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!