great advertisement for signal
Nail no.1 in the coffin for me was when this Durov guy sent an unsolicited telegram-wide message on election day in my country, claiming French interference in our elections.
This is nail no.2 in the coffin.
Guess I’ll get off my lazy arse and delete my telegram account now
now telegram is going to insert random information about South African White genocide to every conversation. or it will be in every recommended reply at least.
There goes my telegram account. Bye, you won’t be missed
I don’t know why people stuck with it. I’ve used it; I get that a lot of the initial success/hype was:
- It’s not owned by Meta
- “Putin hates Durov!”
- “Unlimited” storage (lots of people using it as free cloud storage, which is dumb if you value your files)
But your messages are not E2EE by default (only “Secret Chats”, which aren’t synced across devices)…Telegram (the organization) could always read your messages. I said this so many times and got called everything under the sun.
“Why would they care about my messages though?” ------> Because $300 Million.
This. The second Premium landed I was out, and it was slipping long before that.
Whelp. Same thought :(
I only use telegram to buy illegal iptv subscriptions. Is there a reason I would ever need grok in there?
Yes, because we’re only a few weeks away from Artificial General Intelligence, which will create an Artificial Superintelligence, and it’ll be just like in the hit cyberpunk novel, Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.
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Or Telegram.
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Uninstalled!
Telegram ASTOUNDS me.
Like, there’s been several instances of them outwardly admitting that their security sucks, not to use it for encrypted chats, that they just give logs away to world governments, and yet thousands of crypto bros and bots use telegram to function, EVEN ZLIBRARY, who could just as easily set up and use Matrix, has a Telegram bot for downloading books.
Their bot api is very easy to use. I have made some telegram bots because is so easy. Tried to do the same with WhatsApp and didn’t even get permission and api access.
Average Joes use mainstream things, if you want to do something accessible, these bots are the way. Ideally, you want them to download or use an app that does some hand holding. I’m all up to the fediverse but let’s be honest, it has some non intuitive things for today’s user, most were trained to understand and like centralized services. They vaguely understand and use emails today, and mostly for account creation of other platforms.
Disclaimer: haven’t tried to make signal bots, they are a thing?
No disrespect towards you or your response (which is a good response, btw) – but the Bot API being good means absolutely nothing when the core app is garbage. By “garbage”, I mean that it ignores basic best-practices (like not E2EE everything, which they claimed wasn’t possible with device sync – but look at FB Messenger, Signal, Whatsapp, etc all able to do it).
Nobody is allowed to ask me why that matters. Because the answer is $300 Million.
It matters because when you try to build something new, you choose the path of least resistance. I’m not justifying it, I’m explaining it. Also, guess who doesn’t gives shit about E2EE? Average Joes.
I agree with you, but still your idea of garbage is not shared by the general population. Remember that telegram got traction because it falsely claimed that it was secure, or at least more secure than WhatsApp.
Wondering how long has this been cooking? A year or so ago musk started attacking signal for no discernible reason and recommending telegram instead.
ew wtf, Telegram has been one of the less shittified ones :c
Honestly, Telegramm always seemed to me a bit shifty since I learnt E2EE for chats was opt-in.
Been saying this for years. Then they introduced Premium to “help fund things” (but they’re also taking $300 MILLION from Elon, and giving them access to user data.
So will basic features stop being paywalled now? Or are people going to have to keep paying to stop random people from messaging them?
not even available on desktop clients, or for group chats
First thing i’m doing is opening a channel to run up Grok API calls maliciously
So, a software that is owned by US politician is working together with software that has links to Russian government?
Federal government threatened Telegram and demanded a backdoor a while back, iirc.
You misunderstand. Elon is retired from US politics now, obviously, and will return to being a force of good!
Hasn’t Elon said that he’s “retiring” like every month 47 has been in office?
Just bullshit to try to appease Tesla investors.
Are we calling him a politician now? 😭
You should be using Signal anyway.
I think Telegram is more of a social media than a messenger.
In my experience, telegram is one of those “if someone asks you to go on this app, they’re trying to scam you” platforms. Flatly avoid.
Why did you delete your previous comment that has the exact same content?
In my experience, telegram is one of those “if someone asks you to go on this app, they’re trying to scam you” platforms. Flatly avoid.
Because I’m stupid (I convinced myself I wanted to say something slightly different, deleted the original, then while writing it differently decided it was better off as is. Yes I know I can edit)
What, like Instagram kind of thing?
Not really. It just group chats and some are used as news feeds.
Its one of those terrible UX where people force a tool to do something it’s not supposed to like Discord for forums etc.
Its basically used for piracy and drug markets for tech illiterate but somehow caught on.
One can say terrible, one can say ingenious.
A news feed with comments and a group chat are projections of the same object, thus you have all the events in one “community” in one place, seeing them always (more or less, because going to comments of a post you only see that post’s children and their children and so on).
Personally I think it’s much more convenient than Discord.
And the public opinion seems to be in TG’s favor for usability (except it exhausts me to see that many groups and checking them, so authors’ FB clone background definitely shows).
I think the market has decided that this UX is good. But technically TG is, 1) proprietary in fact despite open client source, 2) insecure, 3) starts getting overloaded with features by now.
I’d want a federated FOSS alternative. I’m actually thinking how one can do that (especially the part about sharing files, the TG way means they’ll have to be stored for long somewhere ; maybe one can have each user issue a fixed amount of tokens on registration, those tokens be passed by uploading user to the one providing storage, and somehow thus using local storage of users as a currency, for file storage only ; the thought is inspired by Redis and probably sucks, especially since in Redis tokens are for hash partitions ; it’s also inspired by BitTorrent reputation and tracker ratings, where you have to upload something to be able to download yadda-yadda) without making running a server a very expensive task. Probably should read something on how XMPP and IRC and other server-server connections work, but lazy.
