Then I joined a group from a bigger city where I commuted for work. They had a telegram group chat with two "channels", one for talking, one for bot posts. The telegram bot could be sent a single screenshot of a raid, and it would use OCR to automatically generate an interactive UI for that raid for everyone to see, with all the relevant info, and it would also clear itself up when the raid is no longer relevant. You could press buttons to say you were going, that you MAYBE were going, if you were late, and if you already started/done it, all in single clicks. Tons of options, tons of information, all live updated.
I was bedazzled. That feature singlehandedly removed all attrition from urban social gaming. And it was entirely grassroots. It made me try out making my own telegram bots, and yeah, you basically have the power to make a little app in chat form, even some that feel like CLI commands.
It's been OVER HALF A DECADE and I have yet to see a single other chat application have that degree of freedom where it comes to applications and bots. Some like discord even did whole ass 100% reworks of their bot AP to support the likes of slash commands, and still fall short. And there's none worse than Teams. Teams hates you. Teams spent the prior 2 years before this one basically pointing a gun to our heads telling us they were removing webhooks and pushing back on it whenever they repeatedly get told that's the most insane and dogshit idea ever. And they still did it. There's just no spark in Teams UX. No self-respect. It's a soulless product made entirely as a dumping place of "synergy" with other M$ products. It's reciprocal, I hate it too.
Oh and my local group never go into telegram because they didn't want a new app. It died, but I still kept playing after work without problem. It makes me wonder how fast Teams would die if it wasn't proped up by 365 and Azure subscriptions.
This kind of thing is so common in groups of people, it's one of my pet peeves. My own family does this in our group messages when trying to make big decisions like who should host thanksgiving or where we should go for a family vacation.
I make it a point to just take charge and tell people that we're doing XYZ now. It usually either results in a decision, or gets the discussion going enough that I can do it again with new information.
But one has to keep in mind that, in our currwnt "more woke" times, if you go this way in a new group you run the risk of being labeled an array of things. So tread carefully there.
I would never accuse Teams of being fast.
Doesn’t seem to matter if I have an i9, a macbook m4 or a threadripper.
Maybe what sucks here is the experience of running it on Windows. Or maybe it sucks for large meetings? But I never have Teams meetings with > 40 people at this company.
When it is online, I agree with things asides from the "fast" part, actually. But many companies have a secondary service for async comms/chat when being Teams cannot be online, and compared to Slack.
Teams network connectivity is a plain joke. If you use suspend, or frequently change network, the thing will just never reconnect, even though you have VPN alive and all network applications perfectly running.
And the thing is just absurbdly sluggish, only display blurred grey lines instead of text in a meager attempt to look snappy.
Months back I was in a meeting and the dial tone just started sounding like someone was calling me.
I face bugs like this often. It's a pos.
Teams that has 3 different UI frameworks on every platform (but your best bet is the web)? With the Microsoft login that tends to loop forever redirecting to God knows where?
It's incomparable to telegram.
It looks like we found a high executive using company money to buy a product no one wants to use.
It's easy to promote Teams if your secretary is handling it for you and you don't need to suffer yourself.
The other possibility: Microsoft started an astroturfing campaign on HN.
Does it not start on your chosen platform or just not exist?
The comment I replied to said all these great things about Telegram, as if it where a marketing copy, but none of the downsides.
For encrypted group conversation over third-party networks use Signal, or Matrix which try to keep your conversations private.
The fact that Telegram has their support playbooks online, is interesting. Though I would call the following claim a stretch
> As a result, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments, to this day.
Telegram gave more user data to French authorities after founder's arrest https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2025/01/08/telegram...
EDIT: and the Bot API is a killer feature
I've been surprised how little support there has been for Teams in the whole AI ecosystem. It seems all developers assume that the whole world is at startups working on Slack when most businesses are on Microsoft 365.
After building a proof of concept, we decided that we will only continue Teams integration if anyone is going to pay serious money for it.
It's just as easy to set up as ntfy.sh, except that it doesn't break every other week on iOS.
Signal specifically is missing any kind of official bot support, cutting off massive audiences from even considering it as an option.
iMessage is proprietary. WhatsApp charges you. Unofficial APIs exist, sure, but not my cup of tea.
Then you have Discord or Slack, which are pretty heavyweight when all you want is a simple chat interface.
Telegram makes it SO easy. Bots are first class resources on Telegram and they make them so easy to use.
WhatsApp vs Slack + Teams is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison though.
I had a look at getting same agent up in WhatsApp but it seems to need FB business acc to even start process, to get FB business you need an FB personal etc. ... looked like too much effort
Pi already has 700+ third-party packages [2] for various purposes of various quality. But it doesn't matter, since creating a new working Pi extension to suit your needs is just a prompt away, and you don't even have to restart your coding session.
[1] Pi Coding Agent https://pi.dev [2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@e9n/pi-channels [3] https://pi.dev/packages
Telegram is 'bot friendly' since the beginning, gaining a lot of users with crypto boom a decade ago with coin drops and things like that, so it is very good to develop for, but I have your initial sentiment first - shame this hasn't launched with tools people actually use for work.
And no, Discord is not used for that either.
Overseas numbers are likely worse for Claude.
Try and ask someone not in tech what they think of Claude or Anthropic. There's a high chance they've never heard of either.
Things might have changed with Anthropic showing up at the Superbowl, and in the news over their fight with the Pentagon.
I'm bullish on Claude. It will see a surge in users, and will likely surpass Perplexity this year. However I don't think it will catch up to even Meta AI (which had 10x the number of users) this year.
Anthropic’s revenue in Q1 2026 has skyrocketed.
a) they are private and revenue numbers for private companies are hopelessly unreliable, and
b) they are planning an IPO, so there's an extra incentive to big up the numbers. Anthropic always brings up ARR, which is very gameable when the year hasn't ended yet
I am also a software developer. So while the numbers of "people" that use one AI or another may be higher than either of these, it's not a useful metric for myself.
I'm only pushing back against someone thinking "oh HN talks about Claude a lot, therefore Claude must be extremely popular". The information bubble is a real problem.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/top...
It's wild, but "people who want to build and run their own one-off bot for something like home automation" are almost treated by Telegram like first class citizens.
I'm really happy that they choose telegram and discord.