Are people still using Telegram? What is the upside compared to Signal?

▲ crazybonkersai 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Good ux, pleasant to use. A large community and lots of channels with all kind of content. Api is also great for spinning a bot for whatever purpose. I have for example a critical error bot for a production server running. If a critical error occurs, I get an immediate telegram message.

▲

wronex 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Sounds a lot like we might as well use Discord?

	▲	arkaic an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Discord is annoying af to use, slow and bloated like the rest of them. Really it all comes down to UX when anyone asks why use Telegram.
	▲	gf000 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		How is that any better? Still no e2ee, proprietary, arguably worse UX for chat purposes.

▲ Aachen an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Calling/ringing works reliably. My gf usually calls via Telegram to notify me and then we call via Signal

    Code formatting was the first thing my friend ran into after switching last week

In general, formatting on Telegram is a lot more versatile with >quote blocks that show up formatted as quotes and inline links without needing to have a giant message because of the giant URL

Many more image features, like you can do yellow highlighting and not only ugly shades of olive, you can put a message above an image instead of below, you can mark an image as spoiler, you can send it uncompressed, etc.

Jumping to a date was one of the first things I ran into

Web client lets you temporarily use someone else's computer without needing to install software

Making a Telegram bot takes 10 minutes if you just want a simple http callback and know roughly how it works. Signal has no support at all. Some third parties have made libraries but we keep having issues at work with our internal Signal bot to the point where I think we just gave up altogether now

Many people use Telegram to check if internet works because when opening the app it does a lightning quick check and it's very robust (I think it has no problem if DNS is down, for example) Much faster than trying to do a random web search

You can have memorable/pretty group URLs like telegram.me/OpenStreetMapOrg

Large files can be sent

Scheduled messages send at the right time when you're not online & the desktop app supports scheduled messages

Chats take a lot less space. The Signal authors probably don't have many contacts that they use Signal with because you can view the message markers of 4 chats before having to scroll down. In Telegram 9 fit in view. Similar on desktop but both numbers are bigger. Messages are also more space efficient in Telegram

Telegram so so so much faster than Signal's web, ahem, electron client

Literally the only advantage of Signal is the intangible property of privacy. I'm nevertheless switching everything over to Signal but it's often very hard to explain to people why they should give all this up for encryption. My family doesn't use all the advanced features but some techy friends do

▲ St0n3d 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you’re ok with abandoning all security and privacy, then Telegram has some nice extra features that can come in handy.