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.
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.
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.
- 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.
- Telegram vs. XXX - see Telegram vs. Signal.
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.
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.
Many Ukrainian and Russian primary sources are on Telegram only. Including government officials etc.
You first create a bot, then join a chat with that bot, then control the bot via the http api
api: https://core.telegram.org/bots/api
quickstart (just to send messages, not mine): https://gist.github.com/dideler/85de4d64f66c1966788c1b2304b9...
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 perfect, obviously, but if I had the choice between Durov and Zuckerberg, I'd take the former every time.
The app is closed source. Facebook could be copying all your private keys to their servers and you would never know.
I am very happy with it btw; much better than whatsapp.
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.
LibreOffice user groups (e.g. Right-to-Left)
Some activism.
My ex-girlfriend.
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'.
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!
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.
[1] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/0...
Here's a recent report on left-wing extremism in the United Kingdom:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
I have not found a similar study on far-right extremism but there is a report giving an overview of the far right:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
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.
Section 3 of the link breaks down how many people have been identified as at risk from particular ideologies.
'Mixed, unstable or unclear' accounts for 51%.
Islamic extremism is 24%.
Right-wing extremism is 22%.
Left wing extremism is less than 3%.
So, the data aligns well with what the original commentator was suggesting.
[0] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/individuals-referre...