[isatty]

- Telegram has exemplary fast, native clients on most platforms I’ve used it on

- Cat stickers

- Did I mention it has the best native clients out of all the messaging apps? It boggles the mind why other companies can’t get this done.

[mdasen]

I'll add:

- Telegram had usernames in 2014 before Signal added them a decade later, allowing people to chat without sharing their phone number

- Telegram has unencrypted chats which allow for giant chat rooms of 200,000+ and channels with millions of subscribers. Signal warns about performance issues when you have more than 150 people in a group. Telegram isn't just a messenger - it's often used as a social publishing platform like Instagram.

I don't use Telegram and use Signal a lot, but I also understand why other people use Telegram: the same reason they use Instagram.

[inigyou]

Ah the classic tension between encryption and large groups. You can have e2ee or you can have large groups. Not both.

Large groups usually don't need e2ee anyway as the adversary can just join the group - anyone can - that's how they get large.

[maqp]

Yup but the issue is Telegram already has two separate groups, normal groups (3-200 users), and supergroups (200-200,000 users). For end-to-end encrypted groups, Threema supports 256 members, Signal 1000, Wire 2000, and Matrix has no upper limit. Surely Telegram could deploy E2EE for normal groups. Nobody assumes groups with more than 200 members are private anyway.

[darksim905]

I can't say that I've ever seen genuine uses like this that you mention unless it's a 'community' for adult content or sketchy content. Is this that common?

[siffin]

Not a regular telegram user here but I follow a Ukranian guy who hand builds led bulbs/products by hand. He has a telegram group chat where he enthusiastically posts pictures of everything he's doing, it's great.

[darksim905]

Curious seeing as he's in Ukranian, is there also a mindset/distrust of U.S. centric products/services and wanting to feel safe posting updates of whatever it is someone may be doing? Cool!

[siffin]

He fled Ukraine actually and setup shop in Scandanavia, in Sweden I think. He doesn't seem political at all, he just does lights. https://t.me/sunlikenews

[konart]

Uses for what? Here is Russia many companies have (or had) groups (not Slack or something else but Telegram), most communities exists solely in Telegram, most news channes are also there.

Not to mention you create ANY kind of bot without any trouble.

I guess we just live in two different worlds. Like with China where WeChat is the default. (except we now have fucking Max instead).

[ivm]

AvaloniaUI has their community in Telegram, and there are other tech ones. Endless meme channels in different languages too. Also, most of Russian-speaking emigrant groups & news channels are in Telegram, some of them with tens of thousands of participants.

[KomoD]

I'm in groups/channels about stuff like memes, news, hosting providers, software/OSS, or niche/hobby topics, and some of those groups are massive (100k+). I don't think any of those are sketchy or adult.

[tapland]

It's usually where i get news about custom LineageOS builds for various devices

[hbn]

Unfortunately the upselling has got kind of annoying and in-your-face the past few years

But indeed their native clients are great, especially on iOS. It legitimately feels more native and intuitive than Apple's own Messages app. Animations run at a smooth, stable framerate. Never hitches jumping between conversations. One of the greatest apps ever made.

[SXX]

Durov was smart enough to let community build open source clients and use them. And to make internally built clients open source.

[petu]

Most people use official clients and AFAIK they don't really accept any external contributions? All clients were fully developed by employees.

[tiagod]

That's not it. I believe all the clients were built by employees. What he did was give each client to a very small, experienced team.

[maqp]

Too bad he gave the job of company cryptography team to his brother, Nikolai who's an expert in geometry, not cryptography.

[Valodim]

Simple to do when you don't care about e2e and clients can just show data they receive to the user with little logic of their own. It is a world of difference in complexity.

Those nice things are what you get when you're fine having all your data (messages, images, files) forever in plaintext on servers owned by some Russian rich guy.

Pray there will never be a telegram.zip torrent.

[josephg]

I’ve never used the telegram app. What do you like about it compared to signal / WhatsApp?

[tjohns]

- Messages send quickly and reliably, even under poor and sometimes hostile network conditions. Telegram just seems to work even when other chat apps struggle.

- Telegram uses usernames instead of phone numbers by default, which is good if you're using it as an IRC replacement instead of an SMS replacement.

- You can have the client open on essentially unlimited devices simultaneously, including a web app if you need it.

- Messages can be edited at any point after sending with no expiry.

- You can schedule messages to send later, or send a message silently so it doesn't wake people up.

- Different group types - announcement channels, Discord-style groups with sub-channels, flexible moderator roles, etc. (I believe WhatsApp has some of this.)

- Support for bots, which is also very helpful for managing large communities.

- Community-created, sharable stickers. Seriously, people underestimate how nice these are.

