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Doing illegal stuff in public Telegram channels is extremely stupid, they aren't encrypted, you're pretty much giving your information to law enforcement (I know Telegram is often blocking sharing info on their users to law enforcement, but you can be sure agencies are monitoring your telegram channel discussions).
The Russophile comment is pretty frustrating given Telegram is the most commonly used messenger in Ukraine and lots of Eastern Europe...
There's truth to the Russophile comment though, Telegram is regularly used by GRU and the FSB to recruit people to commit acts of vandalism and terror and is pretty well documented. It's also commonly used to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories. My mum has fallen for several of these via Telegram.
Telegram has a larger Russian speaking audience because of the founder, who created VK in Russia. But that doesn’t make it Russophile. Ukraine is organizing pretty much all their resistance on Telegram…
The public channels are where the trash content is, I’ve never used them myself, you have to explicitly look for that feature, it’s not like they are shown in the chat interface directly.
> Why not settle on a chat which actually uses e2e encryption by default though?
Because I care more about the quality of user experience, and Telegram has been awesome to use since I first tried it
You could use it for other things lol. My entire boring friend group uses it for none of those.