Telegram publishes users' locations online

Exactly. "Make myself visible" button on top of a list of random people near you, plus the warning you mention.

Telegram can be criticized for certain things, but this isn't one.

I'm not sure but you can do:

- smooth region borders (based on distance to one or multiple region centers with some the client being reluctant to report you in a new region until you are far enough from your current regions center point(s) to not "jump" back and force.)

- smoothing of reported regions on the client side (might incur some delay)

- user setting of region size (show that I'm in or show that I'm in or )

- white list which users can see the position (allow all, potential with 2 or 3 groups of precision).

I think by combining all of this a reasonable system can be created, but I would never go with a system which can report (explicit or implicit) the exact position (without a lot data and work) or which doesn't allow you to whitelist who can see you tbh.

Anyway this also means that the area would need to be calculated by the client (phone) and then send to the server which then might apply further smoothing/filtering based on the regions it's put in relation with.

Do you know of any unlimited free cloud storage service? I know just one, that's being Telegram.

Telegram is not a business in a sense that it didn’t have any intelligible business model prior to this ads thing (which is not even live yet and this HN thread is the first time I heard about it).

For more than 7 years since its launch, the slick app, servers that instantly synchronize non-secret chats, and basically unlimited file storage were provided for free to use. Really free, no ads, no paid services. If you think about the amount of money that it all cost, it’s _insane_. So it begs the question: are Telegram’s founders really that kind of people willing to donate hundreds of millions for people’s messaging privacy with an additional option of maybe returning some of these money 7 years later with ads, or Telegram is just an elaborate FSB honeypot?

I guess we’ll never know for sure, but I’m more cautious about services that offer too much for free, not too little.

It's a shame that every time that Telegram is mentioned, Signal advocates feels the need to let everybody else know how superior Signal is supposed to be compared to everything else.

I don't have anything against Signal itself, but this aggressiveness and arrogance is really putting me off.

Has this became some kind of religion? Do you people realize that you are not the exclusive bearer of Truth, and that maybe, just maybe people that use Telegram chose to do so for a reason and are not poor clueless persons that need to be indoctrinated?

To be extra clear, my complaint is about whoever insists on spreading the falsehood that Signal is objectively better than anything else [and maybe also adds a bit of compassion on top ("it's a shame") for the rest of us unenlightened].

I would have no problem, and would actually be more inclined to switch to Signal, if you tried something a bit more modest and honest. Dunno, for example something along the lines of "If you would like an alternative to Telegram that has E2E enabled by default and on all chats, you could maybe be interested in Signal!". But what kind of discussion can we have if the argument is always "Signal is so much better, it's a shame that you people don't realize it" ?