Telegram Voice Chats

>I type a message on my phone - I see it on my PC the moment I press Send button

I use some telegram groups and sometimes i'd start typing in phone before the message gets too long and i'd prefer to carry on the message in my laptop instead. It is so useful to have this feature.

I really wish Telegram would embrace open source, security audits, etc. It's one of, if not the, best UX chat message apps with so many features it's sort of mindblowing. I'd love to use them. But.. i avoid it, because something doesn't smell right.

Allowing me to pay would be yet another right direction for Telegram, but i just can't move past the audit (and to a lesser extent, FOSS)

I joined this, replied to the post, and now I'm being sent lots of creepy messages and dick pics from the men of the internet :/

Telegram has no option for "Only allow contacts to message me", it turns out.

After lots of messages, they eventually offer to auto archive and mute people not on your contacts, but it's still fairly visible on the app.

Perhaps Telegram should work on better abuse management before adding voice chat! I used to love the app but now I am considering uninstalling.

After you strip out corporate BS from this announcement (taking stabs at whatsapp, for selling to ads company), themselves they're going to become one more ads supported business.

Basically "Ads companies are horrible and not to be trusted. Btw, welcome to our new business model - ads"

here is a copy for those not using tgram

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As Telegram approaches 500 million active users, many of you are asking the question – who is going to pay to support this growth? After all, more users mean more expenses for traffic and servers. A project of our size needs at least a few hundred million dollars per year to keep going.

For most of Telegram’s history, I paid for the expenses of the company from my personal savings. However, with its current growth Telegram is on track to reach billions of users and to require appropriate funding. When a tech project reaches this scale, typically there are two options – start earning money to cover the costs, or sell the company.

Hence the question – which path will Telegram take? I’d like to make a few points to clarify our plan:

1. We are not going to sell the company like the founders of Whatsapp. The world needs Telegram to stay independent as a place where users are respected and high-quality service is ensured. Telegram must continue to serve the world as an example of a tech company that strives for perfection and integrity. And, as the sad examples of our predecessors show, that is impossible if you become part of a corporation.

2. Telegram is here to stay for a long time. We began developing our apps for our personal use over 8 years ago and have come a long way since then. In the process, Telegram changed the way people communicate in several aspects – encryption, functionality, simplicity, design, speed. This journey has just started. There’s much more we can – and will – bring to the world.

3. In order to make points 1 and 2 possible, Telegram will begin to generate revenue, starting next year. We will do it in accordance with our values and the pledges we have made over the last 7 years. Thanks to our current scale, we will be able to do it in a non-intrusive way. Most users will hardly notice any change.

4. All the features that are currently free will stay free. We will add some new features for business teams or power users. Some of these features will require more resources and will be paid for by these premium users. Regular users will be able to keep enjoying Telegram – for free, forever.

5. All parts of Telegram devoted to messaging will remain ad-free. We think that displaying ads in private 1-to-1 chats or group chats is a bad idea. Communication between people should be free of advertising of any sort.

6. In addition to its messaging component, Telegram has a social networking dimension. Our massive public one-to-many channels can have millions of subscribers each and are more like Twitter feeds. In many markets the owners of such channels display ads to earn money, sometimes using third-party ad platforms. The ads they post look like regular messages, and are often intrusive. We will fix this by introducing our own Ad Platform for public one-to-many channels – one that is user-friendly, respects privacy and allows us to cover the costs of servers and traffic.

7. If Telegram starts earning money, the community should also benefit. For example, If we monetize large public one-to-many channels via the Ad Platform, the owners of these channels will receive free traffic in proportion to their size. Or, if Telegram introduces premium stickers with additional expressive features, the artists who make stickers of this new type will also get a part of the profit. We want millions of Telegram-based creators and small businesses to thrive, enriching the experience of all our users.

This is the Telegram way.

It will allow us to keep innovating and keep growing for decades to come. We will be able to launch countless new features and welcome billions of new users. While doing that, we will remain independent and stay true to our values, redefining how a tech company should operate.

They should integrate direct payments/donations.

Whatsapp, facebook, messenger, twitter enjoy unfair advantage from device manufacturers.

They whitelist the above apps from their battery management systems and indiscriminately terminate everything else.

Summary - figure out how to whitelist telegram on ur phone and you should be fine.

Telegram's notifications are the best among all apps. It works perfectly. If you view a message on desktop, it also removes the android notification.

What did you find wrong with them? In my experience, Telegram's notifications worked better than any other app on a phone where Google Play Services was replaced with microG. I wish more apps would see how they're doing it without killing battery.

Okay I thought that was just me. The majority of the time, I just don't get a notification. It's intermittent, so it's not that something is turned off. I definitely don't have the issue with other comms apps.

That being said, telegram is probably my preferred app - and sometimes I actually use the broken notifications as a positive (the message isn't that important).

It's a mixed bag. Some people (mostly also those who have zero ways of even starting to debug it) seem to have a lot of trouble with it, also on dummy OSes like Apple's, while for me it simply works on a heavily customized Android where a ton of stuff breaks and indeed a lot of other messengers have trouble with it (ranging from Keybase which shows nothing at all ever to Matrix which pops up a notification every 5 seconds for 0.2 seconds "checking for messages" in order to make it work).

