Telegram is just actually superior in terms of features I don't get it.
People don't choose, people use whatever most people around them use. Whatsapp and telegram are both centralized, and shouldn't be trusted because, by the nature of it, they can (and eventually will) turn user-hostile.
Messengers come and go, if we really want to make some progress in this area, we should embrace federated and p2p protocols as the logical evolution. Anything else is just wasting time and user privacy.
I don't understand the love for Telegram.
In the short period of using it I had so much BS come through by scammers/spammers - both as DMs and group messages. I've rarely had that with WhatsApp.
In my eyes WhatsApp is far better than Telegram. And Signal is far greater than WhatsApp. The only thing I wish Signal had was inbuilt GIFs; it's not that much of an issue on mobile but it's a pain on desktop.
Telegram is more user friendly than Whatsapp, it's clients are open source and has a decent desktop app.
It's way better than Zuck's trash.
That's interesting I never had that experience with telegram. It's been cust as "clean" as Whatsapp for me
We don't choose which app we use. Our friends, family, and colleagues do.
I could live with Signal's functionality, but there barely anybody there.
a) because it's what everyone I know uses
b) telegram is not end-to-end encrypted by default. And not end-to-end encrypted at all for group chats. That's kind of a dealbreaker. Telegram is one of the last messaging apps I'd recommend.
It's also closed source and doesn't really specify the specifics of its crypto implementation or really even the underlying technology.
Edit - I was apparently mistaken or my information is outdated. MTProto is indeed open source, though I swear that hasn't always been the case.
In my country whatsapp messenger can and will be seen by the government if there is a request. Have heard it many times. I don't think any messenger or anything you write is actually secure or actually private. We just came to terms with that.
I use email with GnuPG. Everything else is woefully insecure. BTW, I have no friends.
WhatsApp was there first and it was useful in countries where you paid for each individual SMS.
people use the messaging app that their friends are on
doesn't matter if it's objectively terribleTelegram is worse than WhatsApp in terms of security. It doesn’t even use audited encryption by default.
The perceived usefulness of a network, platform, or communication protocol increases with its relative adoption. That's known as "network effect", and network effect is at strongest for anything regarding direct communication - such as messaging platforms.
In other words: WhatsApp is used by lots of people, and this discourages people to migrate over better alternatives, like Signal (my choice) or Telegram (OP's).
Half of the people I regularly talk to are on WhatsApp. I don't like it but that's reality, it's hard to get them to migrate because this means that people THEY talk to would have to do the same. Also a good chunk of them use rakuten Viber. Now why do they use THAT? It's bloated, ad-ridden, and buggy. Almost nobody I know is on telegram. In fact most are still using Facebook messenger.
Simply because everyone is using WhatsApp. And people want to use something that will let them be able to reach almost all their contacts.
Yet I do prefer & use Threema.
Most people don't care that it's owned by Meta. They just want to be on the platform everyone else is on.
What I'm asking is why is everyone on that platform already when they have better alternatives
Every person that i have ever talked to in my country use whatsapp and none use telegram
Riddle me this - Some people's argument against using telegram is that it is not as secure as WhatsApp(which on face value is true because WhatsApp is E2E encrypted while telegram is not E2E encrypted). Other people claim that only hackers and terrorists use telegram and that is why they don't use telegram. My question is why are people like hackers and terrorists using telegram in the first place if it has worse security while having no upsides for these kinds of individuals.
Telegram is not E2E encrypted per default, I think it offers the feature if you start secret chat ?
I use them all, but whatsapp prevails all, because Whatsapp was there first.
What's more important is that we know whatsapp is not the only device, and can be easily replaced.
