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700M users and Premium

telegram.org

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Re: 700M users and Premium

#121

Post by fritigern »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #113
scrollaway wrote: post #14

Telegram blows my mind. Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none. Discord is a close second. But the quality and polish of telegram blows me away to this day. And it’s lots of small features and details such as built in translation for messages in a foreign language, all the smooth animations, quick look and summaries of channels with agg…

What's more is that the quality of UX manages to be mostly consistent across clients with entirely disparate codebases written in different languages with different UI toolkits. That's awesome . You have your pick of a massive variety of clients… one of them bound to fit your device setup like a glove. No lowest-common-denominator one-size-fits-all compromises like is so common with cross platform software these days…

Telegram's Linux client is simply Amazing.

Re: 700M users and Premium

#122

Post by filoleg »

danpalmer wrote: post #33
geerlingguy wrote: post #8

Quoted post unavailable.

This is also my experience in the UK. Messengers are extremely network-based services. Everything depends on your network, and experiences will differ dramatically between countries. For me, WhatsApp is everything legit and personal, Telegram is for extremist groups, Messenger is for parents, Instagram is for millennials, Twitter is for politics nerds, Discord is for gamers, iMessage is... for adverts from takeaways…

> For me, WhatsApp is everything legit and personal

That's how it is supposed to be for me as well, but unfortunately that's not how it is. I only use it because my father and grandparents overseas use it. I literally only have 3 contacts in my whatsapp list, I don't use it ever outside of that.

I still get spam accounts adding me on whatsapp about once every couple of weeks, pretending to have accidentally added a wrong phone number, and then trying to bait the receiver into something (usually using phone numbers with SEA country-codes and profile pics of women that were obviously models and are easily reverse image-searchable). Out of boredom, I once decided to entertain that conversation and pretend to be clueless and play along, just to see how the scam unfolds. Inevitably, I got asked about crypto and got shilled some crypto-related scam that person was running.

Tl;dr: I literally don't use whatsapp for anything, have no picture or full name on my profile, and only use it to communicate with 3 of my relatives, and I still get plenty of scammers messaging me from different SEA countries' numbers about once every few weeks. For context: I live in the US and haven't even visited SEA once (yet).

Re: 700M users and Premium

#123

Post by asddubs »

izacus wrote: post #62
superasn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes their API is one of the best. A simple curl request is enough to send a message and it has been so useful (sentry, uptime, door bell notifications(1), etc). (1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrkAWSemDC8

They also publish a fully functional C library that makes building fully (!) featured 3rd party clients easy. They support everything - from Linux, Windows all the way to Tizen. You compile it into your app and it "just works" with all the features of the main client. As a result, you have a large set of very good clients for pretty much all platforms. Imagine if the FLOSS darlings like Signal would make something as…

Signal's stance on third party clients is so disappointing. Telegram really has them beat there, although it has to be pointed out that Signal actually publishes server source, while Telegram doesn't.

Re: 700M users and Premium

#124

Post by indymike »

allarm wrote: post #93

Yesterday I chatted in Telegram with my friends about a gadget I was considering to purchase - I’ve got an ad of this gadget in Instagram almost immediately. I couldn’t reproduce it by mentioning some other trendy stuff, but it triggered me anyway. Has anyone experienced the same?

So you have instagram on the device too?

Re: 700M users and Premium

#125

Post by okamiueru »

izacus wrote: post #110
Macha wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - It offers you to simply share an alphanumeric handle and you can connect with anyone in the world. I can do a voice chat or normal chat really quickly and easily. It is the only famous truly Instant Messenger there is. And I can do it without sharing my name (unlike FB), email address, or phone number (unlike WApp). Has this changed? Last time I looked, you needed a phone number to sign up.

While you MAY need a number to sign up, you don't need to GIVE your number to other people so you can communicate with them over the service.

I don't understand. I've been using telegram for some years. Could you explain how you would go about using telegram without "signing up"? And by "a number" I understand it to be an option of "not your phone number"? How does the verification go then?

Re: 700M users and Premium

#126

Post by oaththrowaway »

allarm wrote: post #93

Yesterday I chatted in Telegram with my friends about a gadget I was considering to purchase - I’ve got an ad of this gadget in Instagram almost immediately. I couldn’t reproduce it by mentioning some other trendy stuff, but it triggered me anyway. Has anyone experienced the same?

Not on Telegram, but I've had some eeirie ads shown on Facebook after conversations I've had.

Re: 700M users and Premium

#127

Post by f1refly »

the_third_wave wrote: post #48
neals wrote: post #10

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.

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 fac…

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.

Re: 700M users and Premium

#128

Post by lxgr »

upofadown wrote: post #95
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Say what you want about their security; they have the absolute best UX of any (primarily 1-on-1) messaging app, bar none. That is precisely because they don't give a shit about security. While others like Whatsapp bother with e2ee and resulting device sync problems and inability to do server-side search, Telegram just stores everything on a server without (meaningful) encryption and boldly claims that 'it is the mo…

>...and yes, nobody of them used Secret chats... Pretty much no one does any sort of identity verification anyway on any E2EE messaging system. So that means that the people running the servers can MITM if they feel like it to get the content. So in practice Telegram might be the best of something or another for all it matters. It's sort of a con. Yes our E2EE encryption app is perfectly secure assuming you do this t…

> Pretty much no one does any sort of identity verification anyway on any E2EE messaging system. So that means that the people running the servers can MITM if they feel like it to get the content.

The fact that anybody can verify keys raises the stakes of attempting a MITM attack significantly and thus protects the majority that doesn't verify keys themselves.

Re: 700M users and Premium

#129

Post by gomoboo »

annadane wrote: post #98
rejectfinite wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord does all this too? + the server rooms.

Stop. Stop it. This is such an unproductive reply

It would be more helpful to give them the reasons for which their reply is unproductive. Right now it’s unclear what it is you have a problem with.

Re: 700M users and Premium

#130

Post by skyyler »

okamiueru wrote: post #125
izacus wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you MAY need a number to sign up, you don't need to GIVE your number to other people so you can communicate with them over the service.

I don't understand. I've been using telegram for some years. Could you explain how you would go about using telegram without "signing up"? And by "a number" I understand it to be an option of "not your phone number"? How does the verification go then?

I believe they are saying that Telegram doesn't expose your phone number to other users on the app unless you explicitly allow it to.

I only use Telegram, no WhatsApp / Messenger so I had no idea that this was normal for other chat apps. Terrifying.

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