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Comment by neals | Hacker News Reader

So who here is using Telegram and for what? I'm consider myself pretty well connected, but I don't have the app. Tell me what I'm missing.

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I use it for something like 90% of all my social interactions with real-life friends. IMO, Telegram has by far the best UI/UX of any internet chat app. In terms of stuff like group management, working perfectly on any type of device with any OS, including maintaining accounts on multiple devices and keeping everything synced between them, organizing large numbers of chats in the UI, managing notifications, etc. Video and voice messages that just work on all platforms.

It has a lot of good security features too, including support of account passwords, requiring verification of new logins on another device, letting you see all of your login sessions on any device and log out any of them, private groups with detailed controls for join links, etc. A lot of crypto people get mad that it doesn't have E2E encryption outside of opt-in "secret chats", but I don't think that's all that important.

It's also completely free of most of the dark patterns that plague most social media sites. No reshuffling of message order, optimizing for outrage and engagement, or pushing new content to keep you scrolling. No randomly banning or locking accounts for no apparent reason.

I view this paid account thing as an excellent sign that their future plans for the app are for optimizing user satisfaction instead of trying to appeal more to advertisers. I plan to sign up as soon as I can, and hope it goes well and helps us move towards a future where our social platforms see the users as customers to be served, not products to optimize the sale of to advertisers who become their actual customers.

For me, the value of messaging comes 99.99% from availability of people I'm messaging. For work, it's all Slack. For personal it's SMS. I haven't seen a compelling feature in a chat app since 1997.

How do you do groups texts?

Sometimes you want to talk to people without giving them your phone number. Imagine IRC but much more convenient.

It's true that if nobody you want to talk to is on it or willing to install it, then it's not of much use. It's also a bit harder to find really compelling features for direct messages. Though even for DMs, outside of Apple's walled iMessage garden, it's hard to get stuff like high quality photos, videos, and audio messages, reactions, stickers, etc that work correctly for everyone on all device types.

Group handling is where all of the apps really shine though. Doing groups in SMS is basically garbage compared to pretty much any chat app ever made.

Everyone keeps saying group. I've never had trouble sending group texts. Both my kids have had their whole classes in a group text for a year. SMS is the one and only "open" messaging platform left so your experience will depend on if you're using iMessage or Samsung or VZ or whatever other ones are out there. But as far as I can tell they're all perfectly fine and nearly indistinguishable.

I am not crypto people, and still get mad because of E2EE.

I started using it because the UI is flawless and because I never installed WhatsApp and I never will. I don't have false hope about the "security" and "privacy" of Telegram that said: but it's a great messaging app which, by now, a huge number of people are using.

At my kid's previous school and at my kid's current school there are parents using Telegram. Sure WhatsApp is still the most common one but Telegram is not unheard off.

700 millions users is quite something.

Hardly a week goes by without Telegram telling me: "xxx joined Telegram". Last week I re-connected with a friend I hadn't talked to in a long time because I saw he just joined Telegram. Said hi to him, sent him a few pictures. I don't know who brought him to Telegram but he ended up using it and he's definitely not a techie.

At this rate in two years they'll have 1 billion users. Maybe it'll even snowball at some point.

This is competition to WhatsApp. 700 million users and growing is not nothing.

I'm using it to communicate with family members and to follow some development-related channels. Why Telegram?

- Telegram vs. Whatsapp is clear, Whatsapp is off-limits due to it being owned by Zuckerberg & Co.

- Telegram vs. Signal is a bit less clear but the user experience offered by Telegram is superior to that of Signal which made it easy to get some of my more computer-averse family members to accept it. The fact that Telegram is easy to use across devices - native apps on mobile and PC, web, CLI, you name it - is a big plus here.

- Telegram vs. XMPP is a battle which has yet to be fought, I have an XMPP server standing by for the moment when Telegram crosses some line which makes me want to switch. With Conversations on Android the user experience is quite good so I consider this to be a serious contender.

- Telegram vs. XXX - see Telegram vs. Signal.

I'd love to like xmpp, but every xmpp experience apart from dino (which isn't available on windows) is pure garbage from a ux perspective. For some reason conversations chose to not adhere to any design standards in use on the android platform and instead do it's own thing, which subjectively looks really bad (and cannot be customized). It's also missing stuff like the photo editor, daniel said he's not planning to implement it because android will have a system image editor from android 10 onward. The fact that the editor is borderline unusable and the workflow appears to be: open camera app -> take image -> open image in gallery -> open image with editor -> edit the image (somewhat flaky) -> open conversations -> search for your edited image -> send the image is a major deal braker for me, I never even tried to show anyone conversations as an alternative to telegram because of how horrible it is.

