E: downvoted for this?
Pushing cryptoscams and paywalling a subset of emoji-reactions made me move off of telegram. Now I use matrix and as a nice side effect I have whatsapp and telegram bridged in one app.
Of course, it's all open source with the typical lack of polishing. But nobody is gonna pull the rug under me because the company needs $$$ after acquiring users.
Have you heard about the mess that was Durov’s channel some months ago? Telegram is now reserving and then selling usernames as NFTs for crypto on a new site: fragment.com (Use a VPN since it blocks access from the US)
Durov first announced it on his channel and the large majority of the telegram community downvoted it to show disapproval of integrating NFTs and crypto into telegram [1]. Telegram/Durov’s response? Disable negative reactions and ignore it. For later posts, talk about how there was such a great response to them (because only negative reactions were disabled), and how they’re moving forward with it.
Then, when they started, what happened to the people with their old names? Telegram took them without warning [2]. And it wasn’t just any common names, multiple chats I was in had their name, their brand taken even though it was multiple semi-common words stringed together to 19+ characters.
[1] and [2] - I can’t find an online source currently on my phone. I can personally vouch for it, but I understand evidence would be appreciated. If anyone can find a source, that would be greatly appreciated.
I don’t have a problem with their monetary model, because they don’t paywall any essential feature. and not in-your-face about it, and it really is one of the few apps I use on every single device I own.
You mean adding extra sets of emojis and not changing the existing ones? Paying for cosmetics is a pretty good way of monetizing.
> Of course, it's all open source with the typical lack of polishing. But nobody is gonna pull the rug under me because the company needs $$$ after acquiring users.
It literally works better than all the "non opensource polished" apps. Looking at you Discord - a shame of a company to all users.