I wonder when people in the west will start flocking to Telegram groups (or equivalent) to get the real information the way they do elsewhere.

Trading one "private sector" state surveillance and narrative control platform for another isn't much of an improvement.

That said, I hate to break it to you, but there is no real question of 'when', or even 'if'. The general public simply does not care, no matter how much abuse they are subjected to by mainstream platform operators.

There will always be a minority who care enough to embrace decentralization, open source, good e2ee, but they are the exception to the vast majority, at least inside the US, who simply do not care enough to change their behavior.

What percentage of Americans do you think would voluntarily, permanently relinquish their own fourth amendment rights for $5000? Scary thought experiment when you recall studies that have found only two thirds of Americans can name all three branches of government, or that fewer than one in four can name any right secured by the first amendment other than freedom of speech.

https://studyfinds.org/constitution-americans-rights/

Here in Spain we use telegram a lot. I've heard in the US it's used only for piracy and drugs but we use it for everything. There's groups letting people know of Nvidia card availability. Groups for every community I'm part of (WhatsApp sucks at group chats), from makerspaces, lgbt events to tattoo artists, gigs etc. There's also a group exposing the faces of metro pickpockets because the police doesn't care. Stuff like that.

The good thing is that Telegram is not American so you don't get this prude censorship BS that you get on American apps (show half a nipple and get banned). Especially in the LGBT groups this can be a problem but also in the makerspace one (one of our members really loves making certain toys lol). Of course actual porn is not ok but that's fine, we don't use it for that.

I also like that their premium subscription is super affordable, only 2€ per month (it's cheaper if you don't pay through the Apple/Google ripoff stores) and it offers a lot of cool and useful features like automatic translation and transcription (which actually works unlike WhatsApp's)

I'm really quite happy with it and on top of everything bots are a fully supported first class citizen there so you don't have to screw around with hacky code like with WhatsApp. I have several bots for myself. So if there's a feature I want that it doesn't have I can simply add it!

In almost every context when someone says something like "real information" it almost always means "information I like or agree with".

Outside the US, WhatsApp already fills that role, but like Telegram, "real information" is an optimistic descriptor.