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Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

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Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#221

Post by vmception »

perardi wrote: post #60

I quite like Telegram, because I am apparently an old man at the age of 37, and I greatly prefer typing on my real physical keyboard, and not on my phone. Telegram’s desktop client for Mac is great—it’s fast, it has feature parity with mobile clients, and it works . Messages get delivered and stay in sync, and I don’t need to somehow link my phone to my main machine via QR code to act as a gateway. And if they introd…

its so crazy to me how big Telegram is to crypto, while there are people who only know about Telegram for giant conspiracy groups like Q-anon which I never run across

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#222

Post by sim_card_map »

mercacona wrote: post #209
sim_card_map wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, Signal creator is actively against 3rd party clients, because they use his infrastructure for free: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

The issue was branding, not bandwidth. There’re 3rd party clients: https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android

No, not just branding. Read the message I linked to.

He explicitly says he doesn't want other clients to use their infra.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#223

Post by Sunspark »

vxNsr wrote: post #184
perardi wrote: post #60

I quite like Telegram, because I am apparently an old man at the age of 37, and I greatly prefer typing on my real physical keyboard, and not on my phone. Telegram’s desktop client for Mac is great—it’s fast, it has feature parity with mobile clients, and it works . Messages get delivered and stay in sync, and I don’t need to somehow link my phone to my main machine via QR code to act as a gateway. And if they introd…

Only quibble I have with Telegram is their “find nearby” feature, it’s clearly abused by bad actors to funnel users to porn, so my family sees the whole app as not family friendly, bec they don’t want their tweens and teens with phones, that are mostly locked down, having this loophole. There no way to turn it off, or lock it behind parental control, so until then we’re still stuck on WhatsApp.

Good thing your family has no access to the internet, otherwise they might be exposed porn in google image search.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#224

Post by gojomo »

mercacona wrote: post #209
sim_card_map wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, Signal creator is actively against 3rd party clients, because they use his infrastructure for free: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

The issue was branding, not bandwidth. There’re 3rd party clients: https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android

Marlinspike in the linked comment is clearly also disapproving of the use of Signal's servers, so it's more than branding. Unless he's blessed 'MollyIM' explicitly since, there remains some risk it could be locked out at any time.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#225

Post by tjohns »

eptcyka wrote: post #206
vinay427 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly not sure what I'm missing when avoiding Telegram's non-private conversations. There's no desktop client support (unlike Signal which works on a desktop mostly seamlessly, including group video) and no option at all to backup and sync conversations between devices (unlike Signal's rather limited options). If I was alright with Telegram's non-E2EE conversations, I would prefer WhatsApp for its wider adopti…

What do you mean, no desktop client support? There's a fully featured desktop client for Telegram, and I've never had my desktop clients have their sqlite database corrupt itself.

It depends on which desktop client you're using.

Telegram's native Mac app (https://macos.telegram.org/) supports E2E-encrypted secret chats. Their cross platform Qt-based app (https://desktop.telegram.org/) does not support this feature.

Notably, the experience in a Telegram secret chat behaves differently then regular chats. A secret chat is tied to one device; you can't start a secret chat on your phone and pick it up on your tablet/desktop. There's also no server-side message history. Regular (non-secret) chats don't have these limitations.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#226

Post by Aloha »

chrisjarvis wrote: post #215
Aloha wrote: post #149

I'm an early adopter for telegram, and I'd be glad to give them some money. I signed up in 2014, basically the first or second time it hit HN, and over time, I've built out a pretty decent social network on there, and run a dozen or so specialty community chats. I'd be glad to pay them something, 25 a year or so, even if I don't get anything special from it (though, if I did want something, it'd be better access to s…

Would you be willing to describe more about how you engage with this service? I like the service but haven't found many opportunities to use it. Did you move the "specialty community chats" over from another site like Reddit? Do you talk with people you know IRL on it? Mainly just wondering how you built out a social network for yourself on Telegram. just wondering thanks!

They were communities that formed organically on the service from people with otherwise shared interests. While we recruited users by word of mouth and from other services, we've formed our own community on the service.

I do indeed talk with many people on it that I otherwise know in real life, often it goes the other way, I meet people via the service, then we eventually meet in real life.

Most, but not all, are furry fandom oriented, and telegram really fills a hole left by the closure of other instant messaging services. To give you an idea, I run about a dozen chats on there, with around 1400 unique users.

If telegram were to go away, many of us would move to discord, IRC, or a mix of both.

The community has the ability to host its own services, and I've given thought what to do if a shutdown looks likely. Had the telegram server side code been open sourced, we'd likely spin up our own service. While we do have the skills internally to reimplement the server side components it'd be a pretty large amount if work to do so. My hope is that if TG did shut down, they'd open source their service side implementation.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#227

Post by bordercases »

tazjin wrote: post #199
bordercases wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes indeed I use it, it doesn't refute my statement.

Which ones don't? I used the Android client and telega, both of those do. I believe the iOS one does, too.

For sure: Linux.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#228

Post by IntelMiner »

moritonal wrote: post #55
rozab wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although I suspect Discord is still some way from profitability, it's monetisation strategy seems to be working well (charge subscription for premium membership with small features like custom emojis, animated profile pics, better audio quality). A surprising amount of people go for it. Telegram has many nerdy hobby communities which could buy the cosmetics or whatever and subsidise the service for the normal users.

A thing that a lot of people pay for is the better video screen sharing quality. People are happy to have "just about okay" for free, and "good" for a subscription fee.

+1 to this. I give Discord something like 5 bucks a month for 1080p video streaming at 60 FPS

There's an "unlocked" 4K one if you want to pay $10 a month but I still only use a 1080p (at 144Hz) monitor, so I'm very happy to pay the small amount

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#229

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

mercacona wrote: post #209
sim_card_map wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, Signal creator is actively against 3rd party clients, because they use his infrastructure for free: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

The issue was branding, not bandwidth. There’re 3rd party clients: https://github.com/mollyim/mollyim-android

Are there any clients that will run on older versions of Android.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#230

Post by perardi »

theleftfielder wrote: post #194
tazjin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram's clients are amazing (including the ones developed by the community, such as telega.el for Emacs). It is miles ahead of any other messenger in the UX department. Friends of mine who have (reluctantly, in some cases) tried it out quickly got stuck because of this single point. The other thing it's got going for it is that its protocol is designed to work in low-bandwidth environments. Yeah, the protocol look…

It's funny to see this towards the top of the comments here. Feels like not that long ago that Telegram updates would be downvotes on HackerNews because "you should never trust an app that designed their own encryption protocol."

As the author of the parent comment…

…yes, I am aware Telegram does not use the absolute best practices, and at the very least, I imagine it can be cracked wide open by a nation-state intelligence agency.

Which is why, for my occasional super-secret must-be-hush-hush chats, I use other clients. For my day-to-day chats? Telegram. Because, to be privileged, to be flippant: the NSA is welcome to read my texts about what I’m buying at Target this afternoon.

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