[danielschonfeld]

Can someone please explain to me the appeal of telegram (as opposed to signal)? Maybe I don’t understand something or am too old but how is it a safe haven compared to WhatsApp in the wake of the WhatsApp debecle. I just fail to understand.

[lofi_lory]

Telegram is not at all secure compared to Signal (in theory). However it has an awesome UI and lots of nice features (most of which are lost using secret chats).

For the longest time these were exclusive features to telegram compared to Signal:

* Delete messages at other party ("undo"), critical for deleting accidentally sent nudes. * Username only communication * Stickers (silly, but well kinda fun) * Bots (very easy to make your computer talk to your phone or a group this way) * link preview * Self messages as easy link/file sharing between devices. Super useful.

Signal is slowly catching up, but it's so buggy at times, I am starting to really hate it/distrust it (I also dislike MM's personality/opinions). Matrix seems to move at a better pace, with more useful features already (e.g edit, markdown, some fun things). I am happy to get rid of telegram for Matrix. One feature better then the other already: resync of lost messages from the distributed network and no reliance on telephone numbers as UID.

[solstice]

The "note to self" has been there since I started using signal I think three years ago. Stickers are available since one and a half years, even though discovery could be better. Things have improved a lot in the last 2 years and I haven't encountered any breaking bugs.

Edit: and now with the New Groups you can send people a group link so that they can add themselves. Haven't tried that out yet but that seems pretty cool

[bayesianbot]

The APIs for bot programming for telegram are great - good documentation, stable, lots of options/libraries for different languages, and possible to do much more complex bots than other messaging platforms.

[keyme]

It feels to me that Telegram is the closest thing to old school IRC that we "have"* right now. You can have public/private channels, you don't see other peoples phone numbers for no reason (you see their chosen nicks), you have bots, broadcasts and more.

* That has any reach beyond the people who would scoff at this sentence.

[seniorivn]

telegram is not secure, but it has secure secret chats feature it works, but nobody uses telegram for it's secret chats telegram is superior in 2 ways, ui/ux polishness and having an open api and native open source clients for all platforms the only potential competitior in that regard is matrix, but it's not there yet

[lostlogin]

> Can someone please explain to me the appeal of telegram (as opposed

Or Slack?