Comment by jbverschoor

> I never understood Telegram.

Telegram has amazing user experience. It's available for any platform, the messages are always backed up, the apps are high quality and responsive and they have great features for group messaging and group organization. They even give you a library you can build your own Telegram client with.

It's *great to use* - something that Signal people never prioritized and always rather pushed their sometimes horrible preferences down peoples throats.

Different jurisdiction to what? :)

My UK-based employer seems nonchalant about expecting me to agree to be subject to the laws and courts of California in order to receive internal company newsletters delivered via a 3rd party.

While I agree this is harmful to the user (or unpatriotic, if you prefer), it's extremely common thanks to the state of the global economy since the 1980s.

I'd wager that 99% of people in the UK would now be unable to contact their friends and family without relying on at least 1 large U.S. company.

Signal was late to market, and as much as I hate this in principle, it is unfortunate state of things.

Whatsapp has caught internationally but it's Facebook and its desktop app is a crashing dumpster fire.

Viber is another popular app, but has too many ads and visual noise.

Telegram has caught on as a good alternative for all, because it does everything good. Apps are functional, fast and stable. Interface is clean. Also Telegram channels were genius idea to increasing market penetration. Nowadays all social networks are heavily abused by bot abusing abuse feature (hehe). Basically any post containing "politics" let alone "war" content can be taken down by abuse spam. Be it facebook, twitter or reddit, all the same. So political and social "influencers" are rapidly creating backup or new main channels in the Telegram to post "controversial" information, and people reading news and blogs in Telegram will also message there too.

Anonymous groups are one killer app: you can easily join interest groups without leaking your phone number or other obvious ID (Facebook identity etc).

Of course, it's not really "anonymous" if a nation-state wants to come after you, but that's not the threat model for most people.

telegram doesn't make me share my phonenumber with everyone. i would use signal, but sharing my phone number is a no go.

maybe now that signal is switching off SMS it can implement user handles that people can share instead of their number. once they do i'll give it a try

It has channels, which are a great middle ground between Twitter and Substack.

Telegram is now more to Discord than friends and family messaging app. You use Telegram and Discord similar on how you use Reddit or Hacker News.

> It's insecure by default

Any proof? If you're calling MTProto 2.0 'insecure' then you should know it's already been audited multiple times in the last 2 years. If insecure means not using E2EE, then I guess the whole infrastructure of the internet is insecure.

> It's not even anonymous

It's more anonymous than Signal is. It requires phone number to register but you don't need to share a phone number or any personal detail to communicate with people.

> I never understood Telegram.

A lot of piracy stuff on it.