Agreed. I don’t see the appeal compared to Signal. Although, Signal is also sketchy with an operating cost in the tens of millions of dollars per year. Where does the money come from?
- 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly, signal is decent on all the platforms, while mobile clients for whatsapp is somewhat tolerable if you ignore the constant AI push. But the web/desktop client is a pain in the ass to use.
I agree on all the content related things but your argument was about speed.
I use whatsapp web every day at work.
The page. In my Firefox browser.
It's almost constantly open. Never had any issues with that.
The phone app just does what it's supposed to do and even on my Pixel6, it's just fast. I mean there is always faster but it's not even a second.
I use Whatsapp only because I have to. Privately, I prefer Signal. Works also great. Same with the windows app. Been using both since day 1. On a Pixel7Pro....
It's the gold standard for bad support: pretend the user has a problem.
There once was this thread on a blog for a windows XP pirated edition. Someone commented that something small didn't work. They replied in less than a minute, that's terrible! 10 minutes later the version was incremented and a new reply said: Try the new version! After 30 minutes the bug fix was confirmed.
They weren't trying to be funny but it still makes me laugh how it compares to Microsoft, the 3 trillion software company.
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.
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?
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?
The appeal of Telegram over Signal or WhatsApp is that it is not an American or BigTech service. (And, ofcourse, it's really good). Signal is funded by 2 rich American entrepreneurs who made their fortune when their services were acquired by Twitter (TextSecure / RedPhone) and Meta (WhatsApp), respectively. Whether it is indeed altruism behind this, you'll have to judge for yourself ...
> Signal is funded by 2 rich American entrepreneurs who made their fortune when their services were acquired by Twitter (TextSecure / RedPhone) and Meta (WhatsApp), respectively. Whether it is indeed altruism behind this, you'll have to judge for yourself ...
To be fair, Telegram is funded by billionaire Pavel Durov, co-founder of VK, the most popular social network in Russia and one of the most visited websites in the world.
I’ve always been under the impression that Signal is for secure, private chats and group chats amongst friends and small groups. While telegram is often used more like discord or irc, with “secure” and “private” group chats that are extremely large and semi-public. “Invite only” but invites are handed out easily. Those chats are pretty obviously not as secure, as basically anybody can join them and decrypt the chat. On the surface its somewhat more secure than discord, where discord will be scanning all chat content.
Signal users who want to use it with their agents are running an unofficial extracted-and-patched `signal-cli` off GitHub. It's based on an archived official Signal repo and then patched for years by some random accounts. It looks incredibly untrustworthy.
Meanwhile Telegram has bot support and added features specifically for interacting w/agents. It's incredibly easy to write clients and work with it. No one should use it, and I never would, but you can see why it's winning.
Signal's lack of features (like an official Signal CLI) and bots (even attached to existing phone numbers and limited to the owner) is making people less secure than they could be. And unfortunately there are no great alternatives.
Wait, the open source cli of an E2E encrypted messenger seems untrustworthy, but the official API of a completely unencrypted messenger seems trustworthy?
I guess "we can definitely spy on your messages" is a lot more honest than "we are very unlikely to spy on your messages", if it turns out spying takes place.
I've used and promoted Signal for years and I've recently become suspicious of them and their funding as well after looking into starting my own encrypted communications app.
It's not cheap sending dozens or hundreds of megabytes of video files or whatever ... whenever the user feels like it, mind you ... with a monetization strategy that's literally simply hoping that donations will cover it?
I was always under the impression Moxie who created Signal was well accepted in Information Security circles. But you bring up a good posit that running a service probably isn't cheap behind the scenes. Given that Signal is a unique identifier for anyone who uses it, maybe they have funding behind the scenes from Governments.
Telegram is important if you get your news from sources outside of the 'Anglo American empire'. People all over the planet use Telegram to curate their own news feeds and cultivate their own communities. This is generally done with a view to promote understanding rather than to spread misinformation. Telegram is great if you want the perspective of 'the other side' or 'both sides' if you 'trust but verify'.
Some people can get the Telegram app and never get to find any of these communities to never understand what Telegram is really about. Usually though, channel owners repost from other channels and promote channels they like. If you follow one channel then it should not be hard to find other channels in the way. You can also see what other people are subscribed to, depending on their privacy settings.
Importantly, there is no algorithm on a home page, urging you to sign up for promoted content.
