landing in Dubai. Apparently this was because they feared being pressured by governments (the CEO and founders are Russian).
Is Dubai a place with good protection against government pressure?
> Is Dubai a place with good protection against government pressure?
Depends on the government :)
The German government has been throwing a temper tantrum and threatening to bad Telegram because Telegram doesn't respond to data requests from German police and spies.
>The German government has been throwing a temper tantrum
that 'temper tantrum' is colloquially known as the rule of law, and Telegram has cooperated with the government concerning terrorism and child abuse as they should, or alternatively leave if they consider those rules unacceptable.
I wonder if you would also claim "rule of law" when let's say North Korea tries banning the German news infrastructure world-wide, or Iran bans depiction of unveiled women on the internet, or China starts going against Wikipedia with an enforceable worldwide ban because Tiannamen never happened.
It is the nature of an international network that you cannot reasonably expect your government's laws to have any say on a service run in another part of the world. If you do think your government SHOULD have a way to enforce their laws in another country, maybe the internet is not for your country.
well I don't think that and nobody demanded that. Telegram merely has to comply regionally concerning in this case German users or content shown to them. Tech companies differentiating their products to comply with local laws is common practice.
European (and for that matter, Canadian[1]) courts wanting stuff gone internationally is well-documented[2]. It is not unconceivable that German enforcement agencies would use similar tactics. Once you give them the small finger, they will take the whole arm.
I don’t think UAE is particularly well known for taking a hands off approach. They almost certainly have an unspoken arrangement in exchange for an otherwise drama free existence there.
Astounded by some of the negative comments there. (Probably partly Twitter pushing the rage bait to the top, but still). Does Telegram just have a stupid fanbase?
- people claiming MTProto (Telegram's custom protocol which is basically a worse TLS) makes it in any way more secure than pretty much any other system
- people saying moxie is just pushing MobileCoin. Maybe, I don't know, but what does that have to do with Signal? And even if Signal is a total scam, how does that make Telegram not terrible?
- people saying Signal is backdoored by <3letteragency>. We don't know if that's even possible. If it is, then probably so are almost all other e2e encrypted chat apps. And it's about 100x more plausible that Telegram is backdoored - it certainly could be.
The only slightly valid criticism I saw there is that you have to use your actual phone number with Signal. But that doesn't make Telegram any good.
I'd take Telegram over SMS, but I'd almost take SMS+rot13 over Telegram.
There's nothing to address. Telegram chats are encrypted to and from the server, they're not E2E encrypted, they do not claim to be by default. They do offer E2E chats you can opt into, and there has not been a single example of an E2E message being cracked.
> Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct.
How is Joe Average supposed to understand that?
Adding to that, the secret chat encryption has always been Weird (capital W) and in one of the previous generations the server could actually MITM it. Trivially.
That's an interesting question. I don't know. Maybe he would understand it as "messages that are hard to read for NSA".
To be honest, I don't understand your criticism. Surely people can put a video on their website about E2E, about privacy, integrity and authenticity. Maybe put an honest comparison with other messengers. But I'd only expect this kind of openness from a nonprofit organization.
You're the first that I hear saying something has better UX than Telegram, and a Matrix client at that. Power to you, but from my experience with everything from Telegram to Threema and a lot in between, it sounds odd to me.
Of course not. Telegram managed to catch all the people who like that they are not Google and Facebook, while also not caring enough about actual encryption.
I had telegram installed for almost 3 years. I never had a secret chat that I did not start myself.
I really tried to like Signal and convince my family to use it, but the lack of iOS backups, CarPlay support, and web client were dealbreakers for me. I'm no Meta fan but I've found WhatsApp to be the best mix of secure default settings plus usability. It's ugly as sin and doesn't have a Linux app, though.
Yesterday I chatted in Telegram with my friends about a gadget I was considering to purchase - I’ve got an ad of this gadget in Instagram almost immediately. I couldn’t reproduce it by mentioning some other trendy stuff, but it triggered me anyway. Has anyone experienced the same?
Facebook stalks your friends and knows your social graph thanks to enough people leaking their contacts list (you're still exposed even if you don't share your own list).
It could very well be that one of your friends looked up the product being discussed and FB (correctly) guessed based on other data they had that you're the one most likely to be interested in it (or alternatively just shown this ad to everyone in your friends group, but only you picked up on it).
The first one was we were talking about getting pizza for dinner after my in laws showed up. 10 minutes later a Papa John's ad showed up. We don't eat pizza normally.
Second one was talking to one of my neighbors about their dog. For a few days I kept getting ads about dog leashes. I don't have a dog.