Interesting even, can a FOSS federated TG alternative be just another Lemmy frontend. Again, the attached files part should be solved in some smarter way than storing them all on servers, people upload huge things to TG. A builtin bittorrent client is not a solution, cause one person sharing a file and going offline means that nobody can download it. So the previous idea with tokens may be not too bad.
Market has decided that this UX is good
Lol
Maybe you should start with real existing technologies when you do your analysis: rss, federation, graphql. Group chat is the most primitive of feed types and is incredibly outdated UX in 2025. Even RSS - technology from 1999 - has solved the issues telegram is still trying to solve now 26 years later.
RSS is a general standard, for everyone to use, TG is not. Yet it’s likely that more people use TG than RSS. That’s what I meant by market.
Group chat is the most primitive of feed types and is incredibly outdated UX in 2025.
That’s like saying that wheel is outdated when we have jet engines. What would you propose instead?
Even RSS - technology from 1999 - has solved the issues telegram is still trying to solve now 26 years later.
Which specific issues and in which regard?
I would like TG to have a tree view representation of discussions, a bit like what web forums have available. Or a view separated into pages, like the same thing, with n posts on one page and page numbers and visible post ids.
I don’t like its actual client or its UX in the sense of appearance and widgets. What I meant is that I like what it presents to the user in the sense of entities.
In particular, again, that a community is essentially one thing, where posts with comments and a group chat are projections of the same data. You can see new posts and comments in the group chat, all in one place.
You’re using appeal to popularity to claim that Telegram has good UX because more users use it which makes no sense unless you have A|B test that you can execute right now to prove your point.
Just because it’s popular does not mean it’s good especially when the market in this scenario has no choice or vote how the UX is implemented.
Which specific issues and in which regard?
The one you mentioned for starters - following multiple channels in a single feed.
Telegram has a terrible UX for social networking and feed following - it’s a private messaging app that has been hacked together into use case it was never made for in the first place and it really shows.
No it would be best to compare it to discord, except the UI is cleaner and much better.
Pretty much yes. It has channels so there are news channels, personal channels etc. At some point when I discovered Twitter for myself I hated it so much for not being able to simply read subscribed accounts just like telegram does it. It’s too convenient as a feeds app.
Like a light version of Discord
So, a messenger?
Nah, more like a better WhatsApp but with haters even worse than the WhatsApp haters.
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I cant schedule an appointment at the vet with signal.
Well if you tell them you are using Signal and they adopt it, you sure can.
What is your imaginary boundary here where Telegram makes this easier somehow?
The problem is not that I’m not using signal (I am), its that I also have to use telegram and\or whatsapp if I want to contact anyone without sending them an sms, or a pigeon.
So all this bloat still affects me, whether I “just use signal” or not.
I’m not sure what part of the world you’re in, so maybe there is a societal difference here, but last I checked, if you’re running a business, it’s not only run on chat apps. There are other venues to contact businesses to schedule things…
Central Asia, businesses here do not have websites. They put a listing on aggregators with a phone number and may be an instagram account.
Well sounds like a phone number is another option…
And make a call like a psycho? No thanks, Telegram it is (actually OP here is quite lucky, in my town it would be WhatsApp or Messenger only…).
Sure, if I want to pay per message/call. I could also hire a butler to do all my chores for me, alas I am not a Swedish royalty.
I doubt Signal is supported by their scheduling/desk software though, Telegram has pretty wide support.
there’s this old thing called the telephone
or if they’re insufficiently modern (in a good way) a website
“Hello sorry for calling you, can you repair a part of an electric oven? It looks like a thingy with a couple springs. No I can’t send you a photo on whatsapp, do you mind quickly installing signal? No? What about email? You’re going to respond in 3-5 business day? Yeah sure I can survive that long on raw potatoes”
If you can afford existing without big tech, I’m honestly jealous. I’m willing to go quite far for my principles (like I have a phone with graphene) but at a certain point life just gets too difficult. I’m barely above water on my adult-ing as it is 🤷♀️
I genuinely don’t understand what’s wrong with email in this situation? Stay on the phone with them until the email arrives?
If you can’t see what would bother me in that situation, me explaining it further will not help, sorry.
So you’re telling me that Grok is so bad that they have to pay developers to integrate it? How backwards. People are willing to pay for Grok’s competitors.
Or is xAI paying for access to Telegram conversations to train Grok?
This is the reason. Telegram has data and users that can be fed to the AI and they know it. Grok is hungry.
Well it’s gonna learn to post crypto spam ads and swastikas then. Which come to think of it… might be the point
What’s funny is the flipside to it… Telgram is absolutely fucking full of furries so grok’s gonna learn a shitload of gay leftist shit too.
This is the real take away from all this. xAI is trying hard to keep up with the big-boys and has to pay a shit ton of money just to be in the game. xAI’s revenue will be in the deep red for a long time at this rate.
to be fair, pretty much all ai is that bad these days :)
Telegram are being paid by xAI to use their product? Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?
I’m guessing the money flows in this direction because telegram actually has users.
The users must ask themselves if they’re the product, fucking Musk is paying for access to them.
You’re the product either way, free or not. Those days are gone.
I don’t use any of it, neither Telegram or LLMs
Having xAI accessing a billion of users conversations? They are going to have the most “educated” LLM. Also isn’t xAI getting subsidies from the government? Literalły workers of America are paying to spy, again
The funny thing is, half of Telegram is drugs, conspiracy nuts and really weird humour. The ai is going to be great, I can already see it.
AI companies paying or straight up buying other businesses to spread their disease has become their go-to strategy as of late.
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