Comment by as1mov
1 year ago
Anecdotal evidence, so take this with a grain of salt - I work with a bunch of people from Ukraine and almost all of them exclusively use Telegram to keep up with the news and family back home. From talking to them for a while, it's mostly because it's free, has excellent support for sync across multiple devices (including audio, video and other media), has support for proxies to circumvent any kind of blocking, public channels for news updates.
Honestly it would be better if Telegram dropped the facade of having E2EE. It's generally very low on the priority list of most people anyway, as much as it would hurt anyone reading this, but that's the truth. People are not using it for secure messaging, but for a better UX and reliability.
EDIT: Telegram does require a phone number to sign up.
Ideally they should really use something like jami. https://jami.net/
> doesn't require any personal identifier
Do they still not require ID when you buy a SIM card in Ukraine?
Actually I was wrong. Just checked and Telegram does require a phone number to sign up. I haven't used it myself much, but was relaying the general reasons why regular people use it.
You need it to register, but afaik it's not shown to anyone in any way.
You can just grab any prepaid SIM and use it if that's your style
7 replies →
yes, you can just get a prepaid SIM virtually anywhere. though there is an option to add your ID for security purposes