I'm a happy Telegram user, but the features Telegram are introducing with their premium subscription are not particularly compelling, and some of them really seem like anti-features:
• 4 GB uploads, faster downloads: I'm struggling to imagine what these would be useful for, other than movie piracy. The default upload limit is already 2 GB, and the download speed is fine.
• Doubled limits: Most of these are client-side limits. Locking these features down behind a paywall is just obnoxious.
• Voice-to-text: I have never intentionally used Telegram's voice messaging features. Most mobile phones can already do speech-to-text; making other people use a premium feature to get the same results is silly.
• Unique stickers, unique reactions: Oh please god no. Animated stickers were bad enough. I'm going to be tempted to ban anyone using these in the groups I moderate.
• Chat management: More paywalled client-side features. (Including one feature that was previously available to all users -- auto-archive for new chats used to be offered to any user that was getting a lot of chat requests.)
• Animated profile pictures: See "unique stickers".
• Premium badges, premium app icons: Yawn.
• No ads: Where do ads even show up? I've never seen one, even in large channels.
Given these features (and their desire to keep Telegram free), I view these as "donation bonuses", not features to pay for. Although Discord has a similar monetization strategy and people seem to not mind it, so maybe it's just us being out of touch.
Agree: this seems like a perfect way to stay with only users' help in sustaining business. Features are not that critical to pay for, you just can greatly continue use the free tier. But you CAN support them and get small bonuses.
Messengers are extremely network-based services. Everything depends on your network, and experiences will differ dramatically between countries.
For me, WhatsApp is everything legit and personal, Telegram is for extremist groups, Messenger is for parents, Instagram is for millennials, Twitter is for politics nerds, Discord is for gamers, iMessage is... for adverts from takeaways and SMS 2FA.
But this will be completely different in other countries, social groups, industries, etc.
> For me, WhatsApp is everything legit and personal
That's how it is supposed to be for me as well, but unfortunately that's not how it is. I only use it because my father and grandparents overseas use it. I literally only have 3 contacts in my whatsapp list, I don't use it ever outside of that.
I still get spam accounts adding me on whatsapp about once every couple of weeks, pretending to have accidentally added a wrong phone number, and then trying to bait the receiver into something (usually using phone numbers with SEA country-codes and profile pics of women that were obviously models and are easily reverse image-searchable). Out of boredom, I once decided to entertain that conversation and pretend to be clueless and play along, just to see how the scam unfolds. Inevitably, I got asked about crypto and got shilled some crypto-related scam that person was running.
Tl;dr: I literally don't use whatsapp for anything, have no picture or full name on my profile, and only use it to communicate with 3 of my relatives, and I still get plenty of scammers messaging me from different SEA countries' numbers about once every few weeks. For context: I live in the US and haven't even visited SEA once (yet).
I guess the downvotes happened because the message just gives an outsider's view - the reason for that spam is easy, just like with Email spam: it's cheap and works - Telegram is easyier to integrate than their competitors. Thats the downside of its developers friendliness (APIs and open source Clients), feature richness and finally their sizable userbase. It's actually a cat & mouse game between spam creators and the Telegram developers implementing countermeasures (on the proprietary backend) - you could see the evolution in spambot behaviour over time just like what happened with email: from simple text + links to misspellings, then screenshotted text ads and now to "plz dm me" comments outside of Telegram or join group xyz (i.e. joins/chats initiated by victims to circumvent reporting cold call chat invites)
Edit: better wording, typos fixed.
Also: Telegram is not exactly new with an age of 8 or 9 years.
Better a GRU-managed honey pot than a CIA-managed honey pot. My country is a vassal to the US, not the Russians, and GRU power over me is considerably less threatening.
I feel the same way about TikTok. I'd rather have a Hong Kong based company with a threat of Chinese interception because I don't give a shit if the Chinese have my data (at least I dont yet).
I do care about using US/Canada/UK/German/etc apps where you know at least 75% of your data is ending up in some database of a country you live in or your country is has a free-wheeling data sharing policy (with some rubber stamp exceptions which foreign partner interception easily bypasses).
Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none.
Discord is a close second. But the quality and polish of telegram blows me away to this day.
And it’s lots of small features and details such as built in translation for messages in a foreign language, all the smooth animations, quick look and summaries of channels with aggregated links media etc, a super fast and responsive UI etc. And their stickers are actually ridiculously fun to play with (I used to not be into that, telegram converted me).
Just yesterday I accidentally found out that it’s possible to replace a picture you have sent, with a new or different one - I sent a photo, realised it would have been better cropped, and just edited the message as I normally would have.
And with all that it’s the only popular messenger that is actually easy to programmatically interact with. (And cheap! WhatsApp has a business offering and it’s ridiculously expensive)