Comment by yesco
14 hours ago
I like Telegram because it gets my friends & family to not do everything in SMS or iMessage. If I'm the only one using it, what's the point after all? Feature-wise, the app is nice to use, and one I can use on all platforms, even Linux.
Since it has a public API, I can easily make a custom frontend if I ever want to. Most social media does not offer this or tries to lock you into their shitty ecosystem.
I basically just treat it as unencrypted, but the pretend encryption features at least puts the company in a position where blatantly selling data would be a liability. In this respect, I place it on the same level as WhatsApp. Because even if WhatsApp has solid encryption, all it takes is one forced update from Meta to undo all that. They are like the inverse of each other.
My uncle is the only one I know who refused to use Telegram, insisting Signal was better and because he didn't want to use something with vague connections to Russia. Yet even he did not actually use Signal, and simply insisted if we should all switch to something it's either that or he sticks to SMS. So well, when I couldn't sell Signal to anyone else, Telegram it is, sorry uncle, but Verizon is pretty transparent about how they sell all my data.
> vague connections to Russia
Vague only if you don't follow the news. Telegram has added "third-party verification" [1] around January 2025 which conveniently and accidentally coincided with time when Russian authorities made it mandatory to register social network channels having more than 10K subscribers (I was secretly hoping Telegram would instead hide the subscriber count). Such channels are required to add a government bot with high privileges for verification. Note that announce for 3P verification doesn't mention Russia at all and contains some unrealistic examples instead, like a fictional game "Great Theft Starship" channel verified by "Bug-free Agency". Who on Earth would need that.
But to be fair, the western companies are the same, once government hinted they need more control, the companies rushed to introduce face-based "age verification" which allows identification. I would rather use some other body part for this.
[1] https://telegram.org/verify#third-party-verification
That's because Russia/Ukraine/Belarus are heavily on Telegram, everything is there, all blogs, chats, memes, friends etc. since the US sites are almost-blocked and the Russian ones (VK, RuTube etc.) have been managed down to complete unusability. They couldn't afford losing the key blogs because of this law since Russia is heavily pushing Max messenger and there was a chance that it would be the only permitted thing.
People using Telegram doesn't bother me. People calling Telegram secure or "more secure than Signal" does.
But I'm curious, what makes Telegram an easier sell to your friends and family? I've gotten most people to switch over to Signal and the hardest problem is just getting them to use another app. I would be surprised if the API is the killer feature lol. And very few people seem to be concerned with the phone number thing with Signal. So I'm just curious, what is the features that normal people are missing?
> Since it has a public API, I can easily make a custom frontend if I ever want to.
Note that you need to get an API key for that, and there are additional conditions for getting it (for example, you cannot remove ads in your version, you cannot remove Instagram-like "stories", and so on).