[mikece]

Is that because it's not made by/in a NATO country and, therefore, no NATO nation can coerce the developers to install a back door (like, say, the NSA could with Signal)?

Personally I'll stick to Wire, Threema, and my own Matrix server instance.

[axy]

Highly possible, but NATO does not seem to lie. Remember the incident when telegram started developing their blockchain and was kicked out of US by SEC? They had huge debt since then, but things settled down somehow. However, later on I've read some bad news in the press, related to persecution of political activists and the role of telegram in that. I don't remember the details, but I remember those warning signs. And the cherry on the cake was disruption of telegram service during elections 2019 in Russia. Given that you need a phone number to register in telegram, guess who paid the debt and who now owns the userbase. So I dissuade everyone I know from using it.

[usrn]

It's probably because it doesn't encrypt group chats at all.

[Anunayj]

because Telegram doesn't end-to-end encrypt communications by default! If you want that you need to start a "secret" chat, which can only be accessed on that (mobile) device, (and cannot be backed up or recovered)

Forget metadata being protected. Though imo Telegram is great for any communication that does not need to be secret.

People have also expressed concern about flaws in the custom protocol used, though most of the concerns are related to metadata leaks than actual text message communication, which might be ok or not ok depending on your threat.

[Shadonototra]

this, it seems like what ever they don't/can't control/spy/backdoor is automatically tagged as bad/not secure

it is becoming very funny at this point