My main pain points with Telegram are:
- No way to structure a group into sub-groups
- No way to comment on a specific post without polluting the whole timeline (the new DiscussionBot is the beginning of a solution to this problem)
- No way to "like" a specific comment without adding another message to the group (some discussions are mostly a stream of yes and +1)
- No way to bookmark/star messages and easily find them later (apart the save mechanism which is a bit different)
It looks like Telefuel aims to solve them?
- Yes, we're bringing workspaces & chat folders to Telegram (https://cl.ly/9d0ac52b55cf) - Not something we're addressing yet - Not something we're addressing yet - Something we can address :)
Will talk more next week!
They're not really all that open.
All clients are fully open source, they believe it to be a core requirement for formal verification.
You could make the argument about the play store distributed binary being “unverified”, but that applies to any program that’s distributed in binary form. You never know what additions are made.
FWIW the f-droid version is compiled entirely from source with no binary blobs at all and is still the same client.
You’re not helping anyone by spreading FUD.
They’re literally not. The distributed apps update every couple of weeks or even more often while the source they push lags months behind, if it’s even what’s being used to build those binaries.
I wrote the peertube client Throium which is also available on f-droid [3]. When I Tag a new release on github, f-droid will build the package automatically and publish it the next day. I do not build the packages for f-droid.
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.telegram.messenger/
Uncommented code is dumped into the GitHub repo every couple of months after enough people complain. That's not what I would call open source.
[1] https://github.com/overtake/TelegramSwift/commits/master
Or maybe that's the point... but seems short sighted
I've been following their blockchain project since the whitepaper, and they've been quietly missing their launch goals by many quarters...
I think Telegram has a unique position to combat Facebook's Libra.
I haven't looked into it too deeply except what they've released here: https://test.ton.org/download.html
Since the official Telegram clients are open source and the org encourages open competition between third party clients, it's now possible to build a Slack-like experience with workspaces, folders, integrations, and hot keys. Telefuel.com is one example.
As Telegram launches their $1.7bn blockchain by eoy, it'll be interesting to see how they develop their crypto-economy. There seems to be a bit of development activity in various Telegram groups, but there's still a cloud of secrecy about the whole thing.
Disclosure - I cofounded Telefuel.