I’ve never used the telegram app. What do you like about it compared to signal / WhatsApp?

- Messages send quickly and reliably, even under poor and sometimes hostile network conditions. Telegram just seems to work even when other chat apps struggle.

- Telegram uses usernames instead of phone numbers by default, which is good if you're using it as an IRC replacement instead of an SMS replacement.

- You can have the client open on essentially unlimited devices simultaneously, including a web app if you need it.

- Messages can be edited at any point after sending with no expiry.

- You can schedule messages to send later, or send a message silently so it doesn't wake people up.

- Different group types - announcement channels, Discord-style groups with sub-channels, flexible moderator roles, etc. (I believe WhatsApp has some of this.)

- Support for bots, which is also very helpful for managing large communities.

- Community-created, sharable stickers. Seriously, people underestimate how nice these are.

The downside is that a lot of this requires state to be stored on the Telegram servers, so most chat's aren't E2E encrypted. (They do have an option for E2E encrypted private 1:1 chats, but you lose most of the polish by using that.)

Also, the official apps are open source, so you can modify them if needed.

	▲	opem 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I'll add a few more: - insanely fast search, chat history browsing and in app navigation - unlimited unencrypted cloud storage, your chats and docs always stays available - ability to send very large files - ability to host large video and voice chats - chat automation - auto translation and transcription - mini apps - open source client, with lots of customization - phone number less sign up (you can purchase a burner number from them and sign up with that, I guess it costs their crypto (ton) tho) - sending gifts

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isatty 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Signal and WhatsApp are bloated and slow in comparison.

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Krasnol 2 hours ago | parent [-]

What is slow?

I don't understand what there is to accelerate.

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forgotmypw17 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The main things that are slow are loading the app and opening the app, loading the messages, and receiving the messages. On my phone, this is much slower than Telegram, and on my computer, the WhatsApp program doesn't even work have the time -- it just gets stuck in the loading process.

Signal is not as bad, but can still take a minute or two to update everything on my computer. The phone app is better.

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Krasnol 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Sounds more like your personal problem.

I live in Germany and use both. None do that and as I'm "the IT guy" for many people at work an din private, I'd have heard about it. Hell, the whole continent would have heard about it as whatsapp is widely used.

My Signal also doesn't do that.

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econ an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Since the whatsapp cliënt on desktop was replaced by a web wrapper it's even worse.

I don't even remember how the previous cliënt did it but my spelling suggestions are in English (as is the OS) but my chats are all in Dutch. Most words have a red underline.

It recently gave up downloading images. Turned out it was no longer allowed to write to its own folder. Not sure if this should be blamed on MS but from the (many) user perspective it just stopped working.

It keeps limited chat history which makes it inferior to IRC.

It badly wants you to use ai.

It has a spam channel where it promotes it self.

The phone app is decent tho

	▲	opem 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly, signal is decent on all the platforms, while mobile clients for whatsapp is somewhat tolerable if you ignore the constant AI push. But the web/desktop client is a pain in the ass to use.

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opem 11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not at all, telegram clients in every platform are much much faster than whatsapp, signal etc. on the same platform. Although, this is more visible on older devices and on poor network conditions, I clearly see a difference in my newer devices too.

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cardiffspaceman 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

From USA, one mainly needs WhatsApp to chat with Latin Americans. Judging from the billboards I have seen in Argentina and Uruguay, there are a lot of Latin Americans getting WA free. So of course, why pay more?

	▲	maximilianthe1 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>> why pay Both WhatsUp & Telegram are completely free to use. Telegram has premium features, but they are tangential to chatting & average use.

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Paracompact an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

There are three people in this thread with this "personal" problem.

	▲	econ 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's the gold standard for bad support: pretend the user has a problem. There once was this thread on a blog for a windows XP pirated edition. Someone commented that something small didn't work. They replied in less than a minute, that's terrible! 10 minutes later the version was incremented and a new reply said: Try the new version! After 30 minutes the bug fix was confirmed. They weren't trying to be funny but it still makes me laugh how it compares to Microsoft, the 3 trillion software company.