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Comment by mattnguyen | Hacker News Reader

A growing number of people and organizations are starting to choose Telegram over Slack. This became prevalent in the blockchain space where pretty much everyone prefers Telegram to other messaging apps. OTC brokers, quant funds, and the largest exchanges use Telegram in some capacity, some almost exclusively.

Since the official Telegram clients are open source and the org encourages open competition between third party clients, it's now possible to build a Slack-like experience with workspaces, folders, integrations, and hot keys. Telefuel.com is one example.

As Telegram launches their $1.7bn blockchain by eoy, it'll be interesting to see how they develop their crypto-economy. There seems to be a bit of development activity in various Telegram groups, but there's still a cloud of secrecy about the whole thing.

Disclosure - I cofounded Telefuel.

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This is very interesting! I'd be happy to try.

My main pain points with Telegram are:

- No way to structure a group into sub-groups

- No way to comment on a specific post without polluting the whole timeline (the new DiscussionBot is the beginning of a solution to this problem)

- No way to "like" a specific comment without adding another message to the group (some discussions are mostly a stream of yes and +1)

- No way to bookmark/star messages and easily find them later (apart the save mechanism which is a bit different)

It looks like Telefuel aims to solve them?

Hi Nick! Received your invite request! Looking forward to speaking with you this week :)

- Yes, we're bringing workspaces & chat folders to Telegram (https://cl.ly/9d0ac52b55cf) - Not something we're addressing yet - Not something we're addressing yet - Something we can address :)

Will talk more next week!

Would be interesting if Telegram can merge with Keybase for organizations and teams platform to compete with Slack.

> Since the official Telegram clients are open source

They're not really all that open.

This statement is factually wrong. The server code is not open source but the clients are fully open.

The clients aren’t “fully open”, since their source doesn’t match the binaries that Telegram distributes.

That’s not true at all.

All clients are fully open source, they believe it to be a core requirement for formal verification.

You could make the argument about the play store distributed binary being “unverified”, but that applies to any program that’s distributed in binary form. You never know what additions are made.

FWIW the f-droid version is compiled entirely from source with no binary blobs at all and is still the same client.

You’re not helping anyone by spreading FUD.

> All clients are fully open source

They’re literally not. The distributed apps update every couple of weeks or even more often while the source they push lags months behind, if it’s even what’s being used to build those binaries.

This package [1] on f-droid is built directly of the source on github [2]. Even if the source is old so is the package. F-droid compiles this package not telegram.

I wrote the peertube client Throium which is also available on f-droid [3]. When I Tag a new release on github, f-droid will build the package automatically and publish it the next day. I do not build the packages for f-droid.

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.telegram.messenger/

[2] https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS

[3] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.schueller.peertube/

I gave up tracking the delay a while ago but I think the macOS and iOS packages were lagging by six months at one point. Heck, even now the last commit with actual code [1] is over two months old yet the macOS app updated two days ago for me.

Uncommented code is dumped into the GitHub repo every couple of months after enough people complain. That's not what I would call open source.

[1] https://github.com/overtake/TelegramSwift/commits/master

I’m mostly referring to the macOS and iOS clients, since I’m not really familiar with the Android version.

How can finance firms use telegram? aren't there strict compliance laws which require logging of messages - e.g. why Bloomberg chat is popular?

Or maybe that's the point... but seems short sighted

Couldn't a bot do logging?

Sure but then what's the point of the extra encryption hassle

Do you have a source for their blockchain being launched EOY?

I've been following their blockchain project since the whitepaper, and they've been quietly missing their launch goals by many quarters...

I think Telegram has a unique position to combat Facebook's Libra.

Good question. I don't have any sources on hand, but I've heard whispers that they should launch by end of Oct. We'll see where they land then.

I haven't looked into it too deeply except what they've released here: https://test.ton.org/download.html

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