Honestly, Telegram sucks. Use Signal for private communications and Matrix for groups/communities.
It's not great if security is your main goal for organizing, but it has a better user experience than most chat apps. Especially if cross platform chatting is important to you.
I don't understand why people like it so much, I tried it and found the experience pretty bad. Signal is a million times better and easier to use, and Matrix isn't that hard to figure out either.
I started using it about 8-9 years ago at this point, back when the options were FB messenger or whatsapp. Both were trash and limited in comparison.
I only use signal for work but I find the app clunky and unintuitive. Telegram, being a somewhat privacy nightmare, but not connected to a big data broker company, also gives me the ability to search through a decade of messages to find an old joke, a picture shared, etc.
Telegram is simple enough that I can tell my aging gen x parents and apathetic zoomer siblings to install it and there's nearly zero friction to them logging in and receiving messages. It solved the problem of being added to a new fucked up imessage groupchat every other week as an android user.
- You can schedule messages
- Have supergroups, subgroups, broadcasts, admin roles in groups,...
- Channels can be configured in various ways. For example, you can post messages and choose the type of previews links render.
- You can add voting options to posts
- Members of the channel can only reply in threads so the replies are bundled.
- You can decide wheter new group members can view chat history or not.
- Members can be muted.
- Bots can be built withing the app
- Chats can be arranged in folders *...
I could go on.
No I think you are just stupid. I'm not even American lol. What does this have to do with racism? I don't care about the nationality or ethnicity of the developers, but about the country from which the company operates or has ties to.
Ok, I see. Telegram tries to combine Discord, WhatsApp and WeChat, but it isn't a great replacement for either of them.
Discord has groups, chanels, threaded conversations, allows you to mute people, great support for bots, folders, etc. Signal is much better for private chats though, it has a very secure encryption protocol and enables E2EE by default and is very focused on privacy in general. Btw Signal also allows scheduling messages. I tried Telegram for both groups/chanels and private chats and I found it really annoying to have my groups and channels in the same app as my normal conversations. Just use Signal and Discord/Matrix/Revolt.
I get it. That's why I use Plus messenger. It's a better, more customisable UI. Private chats, groups and channels are on a different page, if you want it.
Unfortunately I use Discord, WhatsApp, Signal, Element (Matrix) and SimpleX all combined because my contacts are spread out. Looking forward to secure interoperability.
Plus Messenger looks proprietary. You might be interested in Beeper once it's released, it let's you use all your messaging platforms in one app. And it's supposed to be secure and open-source.
Matrix is good for personal communications too The us companies made you to use phone numbers for chatting Id's are convenient
I mean, sure, you can use Matrix for personal chats. It's perfectly secure, but it's not as easy to use as Signal. For example, if I told my grandma to install Element and send me her Matrix ID, she would be really confused. Signal is very easy to use, and the user experience is basically the same as on mainstream platforms like WhatsApp. I also don't think that the phone number requirement is a US thing, as Telegram also has it. Signal only requires phone numbers to prevent spam, but they recently introduced usernames, so you don't have to give people your phone number in order for them to message you.
Element is just a piece of shit. Matrix is fine for almost all use cases. If you actually need metadata protection use Session.
The old version of Element ain't great, but it is currently being replaced with a complete new, rewritten app called Element X. Check it out, it's really awesome. Session isn't good at protecting metadata, as it removes important parts of the Signal protocol, in order to work on a decentralized network. Just using Signal is probably the best solution for private communications.
You know Telegram is secure when every government in the world is trying to ban it.
Good luck ban it, Telegram runs everywhere without playstore and with proxy.
It indeed empowers common people by distributing full seasons of series all in one place in a somewhat user friendly way without "10 chicks in 10mt" popups.
A bunch of my friends, who don't even know how to install an adblocker, have a very rich catalog of things there.
Also, it is more difficult for a telegram channel to be banned than a website.
Sticker packs are a gateway drug to, well, drugs. Which you can buy on telegram too of course.
:)
I make my own thank you very much. Sticker packs are a right of passage to navigation on Telegram. We also have the gif game.
I think we've lasted 20mins of replying in gifs to each other, in context. Is a very hard "game".
So are Signal, Element, Revolt and many other apps. What's to special about Telegram?
This is one of the rare things where the Spanish left and right agree, for different reasons.
Simplifying a lot:
- The left generally supports culture, actors, theatre, writers, Spanish made movies. They see piracy as a threat to the earnings of those people.
- The right has historically cut any sorts of subsidies to the "culture creators", but they see piracy as a threat to the publishing, TV (...) industries.
They both support SGAE, which translates cleanly to the General Society of Authors and Editors, who protects their interests by charging fees to everyone who dares look at copyrighted work.
- You own a bar and you play TV, Radio, or Spotify? You have to pay SGAE.
- You buy a computer, part of the money goes to SGAE.
- You buy a blank CD, DVD, Hard Drive, you pay SGAE (because they know you will put copyrighted material there, and if you don't, well, fuck you)
It's a fucked up system and I don't know if things have changed in the past few years as I don't live in Spain anymore. But it honestly feels like a prosecution of the population who is so evil and trying to destroy Spanish Culture.