As for 'where does the money come from', there are ways to subscribe to get a few more bells and whistles, with many that cultivate a community choosing to do so, in order to manage their channel(s). Few normal users pay up, and the app isn't paywalled or 'pay to post'.
There is a whole parallel universe of drug dealers and women that sell their bodies, all of which is a search away. I doubt these people are paying for premium accounts either.
IMHO only a modest amount of money is needed, sure, bandwidth has to be paid for, however, the app is already written and it is very good. I have no idea why the likes of Meta need tens of thousands of 'engineers' for optimising doom scrolling 'with AI'.
With Telegram, you could have 1% of 1M users paying $10 a year, meaning revenue of $100k a year. That would be okay if it was Pavel and his bro in his mum's basement with one server to pay for.
Scale this up to a billion and now you are talking. Since the app scales, are more staff needed? A few devs, but not that many managers since the founders are technical and therefore don't need the useless hordes of non-technical managers. Yet the money is now 1% of a billion. Multiply that by $10 a year, every year, and Pavel ends up asking finding his Bugatti on the moon.
This sounds manageable to me, no need to run in debt, have shareholders or be beholden to vested interests.
At Meta et al., there is a need to feed the greed of the stock market, pay billions in debt, do billions in share buybacks, do the AI nonsense, keep the advertisers happy, keep America's Greatest Ally happy, sign a secret deal with Five Eyes and the list goes on.
I have never met Pavel or the Meta guy, whatever his name is, but I suspect the former is getting more out of life than the latter.
wait ... when was it not sketchy? Did people not know the intentions behind it? Damn, wild. I get that there are some people that may use it as a communication medium for benign purposes, but it's filth all the way down.
Agreed. I don’t see the appeal compared to Signal. Although, Signal is also sketchy with an operating cost in the tens of millions of dollars per year. Where does the money come from?
- 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
It's usually where i get news about custom LineageOS builds for various devices
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.
Durov was smart enough to let community build open source clients and use them. And to make internally built clients open source.
Most people use official clients and AFAIK they don't really accept any external contributions? All clients were fully developed by employees.
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.
I’ve never used the telegram app. What do you like about it compared to signal / WhatsApp?
- 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.
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
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
Signal and WhatsApp are bloated and slow in comparison.
What is slow?
I don't understand what there is to accelerate.
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.
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.
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.
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
Exactly, signal is decent on all the platforms, while mobile clients for whatsapp is somewhat tolerable if you ignore the constant AI push. But the web/desktop client is a pain in the ass to use.
I agree on all the content related things but your argument was about speed.
I use whatsapp web every day at work. The page. In my Firefox browser. It's almost constantly open. Never had any issues with that. The phone app just does what it's supposed to do and even on my Pixel6, it's just fast. I mean there is always faster but it's not even a second.
I use Whatsapp only because I have to. Privately, I prefer Signal. Works also great. Same with the windows app. Been using both since day 1. On a Pixel7Pro....
There are three people in this thread with this "personal" problem.
It's the gold standard for bad support: pretend the user has a problem.
There once was this thread on a blog for a windows XP pirated edition. Someone commented that something small didn't work. They replied in less than a minute, that's terrible! 10 minutes later the version was incremented and a new reply said: Try the new version! After 30 minutes the bug fix was confirmed.
They weren't trying to be funny but it still makes me laugh how it compares to Microsoft, the 3 trillion software company.
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.
Could you give me one for Android which is really fast? I'd try that out on a phone with whatsapp and signal.
Also, what does "fast" mean? Fast on start?
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?
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?
>> why pay
Both WhatsUp & Telegram are completely free to use.
Telegram has premium features, but they are tangential to chatting & average use.
Probably still doesn't beat ripcord
The appeal of Telegram over Signal or WhatsApp is that it is not an American or BigTech service. (And, ofcourse, it's really good). Signal is funded by 2 rich American entrepreneurs who made their fortune when their services were acquired by Twitter (TextSecure / RedPhone) and Meta (WhatsApp), respectively. Whether it is indeed altruism behind this, you'll have to judge for yourself ...
> Signal is funded by 2 rich American entrepreneurs who made their fortune when their services were acquired by Twitter (TextSecure / RedPhone) and Meta (WhatsApp), respectively. Whether it is indeed altruism behind this, you'll have to judge for yourself ...
To be fair, Telegram is funded by billionaire Pavel Durov, co-founder of VK, the most popular social network in Russia and one of the most visited websites in the world.
