Comment by writtenone
8 hours ago
Telegram has channels, which are a one-to-many (thousands or millions of people) chat feature letting you have basically your own social feed.
Lots of people follow channels for on the ground news reporting, especially since it's not censored or "advertiser friendly" like social media companies are incentivised to be.
The onboarding experience with Telegram is extremely easy, which is useful when dealing with non-technical audiences who might not even have a social media account (but do have smart phones).
My Bible study class has grown enough that standard SMS/MMS group texts are hitting up against Verizon's carrier limit (I think we have only two people who use Verizon), and RCS isn't an option. Telegram wasn't my first choice, but it was a lot easier for everyone, and it supports tablets out-of-the-box.
Matrix also has that.
Matrix clients do not allow to even select several messages to delete them at once. Matrix is a superior concept to proprietary Signal, Whatsapp, Telegram etc but the implementation needs some help yet and UI is far behind.
No it doesn't. Matrix has large groups, but they are limited:
1. You must join a group to see its contents. This puts a stupid "{user} joined the room" message in the room for everyone to see. Channel membership is anonymous.
2. Channels generate a public feed that doesn't require any special software to read from (see Durov: https://t.me/s/durov). Matrix requires a client of some kind, all clients are clunky at best and none have a public view.
3. Channels support millions of readers. Matrix rooms literally cannot do this, and rooms frequently get out of sync due to federation.
It's just extremely scamming or disinformation friendly