However, I couldn't get people to use it. It's constantly under political pressure because big bad encryption and Bad People are using it, despite the fact that lot of other messengers offer the same (including basically anything with OTR plugins, say, ICQ via Pidgin).
Telegram could and should be great, but the pressure needs to go away from it. I really wonder why Whatsapp, with it's encrypted-by-default approach is not under this level of attack. It's good I'm not into conspiracy theories.
Anyway, in the end, I ended up using it with my wife and nobody else. This made me realise I could just set up an XMPP server (Prosody in this case) next to my already existing mail server and use that with her. At least I have complete control over that.