I’ve always been under the impression that Signal is for secure, private chats and group chats amongst friends and small groups. While telegram is often used more like discord or irc, with “secure” and “private” group chats that are extremely large and semi-public. “Invite only” but invites are handed out easily. Those chats are pretty obviously not as secure, as basically anybody can join them and decrypt the chat. On the surface its somewhat more secure than discord, where discord will be scanning all chat content.
Signal users who want to use it with their agents are running an unofficial extracted-and-patched `signal-cli` off GitHub. It's based on an archived official Signal repo and then patched for years by some random accounts. It looks incredibly untrustworthy.
Meanwhile Telegram has bot support and added features specifically for interacting w/agents. It's incredibly easy to write clients and work with it. No one should use it, and I never would, but you can see why it's winning.
Signal's lack of features (like an official Signal CLI) and bots (even attached to existing phone numbers and limited to the owner) is making people less secure than they could be. And unfortunately there are no great alternatives.
Wait, the open source cli of an E2E encrypted messenger seems untrustworthy, but the official API of a completely unencrypted messenger seems trustworthy?
I guess "we can definitely spy on your messages" is a lot more honest than "we are very unlikely to spy on your messages", if it turns out spying takes place.
Apparently it's funded by your friendly neighbor.
I've used and promoted Signal for years and I've recently become suspicious of them and their funding as well after looking into starting my own encrypted communications app.
It's not cheap sending dozens or hundreds of megabytes of video files or whatever ... whenever the user feels like it, mind you ... with a monetization strategy that's literally simply hoping that donations will cover it?
That's insane.
I was always under the impression Moxie who created Signal was well accepted in Information Security circles. But you bring up a good posit that running a service probably isn't cheap behind the scenes. Given that Signal is a unique identifier for anyone who uses it, maybe they have funding behind the scenes from Governments.
Does Signal also have channels, groups etc?
1) more users 2) bots
Telegram is important if you get your news from sources outside of the 'Anglo American empire'. People all over the planet use Telegram to curate their own news feeds and cultivate their own communities. This is generally done with a view to promote understanding rather than to spread misinformation. Telegram is great if you want the perspective of 'the other side' or 'both sides' if you 'trust but verify'.
Some people can get the Telegram app and never get to find any of these communities to never understand what Telegram is really about. Usually though, channel owners repost from other channels and promote channels they like. If you follow one channel then it should not be hard to find other channels in the way. You can also see what other people are subscribed to, depending on their privacy settings.
Importantly, there is no algorithm on a home page, urging you to sign up for promoted content.
As for 'where does the money come from', there are ways to subscribe to get a few more bells and whistles, with many that cultivate a community choosing to do so, in order to manage their channel(s). Few normal users pay up, and the app isn't paywalled or 'pay to post'.
There is a whole parallel universe of drug dealers and women that sell their bodies, all of which is a search away. I doubt these people are paying for premium accounts either.
IMHO only a modest amount of money is needed, sure, bandwidth has to be paid for, however, the app is already written and it is very good. I have no idea why the likes of Meta need tens of thousands of 'engineers' for optimising doom scrolling 'with AI'.
With Telegram, you could have 1% of 1M users paying $10 a year, meaning revenue of $100k a year. That would be okay if it was Pavel and his bro in his mum's basement with one server to pay for.
Scale this up to a billion and now you are talking. Since the app scales, are more staff needed? A few devs, but not that many managers since the founders are technical and therefore don't need the useless hordes of non-technical managers. Yet the money is now 1% of a billion. Multiply that by $10 a year, every year, and Pavel ends up asking finding his Bugatti on the moon.
This sounds manageable to me, no need to run in debt, have shareholders or be beholden to vested interests.
At Meta et al., there is a need to feed the greed of the stock market, pay billions in debt, do billions in share buybacks, do the AI nonsense, keep the advertisers happy, keep America's Greatest Ally happy, sign a secret deal with Five Eyes and the list goes on.
I have never met Pavel or the Meta guy, whatever his name is, but I suspect the former is getting more out of life than the latter.
There's a lot of sketchy things about telegram but I'm confused, what exactly in this article seems sketchy to you?
A fee based service without site redundancy for one?
[dead]
wait ... when was it not sketchy? Did people not know the intentions behind it? Damn, wild. I get that there are some people that may use it as a communication medium for benign purposes, but it's filth all the way down.
We aren’t all perpetually online people interested in gossip.