The downside is that a lot of this requires state to be stored on the Telegram servers, so most chat's aren't E2E encrypted. (They do have an option for E2E encrypted private 1:1 chats, but you lose most of the polish by using that.)

Also, the official apps are open source, so you can modify them if needed.

[opem]

I'll add a few more:

- insanely fast search, chat history browsing and in app navigation - unlimited unencrypted cloud storage, your chats and docs always stays available - ability to send very large files - ability to host large video and voice chats - chat automation - auto translation and transcription - mini apps - open source client, with lots of customization - phone number less sign up (you can purchase a burner number from them and sign up with that, I guess it costs their crypto (ton) tho) - sending gifts

[sharpshadow]

WhatsApp will have usernames too in the near future and one will be able to reach out to a WhatsApp user solely by username hiding the phone number. One can create a username already reverse it. Sounds very similar to the Telegram username approach but we will see.

[darksim905]

- Telegram uses usernames instead of phone numbers by default, which is good if you're using it as an IRC replacement instead of an SMS replacement.

---

What? When you register, I'm pretty sure it requires putting in a phone number that preferably isn't a VoIP line and not a username. It's been that way any time I've tried to use the service on mobile.

Scheduled messages have been a thing for a long time on Signal, but they seem to be only on mobile, which is wild to me.

I would posit that Signal is more for individual to individual. I'm seeing in these comments that telegram is clearly a lot more community centric, ala Discord lite than I realized.

[tjohns]

Yes, you need to register with a phone number, but publicly you'll show up as your @username and that's how most people will interact with you.

And I agree, I think yours is an accurate assessment. Telegram is indeed much more community centric.

[stavros]

That's almost the same as Signal, though on Signal you don't show up as anything. People need to get a username from you to share your contact.

[MC995]

Signing up for an account requires a phone number, but you can keep that hidden from other uses and use the username for everything.

It lets you keep your number private from everyone else you're chatting with.

[isatty]

Signal and WhatsApp are bloated and slow in comparison.

[Krasnol]

What is slow?

I don't understand what there is to accelerate.

[0x457]

In Telegram, I can open a chat, find a sticker, send a sticker, post a circle story, and shitpost in another group chat. All while WhatsApp loads my chat history. That is on any platform and any network condition, except for fully offline.

Their desktop apps are just Qt and not WebView inside a Qt. Mobile apps are native and not React.

[Krasnol]

Ok I don't know what finding a sticker has to do with speed.

Whatsapp and Signal have stickers too. Kids use them sometimes. They are like in a list. You open the list. Chose one and then it appears. Don't know what there is to accelerate.

...and yeah, whatever language they are. I don't really care because, as said: there is no problem...

[0x457]

> Ok I don't know what finding a sticker has to do with speed.

You don't know that it takes time to load graphical assets? And you can't comprehend that I'm using it as an example of how much more stuff Telegram clients manage to do/load in the time it takes WhatsApp to load one screen?

[forgotmypw17]

The main things that are slow are loading the app and opening the app, loading the messages, and receiving the messages. On my phone, this is much slower than Telegram, and on my computer, the WhatsApp program doesn't even work have the time -- it just gets stuck in the loading process.

Signal is not as bad, but can still take a minute or two to update everything on my computer. The phone app is better.

[Krasnol]

Sounds more like your personal problem.

I live in Germany and use both. None do that and as I'm "the IT guy" for many people at work an din private, I'd have heard about it. Hell, the whole continent would have heard about it as whatsapp is widely used.

My Signal also doesn't do that.

[econ]

Since the whatsapp cliënt on desktop was replaced by a web wrapper it's even worse.

I don't even remember how the previous cliënt did it but my spelling suggestions are in English (as is the OS) but my chats are all in Dutch. Most words have a red underline.

It recently gave up downloading images. Turned out it was no longer allowed to write to its own folder. Not sure if this should be blamed on MS but from the (many) user perspective it just stopped working.

It keeps limited chat history which makes it inferior to IRC.

It badly wants you to use ai.

It has a spam channel where it promotes it self.

The phone app is decent tho

[opem]

Not at all, telegram clients in every platform are much much faster than whatsapp, signal etc. on the same platform. Although, this is more visible on older devices and on poor network conditions, I clearly see a difference in my newer devices too.

[Paracompact]

There are three people in this thread with this "personal" problem.

[cardiffspaceman]

From USA, one mainly needs WhatsApp to chat with Latin Americans. Judging from the billboards I have seen in Argentina and Uruguay, there are a lot of Latin Americans getting WA free. So of course, why pay more?

[forgotmypw17]

I'm confused about how it is that because it hasn't happened to you or anyone you know, it's my personal problem that closed-source software that I have no capability to modify is working slowly or failing to work at all?

[asdff]

Probably still doesn't beat ripcord