It seems not to be a Telegram-specific problem, and I haven't heard from anyone who actually had the issue and even attempted to find what's wrong.

one of the teams I was on at my previous employer was like this. code review was done in groups on this call as well. Got stuck on something and need another set of eyeballs? Share your screen and pair program on it.

It made working from home a little less solo. You could come and go on the call as you wished it wasn't really required unless it was a team call where certain topics were being discussed that should have everyone (or nearly everyone).

I convinced my coworkers to start a discord, and we now have most of our department in there. Having the (totally optional) PTT voice channels to hang out in makes these long weeks of WFH much less solitary.

that's interesting, indeed. is it like everyone puts their mic on mute except when they want to speak ?

Telegram keeps talking about how private and secure it is, but all group and private chats are not encrypted by default. Its end to end encrypted chats are very limited (only direct messages and only on one device) and rely on self-baked crypto. Their voice chat is also almost definitely not end to end encrypted, as I'm not aware of a way to do e2ee voice chat with many participants without linearly increasing bandwidth requirements for users

By default, it's as good (or as bad) as email with secure transport. "Secret chats" are end-to-end encrypted, but it supports only one-to-one conversations. There is no group secret chat feature. Voice chat also being a group feature, would have the same transport level encryption as the default chats, I suppose.

"Server-client encryption is used in Cloud Chats (private and group chats), Secret Chats use an additional layer of client-client encryption."

from: https://telegram.org/faq#q-so-how-do-you-encrypt-data

Since it is a group thing it would likely only be encrypted to the server. Telegram only does end to end encryption for "Secret Chats" which is a different mode.

Or like Mumble or like TeamSpeak or like Wire or... this isn't unique to any specific brand, not sure if there is a reason to specifically refer to a walled network service.

Slack/Zoom/Teams/Whatever Google is running now is mostly dictated by what the company uses for their email.

Pretty much no-one uses any of those for personal stuff, Slack does have some open-source project stuff in there.

FB Messenger seems to be highly siloed, I never use it and I know only one person who uses it as their main communication platform.

Whatsapp has reached critical mass in many countries outside of the US. People use it because everyone uses it - not because it's especially good in any way.

Signal, Matrix etc are for idealists, who have a future vision of what the platform will develop into in mind.

My personal favourite is Telegram. It has a good mix of bots, API, native clients and channel management tools.

No one will win. That's not how this works. Things will continue to be an ongoing example of XKCD-927 until the world as a whole cares enough to fix things.

The train wreck that is instant messaging makes me realize how incredibly lucky we are to have email.

Will win in terms of what?

A lot of things in Telegram are done right, but that does not mean it will win the audience.

Discord is a very good solution too, but I doubt people want to use it on their smartphones as a messenger.

My team hosts a weekly call where we sum up our progress for the last week and loosely plan the activities for the next week.

It's very useful. It adds value, since during this kind of conversation one can offer useful suggestion or another point of view on an issue that they hadn't addressed before (because they were working on something else, for example).

Different use case: incident handling with tight time constraints. In other words: prod offline and has to be brought up asap, but coordination is needed in touching the various systems. A 2+ people voice call is a godsend because now everything is "in sync" and usually updated in real time with what other people are doing.

Your opinion is not unpopular, is just the product of an HN-like echo chamber. People advocating of async-only communications are a small minority that makes a lot of noise, it's a common situation.

Clubhouse user here, it can add value if people are intentional, empathetic to others in the room, and have differing perspectives. There is something magical about co-creating a conversation like Jazz musicians improving a piece. When it works you feel a tangible energy that is it's own 'person', when it doesn't work it degrades into a mob. So the key here is curating people and making sure they have some common base of values.

This is weird.

I had to talk to two others yesterday, all separated by thousands of kilometres. The video chat gave us the ability to catch up without having to repeat the same stories twice. And it was a chance to hear two voices on the same topic from their experience in their specific country/place. And I got to see their smiling faces.

I disagree, but I upvoted since I hate the kind of downvote you're describing and I am regularly downvoted for the same reasons.

I think it adds a great amount of value, I can have a group discussion and plan things in real time instead of a slow async discussion.

Especially for online games, a async communication would be terrible. ;)

Does having a conversation with more than 1 person in real life also rarely add value?

You're thinking business, but this is more like Teamspeak (or Discord).

It's basically a comparison of two functions. On the one hand is the overhead of needing to schedule and maybe travel in order to meet, and amount of time wasted by people in the meeting who don't actively need to participate. On the other is the cost of context switching, risk of misunderstanding inherent in lower-bandwidth communication and delay in understanding one another that comes from asynchronicity. Whichever is more costly in a given situation loses out. In my experience, if the conversation would require a lot of back and forth (e.g. complex or delicate topic) synchronous wins, otherwise asynchronous wins out. As async tools become better, the cost of async goes down, and it comes out ahead more often. It's not always the best solution, but it often is.

I guess its ok for non-business purposes, e.g. catching up with friends. It was a bummer having to bounce off to Messenger for that, especially when tg's user interface is smoother.

Clubhouse seems to be doing something interesting with voice chat, twitter is testing out too. I think it has value as micropodcasting.