13 ms·

Telegram Voice Chats

189 points by ffpip 6y ago

echelon 6y ago
Telegram, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Hangouts/Voice/Talk/Meet/Allo/Whatever -- who will win? And without ads deeply ingrained (or highly addictive paid features like Discord has), does it matter? With the recent scrutiny of the DOJ, I wonder if Google and Facebook's business models are really all that sustainable or desirable. Discord seems to have the healthiest setup here.
- f311a 6y ago
  Will win in terms of what? A lot of things in Telegram are done right, but that does not mean it will win the audience. Discord is a very good solution too, but I doubt people want to use it on their smartphones as a messenger.
  - theshrike79 6y ago
    The problem with Discord is that every single thing has their own server with 42 highly nuanced channels, intricate permissions and multiple utility bots. Then you have like 15 active users, all typing on #general Multiply this by 20 or so communities and it's an UX clusterfuck of epic proportions.
    - ffpip 6y ago
      Yeah. Even I felt the same. It feels incredibly spammy, admin, roles, plus cluttered interface.
      - dorchadas 6y ago
        That's exactly why I prefer Telegram to Discord in most cases. Everything just feels so cluttered. Yeah, it's nice to have the multiple channels in one server (though forums would be nicer, as then things would be easily searchable in the future for everyone and not behind Discord's wall, where who knows what could happen), but Telegram is just so much sleeker in my opinion, and that's why I use it as my primary chat app (and keep trying to get more of my friends and family on it)
    - maeln 6y ago
      When you look at what it was supposed to compete with (good old mumble and teamspeak). The UX and UI make a lot of sense. You where supposed to have a lot of channel since you where usually creating one per game / per team. I remember having channel lol-1, lol-2, cs-1, cs-2, etc, so that multiple team could play the same game at the same time without speaking over each other. Then you had a main channel where you where hanging out when not playing anything. But discord became so popular, it stopped being used just has a "game voip" service and has a general messaging service. A lot of streamer/youtuber use discord to host their community. I even know some company who switched to it when the pandemic started. And the fact and the matter is that discord was never designed for this.
    - WanderPanda 6y ago
      And still not as bad of an UX as the process of joining a Zoom Meeting / Webinar
    - thefz 6y ago
      At the other end of the spectrum, I manage a 20-user private channel in which users coordinate to play together and chat about games in a single channel, voice chat in about 2-3 channels and the quality of life is various degrees of magnitude better than the old skype/teamspeak days.
    - markshepard 6y ago
      Totally Agree. We have quite a few smaller professional communities switching to our airsend (https://www.airsend.io/ https://www.airsend.io/) exactly for the same reason. What we hear often from these users is that managing discord (tool) takes more time than the actual communication. It is ideal for large communities but if you want something simple discord is not the way to go.
  - echelon 6y ago
    > Will win in terms of what? Penetration, profitability, etc. More broadly, what does the landscape look like in 5 years? 10 years? I'm also skeptical that chat is worth as much as I'd once thought. If it's not paired with an enterprise solution (Slack, Teams, Hangouts/Allo/Meet/Whatever), it has to make money on ads or premium features (emotes, stickers, "server boosts"). Google and Facebook are about to get reamed by the DOJ for anti-competitive practices, and I'll wager that privacy is one of the talking points. If you can't use chat to enhance your advertising moat, what then? Sticker sales can't amount to that much, and ads without purchase intent or social graph knowledge are pretty low value. I'm curious what people's thoughts are.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  Slack/Zoom/Teams/Whatever Google is running now is mostly dictated by what the company uses for their email. Pretty much no-one uses any of those for personal stuff, Slack does have some open-source project stuff in there. FB Messenger seems to be highly siloed, I never use it and I know only one person who uses it as their main communication platform. Whatsapp has reached critical mass in many countries outside of the US. People use it because everyone uses it - not because it's especially good in any way. Signal, Matrix etc are for idealists, who have a future vision of what the platform will develop into in mind. My personal favourite is Telegram. It has a good mix of bots, API, native clients and channel management tools.
  - OJFord 6y ago
    I don't actually use it yet myself, but my hope is that Matrix will eventually be the end of having to care about which app someone else uses. That an incumbent or two will switch, and no new app would gain significant market share with a non-Matrix silo. I may just be dreaming though. Perhaps better bridges are the best we can realistically hope for.
    - minot 6y ago
      I have almost no hope for matrix at least in the short term given that I recently tried joining Mozilla’s server and ended giving up and creating a new account with Mozilla login.
    - theshrike79 6y ago
      Matrix-the-technology is a really good idea, no complaints there. But Matrix the ecosystem is a mess. Everything is almost there, but not quite. Pretty much anything you want to do is just a little bit too difficult compared to the amount of work you're willing to put in to adopt a new messaging system. The worst part is, that it's been in this state for a few years now. It's not that much easier to run your own server, clients are just a bit too clunky, bridges are flaky and hard to use. It'll get there someday, I hope.
  - mminer237 6y ago
    I assume you're not American. Here everyone uses SMS by default. Failing that, everyone uses FB Messenger. Discord is used for gaming. That's about all the breadth you'll get outside of work. I guess I know three people who use Hangouts sometimes. Marco Polo and Snapchat are moderately popular things, though a bit different. Still, I have never met a single person who has used Whatsapp, Signal, Matrix, or Telegram. I doubt more than a handful have ever heard of any of them.
