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Comment by misiek08

16 hours ago

Still we are using it, because UX kills any other app and people that are (probably) behind it will cause almost no harm to casual, not-interesting people :)

And yes, I know that by default chats are not E2E, that phone number has way too many effects on accounts etc. Still, UX and agencies interested in important people are more welcome than data selling, ad-based companies.

11 comments

misiek08

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lxgr  14 hours ago

What a bizarre threat model. Why would you rather have your data with who knows who than just your metadata?

And what UX problems exactly is Telegram solving that its many competitors aren’t? I hear this all the time, but I use both Telegram and WhatsApp and I haven’t found anything lacking in the latter, UX wise.

  • maxgashkov  13 hours ago

    > and I haven’t found anything lacking in the latter, UX wise

    I'm sorry if I'll sound condescending, but you probably don't use either frequently enough. With telegram it's the little (and sometimes not so little) things, e.g.:

      - voice message transcription
  - you can select part of the message via long-press and use it as a quote when responding
  - massively more complex formatting possible
  - bots as the first class citizens not gated behind some bullshit 'Business' KYC/subscription
  - is not crippled by prohibiting system-level phonebook access like whatsapp
  - extreme flexibility in managing large groups, mostly due to the bot point above
  - and many more

    All of the above does not excuse lack of e2e by default, this is almost embarrassing in 2026 now, but Telegram is the most polished IM experience of all the apps I have tried.

    • lxgr  12 hours ago

      I use them daily, so we might just have different priorities.

      Bot access is definitely better in Telegram; that’s what I sometimes use it for.

      WhatsApp has voice message transcription now, but fortunately I don’t receive many. (I consider it pretty rude to put the effort of messaging on the recipient because the sender can’t be bothered to type or transcribe on their side.)

      Everything else you mentioned is a minor inconvenience to me. Knowing the provider can’t mine my message data more than makes up for that.

  • Kinrany  2 hours ago

    I lost access to my WhatsApp history multiple times. This never happened to me anywhere else. This is admittedly an example of WhatsApp UX being terrible, not Telegram UX being great.

  • zahrevsky  9 hours ago

    I agree with maxgashkov about the UX. Just wanted to add that the list of good UX features is much, MUCH longer than the one maxgashkov provided.

  • skeledrew  10 hours ago

    For me it isn't the UX really. I was sold on it NOT being WhatsApp, etc, and then I stayed for the unlimited free storage for life (have a virtual FS built on it). Definitely ain't nobody else offering that.

maqp  16 hours ago

"will cause almost no harm to casual, not-interesting people"

Yeah same can be said for Facebook and WhatsApp that Durov vehemently claims should not be trusted with user's data. Maybe it's a ploy for the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia to get the data of people.

Also, Telegram doesn't have to sell it's users if it's an FSB honeypot.

  • mschuster91  13 hours ago

    Well, it makes sense from a threat modeling perspective. If you're Russian, you should use Whatsapp because it is unlikely Whatsapp will cooperate with the Russian dictatorship, but in Western countries, you can assume that anything from Meta, Google or Apple that's in any way useful (and even if it's just metadata) can and will end up in the data lakes at the NSA.

    • maqp  2 hours ago

      False dichotomy. Nobody's forcing you to use proprietary messaging app like WhatsApp in the West. FOSS tools like Signal are the norm in privacy circles.