I'm in France. I use Telegram extensively for chatting with friends (1:1 or group chats) because its UX was vastly better than any of the alternatives when we started a few years ago (stuff like polls to decide when to meet, location sharing to find one another in a crowded place), custom bots, being able to edit messages to fix typos, etc. Nowadays WhatsApp does those too, but UX is still worse, especially on non-mobile.

Meanwhile I know people buying drugs off WhatsApp.

I know absolutely no one using Telegram as a chat app however. Pretty much everyone uses WhatsApp for everything here.

Hi, pleased to meet you. I have around 15 people I only chat with via Telegram just in France.

The “people nearby” feature is literally “find me a dealer close by”.

From what I'm hearing through the grapevine (from people who actually use Telegram for this), some of the dealers on there actually use bots to take your order / address. You can't really do this on any other messaging app, at least not easily.

Not saying you’re wrong, just that it’s not something in your face and you need to actively search for this (now that I know this exists, it took me a minute to find it).

I don't use this feature as I don't really want to send my precise location to Telegram but I can imagine it being in someone else's usability complain against Signal, too.

Considering how everyone reporting their actual experience with Telegram here is downvoted to death, it seems to really hurt some users to actually consider that maybe the reason Durov got arrested is because Telegram welcomes criminals with open arms and does absolutely nothing to moderate the platform.

I’m sorry?

Operating a platform facilitating crime on a large scale is a very valid reason to arrest someone.

The uberisation of drug dealing is a major issue in France right now and striking Telegram would be a huge blow to that.

Obviously legalisation would be even better but that door is shut due to the US influence on international treaties.

In our company all of the work chats are on Telegram although it's 100% legal, audited, and does nothing wrong. It's just the most convenient way to communicate. We use Slack only when some client heavily insists on it.

WhatsApp is a good corporate puppy of the West; Signal is a crazy nothingburger that recently burned its reputation by going into cryptocurrencies; Matrix, like with all FLOSS, has approximately zero users and is way under the radar of authorities. Still, you do occasionally see talk and moves against the first two.

Do you have an actual argument against my main point - Telegram UX is literally designed to facilitate drug trafficking inside the application - or are you just there to parrot the same argument “Absolute freedom of expression! ‘Murica land of the great! We the best!” that’s already polluting 90% of this page? I missed the time where you could have a contrarian position here and it leads to discussions.

Shmaybe, idk. It never occurred to me until you wrote it that this feature would be used for drug trade. Then again, the one time I turned it on out of curiosity, I figured it's mostly used for prostitution. I guess the use may differ across the world :).

FWIW, I'm somewhat with you on this - I'm not assuming that governments and law enforcement frowning on E2EE chats are just fascists revealing themselves. USA is good at signalling the zeitgeist, but all the issues with police power abuse are IMHO a USA problem, not a whole world problem; over here, people seem to have a little more trust in governments and law enforcement.