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Comment by chromedev | Hacker News Reader

You forget to mention the desktop and mobile apps both are open source, so anyone can build their own network.

I have never seen anyone actually doing that. The popularity of Telegram consists 100% of the popularity of its own network.

If for some reason they were caught doing something worthy of changing the network, then I could see it happening. With their recent addition of video messaging, they pretty much have the best messenger app to date.

A nice thing is that you're allowed to use that network without using the official client. Unlike Signal, they're okay with third party clients, and there are libraries for multiple languages to help build your own client.

Unfortunately (this may have changed in recent times), they often don't update the public repos in line with their releases. They put them out all at once later. Also, last I checked only the clients are open source? Has that changed?

You can find the releases here, and if there is a delay it is only a few days at most:

https://github.com/Telegram-FOSS-Team/Telegram-FOSS/releases

Only the clients are open source, but anyone could use the source code to create their own network.

Without server source? Might as well start from scratch and use something like matrix.

Matrix doesn't compare at all and Element is their client to promote their SaaS solution.

This repository has been notoriously bad at doing this: https://github.com/overtake/TelegramSwift

The clients wouldn't feature E2EE for groups even if you'd write your own server from scratch so no, nobody should use Telegram for anything.

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