Wondering how long has this been cooking? A year or so ago musk started attacking signal for no discernible reason and recommending telegram instead.
If anybody still believed in Telegram’s trustworthiness, it should now be dispelled.
(Only kidding, there’s plenty of people who still “believe” in both Durov and Musk)
Sad but true
I’ll think about if they also somehow prohibit 3rd party clients from removing that AI garbage.
You should be using Signal anyway.
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?
I doubt Signal is supported by their scheduling/desk software though, Telegram has pretty wide support.
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.
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.
I think Telegram is more of a social media than a messenger.
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.
Nah, more like a better WhatsApp but with haters even worse than the WhatsApp haters.
Like a light version of Discord
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.
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)
Fascist media meets fascist media… well…
Two insane billionaire eugenicists … working together? No way. Birds of like feather stick together.
Can this be a joke pleaseeeee ?
I’ve seen posts in TG that yes, this is a joke and there’s been no such deal.
Reuters reports it’s true: Telegram, Musk-owned xAI partner to distribute Grok to messaging app’s users | Reuters
What is the fediverse chat equivalent?
If you want something more like the fediverse itself, then Matrix. If you want something closer to Telegram out of the box without setup, then Signal or SimpleX.
Signal doesn’t have bot support, so it’s hardly a Telegram equivalent sadly
Matrix works though, but it has the fediverse problem of “which instance do I pick?”
What do people use bots for in Telegram?
Anything really, it’s really simple to whip up a bot for anything. On par with Discord, maybe even a bit easier.
We have a family channel with bots that do calendar notifications and connect to home automation systems.
But I think you can do full on stores with payments using Telegram bots, never tried nor been in channels that do it.
Yeah, that’s true. I still use Signal as the main app to keep in contact with friends and family, though. It’s not like we ever discuss anything important, I just don’t like having my privacy openly invaded by apps like TG. Its affronting and insulting.
I can’t think of any other alternative to Matrix that has bot support, though. I guess just be careful of which instance, because I’ve read that there’s a lot of shady stuff that goes down in Matrix groups sometimes.
XMPP
I use matrix synapse. You can self host or join an existing server.
My Matrix server is conduwuit which was discontinued some time ago and your comment made me look at the GitHub page of its successor again, tuwunel…
It’s finally out! Ohh I’m so happy, updating today 😁
First thing i’m doing is opening a channel to run up Grok API calls maliciously
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
I thought The Establishment was all booboo Telegram badbad, I guess now they’re just another toady
Fuck telegram. I get so many spam messages there.
So… why don’t you delete your account there?
Network effect. It’s been hard enough to get friends and family to move away from Whatsapp, it’s going to be a while till I get them away from telegram as well
I wonder of grok will read even secret chats KB telegram
Your secret chats are already being read. Hell, secret chats are probably the first to be read.
A secret chat is only for local privacy, meaning if someone got access to your device they can’t find them, nor will you get notifications (in case your partner is watching your screen).
Back when we just had SMS and MMS, they had secret chats, too. They were blatantly marketed as tools to cheat on your partner. GO SMS was one of the first to use them. Its not so blatant anymore, but its still the primary use for “secret” chats.
I remember reading an article that someone figured out everyone’s GO SMS images (even secret ones) were uploaded online without any security whatsoever. You could put in the url and some random numbers and get any pictures and voice clips ever sent. And they never fixed it even after it was leaked.
So yeah, not so secret. You want secure.
I thought secret chats were E2EE and weren’t stored on servers. That doesn’t necessarily mean Grok can’t read them if it’s not server side, but that’s what I’m curious about.
https://privacyinternational.org/guide-step/5540/telegram-secret-chats-end-end-encrypted
Ah no, I mean the government backdoor. Last we knew, Telegram was threatened, then it suddenly quiet and Premium launches. Fishy. So potentially the federal government has access.
Sorry, I’m bad at providing context. When it comes to another user accessing your messages, you should be right. However, when it comes to the US and Russian governments, its probably getting read already. And we all know what ties and connections Elon has there. So Grok can probably read them.
It looks like telegram under the U.S SCA and FISA acts may be gagged from disclosing government surveillance as well in their privacy policy or terms of service.
However, their privacy policy on secret chats say this.
Secret chats use end-to-end encryption. This means that all data is encrypted with a key that only you and the recipient know. There is no way for us or anybody else without direct access to your device to learn what content is being sent in those messages. We do not store your secret chats on our servers. We also do not keep any logs for messages in secret chats, so after a short period of time we no longer know who or when you messaged via secret chats. For the same reasons secret chats are not available in the cloud — you can only access those messages from the device they were sent to or from.
This would be a lie if government agencies had backdoor access to your EE2E messages. And would potentially line themselves up to a lawsuit? However I am not a lawyer and don’t know if there are other laws that overwrite this.
Big yikes
How many people pressed the play button in the image. I know I did.
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.
