Anyone still uses Telegram? What is really their selling point? We already got WhatsApp and Signal.
this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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Weird comparison.
WhatsApp is a kinda secure messaging app - small groupchats and personal chats first.
Signal is a secure messaging app - small groupchat and personal chats only.
TG is an app for big groupchats and channels, with dozens of people writing to one chat simultaneously, discussing big posts etc. It's, once again, like IRC, just proprietary, with history and sharing files. Or like a social network without friends and feeds.
Honestly I can't even blame TG for enshittificatory practices, because it gives so much more freedom to use it however one wants than the others. Even though I prefer to blame everything. All these things have taken a lot of work to create.
TG is an app for big groupchats and channels
You make it sound like that's the sole purpose. There are 1:1 chats in Telegram and people actively use them. Everything else builds on top of that.
That's the only important advantage over anything else.
by my experience mostly straight eastern europeans. everyone else either started on something else or they moved off telegram because they didn't feel like they could trust it
Anyone still uses Telegram?
Like 1B monthly active users.
I do
This is old news already; xAI backed out of the deal this morning.
https://bsky.app/profile/kateconger.com/post/3lqbe7bikzs2u
Either way, this "integration" is just Grok being available on Telegram for Premium subscribers only. It's just like any other bot on the app.
Looks like musk got his feelings hurt over it, interesting.
Thanks for the correction!
"No deal has been signed" does not mean they've backed out.
The beauty of open source is that there will be 3rd party clients that don't care about all of that.
they will be integrating it on service side if I read it correctly so the choice of client would be non-important
They can’t force local UI elements via server. That’s impossible to do with forks who decide against following server side requests.
There are already agreements that forks are not allowed to remove the premium feature stuff, they could do this to grok as well.
That’s not how the GPL works. Any such agreements would be voluntary.
Your non-premium account tries to use a feature available to premium and that doesn't work. Where does the GPL come into equation?
Also they can detect alternative clients and ban them.
Grok UI elements and number of GIFs in the picker are 100% local features clients can choose to ignore.
Ah, so you mean Grok service just being available from TG UI without any authentication from TG being used?
I‘m saying whatever the server asks the client, a client can choose to hide the UI elements. Nothing more, nothing less.
Yes, I mean it wouldn't change anything if Grok were a premium-only feature, apparently this was about ability to turn it off, ok fine.
elon musk in business deal with russian oligarch again. nothing is new
Telegram founder fled Putin.
Not certain and doesn't make him an angel.
Definitively certain and I didn’t call anyone an angel, so no idea why bring such a thing up.
Well if anything such obviously advertising him as a fighter against the regime, while Telegram is not banned in Russia, is definitively certain for you - just go on.
Telegram is not banned in Russia in the same way YouTube isn't. They fight it by attempting to decrease service quality, prompting users to switch platforms. In last few months connectivity without VPN degraded noticeably. It just happens that since it's official ban (2018-2020) telegram evolved to be pretty resilient to blocking, and it's easier to declare "yeah we signed a deal with Durov he works with us now, unbanned" than look like fools while blocking 1% of all IPv4 addresses (im not kidding) with no result.
Not true. There was a period it wasn't possible to use Telegram without VPNs. That's in the past.
What shows their alignment best is that Russian state propaganda feels right at home in TG, while counterpropaganda channels from time to time get banned without explanation.
YouTube just plainly doesn't work in Russia, its pages load, videos don't.
The reason they say stuff about "degrading caching servers" and whatever other bullshit they say is to reduce visibility of their actions from the general population. It's smart, not stupid. I thought it's dumb that they always lie this way, until I realized that most of said lie sticks subconsciously, and the saved expenses at controlling the population add up. It's like saving every dime being virtuous in the Protestant approach to life.
They could ban it completely.
than look like fools while blocking 1% of all IPv4 addresses (im not kidding) with no result.
They did look like fools, but the "no result" part is just not true, the result was achieved. Telegram didn't evolve, it works the same as before, a typical client-server application.