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Comment by m52go | Hacker News Reader

Despite its imperfections, which in my cursory understanding are largely academic, Telegram is an amazing messenger.

It's very quick, feature-rich, and developer-friendly.

Perhaps best of all, it's a nonprofit. So I can expect, with a high degree of confidence, that the organization won't abruptly switch course one day to appease investors.

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Telegram has solved the communications problem for me mostly. Before telegram, I had, all of the legacy messenger services (AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Skype, etc), plus Slack, IRC and whatever I used at work - now I have Telegram, and no longer sign into those legacy services anymore.

What makes telegram a winner for me is that the desktop is a first class citizen, I'm in front of a computer like 18 hours a day - I don't want to have to stop what I'm going and respond on my phone. Yes, perhaps Signal is more secure, and I may try it someday.. but for now.. Telegram has largely solved my 'communications' problem.

Are you using Telegram instead of Slack at work?

I know few people who do.

Work is still skype for business, plus iMessage between co-workers.

Discord has done that for me, but only because all my friend groups are willing to use it. If you just want a messenger that works well, there are a number of good options - that unfortunately don't talk to each other.

The criticism is only about the crypto, which is weird and historically unsafe (and not on by default).

Other than that it is a great app. Some of us just think the bar is e2e by default.

A non-profit simply means that it cannot hold money from one year to the next. To achieve that, a "non-profit" could give millions as executive compensation or contract inefficiently to for-profit "partners" who collect the gains. Not saying Telegram is doing that, but the structure shouldn't be adding to a vote of confidence in any way.

>Despite its imperfections, which in my cursory understanding are largely academic

1) no video calls

2) voice calls just now being rolled out

3) encryption is opt-in and limited to one-on-one conversations

4) requires a phone number for authentication

The "academic" criticism is about its crypto being poor. The rest is regular stuff which is a deal breaker even for many non-academics.

> Perhaps best of all, it's a nonprofit.

That doesn't appear to be true:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/11...

If they're a nonprofit, where is their 990 (or equivalent)?

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