[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