Telegram was always super shady. Why do people use it instead of f.e. Signal?
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2025
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Not an excuse but Telegram is pretty, and full of colors and animations. Signal is ugly (which is a feature for a small number of users).
But yes it's shady since their custom encryption is weak and they hold the keys.
nah both are ugly, but out of the messengers I have tried only telegram and whatsapp have the problem of randos adding me to crypto scam chat groups without any option to decline before it starts pinging me with notifications.
you want to go into settings > privacy > invites > change to my contacts
that will stop the random channel invites
It started pretty fine actually.
But nowadays I just love the API and my bot that's wired into my smart-home.
worst case that means FSB can control your home 😆
It's a lot easier to get a telegram account. I use telegram for its API and automated notifications, not impossible to do that with signal, but difficult to the point of serious impracticality. Telegram groups also don't really have anything that compares with Signal.
For person to person communication, its signal every time though.
it got big in people's minds earlier. my experience over the last 5 years has been that the only people still using telegram are fascists and cishet eastern europeans. queer folks in eastern europe mostly moved to signal (again. this is my experience. it's purely anecdotal)
Unfortunately the vr pirates that crack the games I want to try only use telegram.. So I have to use it to get their releases, but they prob fit the categories you listed...
nah for sure. there's a lot that goes on on telegram. just don't put anything that incriminates you on it
And furries. For some reason furries are all over telegram.
noted! wonder why they're not on signal? seems like with how common queer identities are in the furry community there'd be more desire to avoid a platform with russian ties
All my weed dealers use it where I am, so I think of it only as a drug app.
I've had it installed for a while. Didn't use it much, but it was fun to see the pop ups from people out of address book joining telegram.
There were some usual suspects of kind of 'sceptical' folk, but also some surprises like my aunt.
The novelty wore off quickly though
Because there is nobody who has signal, and everyone is using telegram. I could switch to signal, but there is nobody to chat with. Telegram users and group chat owners wouldnt switch to signal, because they dont care, and nobody else in chat does so. So unless telegram will be legally banned by government, nobody is going to do anything about using it.
Not based in the US is one.
FSNotes: sorry bud, I’m going to come up with bad excuses instead.