I really like the simplicity of Conversations. It's unclear to me why every app must implement it's own image editor. This really should be solved on the Android level of things and I think Daniel is right not to include it. Do one thing and do it well, after all.

Also all the other messengers like WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram don't seem to care about interoperability or internet standards and are not XMPP compliant.

Outside of being great for cross-platform messaging, it's awesome for transferring files. Quick, no restrictions on file extensions, and I've yet to hit a size limit. Great for building an APK and shooting it off to my friends + other devices.

It's also great for piracy. There's a channel I'm in with links to updated Nintendo Switch modpacks as well as one for premium STL files.

And there's a veteran (as in age) SciHub bot. Works great and is more hassle free than constantly dealing with DNS blocks/ new domain names.

File size limit is about 2GB

Everyone with a passing interest in the current war must use Telegram.

Many Ukrainian and Russian primary sources are on Telegram only. Including government officials etc.

I use it for notification from many servers... just a quick curl in a script, and I get an alert on my phone in a matter of milliseconds.

That's actually awesome, does Telegram have an API of some sort?

Telegram actually has full-featured APIs, allowing you to implement both bots and custom clients! You can start here: https://core.telegram.org/ . Unfortunately, I don't have the direct link to the single-curl-request.

Yep :)

You first create a bot, then join a chat with that bot, then control the bot via the http api

api: https://core.telegram.org/bots/api

quickstart (just to send messages, not mine): https://gist.github.com/dideler/85de4d64f66c1966788c1b2304b9...

One-way media sharing. It's the only chat app that realized how fucking great galleries are, being able to post a ton of pics (or videos) in one message, with smooth full size opening of the media. Not re-encoded into mush, no endless scrolling down or left (cough instagram cough).

Not much in terms of restrictions to message size, or file size, or storage, or bandwidth.

You're not spoon-fed by some algorithm, no recommendations, you only see the channels that you manually joined/followed/subscribed to. Feels very old-school in that regard, but in the best possible way.

It has great desktop app support (I'm not much of a mobile user).

No ads, ever, anywhere.

If you just want to follow some content creators without much interaction, it's perfect (that being said, of course there's regular group chats too, I just don't use any of those).

My entire family and my D&D group use it, easily the slickest UX/UI of any chat app I have used. It is feature rich without feeling cluttered.

It's WhatsApp for people who don't trust Meta/Facebook.

Interestingly, Telegram by default is not even end to end encrypted.

Neither is WhatsApp. It's a closed source app, no one outside of Meta knows if it is actually encrypted properly.

I always wondered how feasible it is to analyze whatsapp network traffic to test their claims.

I'm sure the traffic is encrypted. But it's trivially easy for Facebook to copy your private key to their servers.

That's not how it works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11432661

That's exactly how it works. You can claim a lot of the day is long when the app is closed source

I invite you to read the comment I linked.

Nonsense.

The app is closed source. Facebook could be copying all your private keys to their servers and you would never know.

I invite you to read the comment I linked.

I read it. It is nonsense.

It's not a large corp who's monetization strategy is selling or exploiting user data. In fact, it's founded by someone who was screwed over by government overreach.

It's not perfect, obviously, but if I had the choice between Durov and Zuckerberg, I'd take the former every time.

It's very popular is some (usually heavy censored) countries. It's also popular in the IT field.

Telegram is my main messenger to speak to friends and family. I also use it to connect to the chatrooms of the various open source projects I participate in.

The Syrian War was broadcast on Twitter. The Ukrainian War is broadcast on Telegram.

It's the only messenger I use; I guess it depends from your social circle and/or geographical location.

I am very happy with it btw; much better than whatsapp.

Many university group chats are in it, for some reason.

I'm using it to avoid the Meta apps on my phone. It was the easier to convince my mom to use so that we can talk online, the other being Signal.

On the other side, people who I know use it for finding all kinds of uncensored stuff in the groups there. It is not totally dark net style there, but the moderation is lax compared to the more visible social media.

I use it because all my friends are on it. Sometimes I have someone asking me to add them on Whatsapp, but I offer Telegram instead and they end up liking it a lot more. There are also a few public channels I follow that are essentially RSS feeds. Linuxgram and PINE64 News for example.

Use it exclusively to talk to crypto exchanges. Use Signal for personal use

Some of my family chat on Telegram.

LibreOffice user groups (e.g. Right-to-Left)

Some activism.

My ex-girlfriend.

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