[Aloha]

They were communities that formed organically on the service from people with otherwise shared interests. While we recruited users by word of mouth and from other services, we've formed our own community on the service.

I do indeed talk with many people on it that I otherwise know in real life, often it goes the other way, I meet people via the service, then we eventually meet in real life.

Most, but not all, are furry fandom oriented, and telegram really fills a hole left by the closure of other instant messaging services. To give you an idea, I run about a dozen chats on there, with around 1400 unique users.

If telegram were to go away, many of us would move to discord, IRC, or a mix of both.

The community has the ability to host its own services, and I've given thought what to do if a shutdown looks likely. Had the telegram server side code been open sourced, we'd likely spin up our own service. While we do have the skills internally to reimplement the server side components it'd be a pretty large amount if work to do so. My hope is that if TG did shut down, they'd open source their service side implementation.