Comment by Yizahi

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.