- upofadown 6y ago
  No one will win. That's not how this works. Things will continue to be an ongoing example of XKCD-927 until the world as a whole cares enough to fix things. The train wreck that is instant messaging makes me realize how incredibly lucky we are to have email.
  - ValentineC 6y ago
    > The train wreck that is instant messaging makes me realize how incredibly lucky we are to have email. Isn't the opposite of xkcd 927 a monopoly? If we're talking about a federated standard, we had XMPP [1], but nobody who can create user-friendly apps seems to want to adopt it. [1] https://xmpp.org/ https://xmpp.org/
    - mminer237 6y ago
      The advantage of XMPP is that you don't have to use the official site/app. It's not surprising that Facebook and Google removed support when they both rely on ads on their sites to fund their businesses.
    - _flux 6y ago
      Email or the phone networks aren't global monopolies, are they? They even got text messages working globally—no idea about MMS though. So maybe there's a way to make a globally non-island IM that works in the Internet as well; or maybe with islands that can work with each other if that's how it must be. Sadly I doubt this will not happen without regulation; it worked for the telephone network, though email happened without.
    - MattJ100 6y ago
      Snikket[1] is an attempt at creating (maybe better "curating", as we're not starting from scratch) a suite of well-integrated user-friendly XMPP software (a server, and a single app for each platform). The server is available as a Docker image, though we're still working on things like a web admin. Android app is available, the iOS app is due to enter beta in a month or two. This is a personal thing for me. This year I migrated my family to XMPP from WhatsApp (at least for communicating with each other), and I want others to be able to do the same. Trying to make it a sustainable project (it's 100% open-source). [1]: https://snikket.org/ https://snikket.org/
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
nikivi 6y ago
I found Durov's plans to monetize Telegram most interesting. https://t.me/durov/142 https://t.me/durov/142 Team features (competing with Slack/Discord?), ad tools for telegram channels and premium stickers. Whilst keeping all the existing Telegram features.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  here is a copy for those not using tgram -- As Telegram approaches 500 million active users, many of you are asking the question – who is going to pay to support this growth? After all, more users mean more expenses for traffic and servers. A project of our size needs at least a few hundred million dollars per year to keep going. For most of Telegram’s history, I paid for the expenses of the company from my personal savings. However, with its current growth Telegram is on track to reach billions of users and to require appropriate funding. When a tech project reaches this scale, typically there are two options – start earning money to cover the costs, or sell the company. Hence the question – which path will Telegram take? I’d like to make a few points to clarify our plan: 1. We are not going to sell the company like the founders of Whatsapp. The world needs Telegram to stay independent as a place where users are respected and high-quality service is ensured. Telegram must continue to serve the world as an example of a tech company that strives for perfection and integrity. And, as the sad examples of our predecessors show, that is impossible if you become part of a corporation. 2. Telegram is here to stay for a long time. We began developing our apps for our personal use over 8 years ago and have come a long way since then. In the process, Telegram changed the way people communicate in several aspects – encryption, functionality, simplicity, design, speed. This journey has just started. There’s much more we can – and will – bring to the world. 3. In order to make points 1 and 2 possible, Telegram will begin to generate revenue, starting next year. We will do it in accordance with our values and the pledges we have made over the last 7 years. Thanks to our current scale, we will be able to do it in a non-intrusive way. Most users will hardly notice any change. 4. All the features that are currently free will stay free. We will add some new features for business teams or power users. Some of these features will require more resources and will be paid for by these premium users. Regular users will be able to keep enjoying Telegram – for free, forever. 5. All parts of Telegram devoted to messaging will remain ad-free. We think that displaying ads in private 1-to-1 chats or group chats is a bad idea. Communication between people should be free of advertising of any sort. 6. In addition to its messaging component, Telegram has a social networking dimension. Our massive public one-to-many channels can have millions of subscribers each and are more like Twitter feeds. In many markets the owners of such channels display ads to earn money, sometimes using third-party ad platforms. The ads they post look like regular messages, and are often intrusive. We will fix this by introducing our own Ad Platform for public one-to-many channels – one that is user-friendly, respects privacy and allows us to cover the costs of servers and traffic. 7. If Telegram starts earning money, the community should also benefit. For example, If we monetize large public one-to-many channels via the Ad Platform, the owners of these channels will receive free traffic in proportion to their size. Or, if Telegram introduces premium stickers with additional expressive features, the artists who make stickers of this new type will also get a part of the profit. We want millions of Telegram-based creators and small businesses to thrive, enriching the experience of all our users. This is the Telegram way. It will allow us to keep innovating and keep growing for decades to come. We will be able to launch countless new features and welcome billions of new users. While doing that, we will remain independent and stay true to our values, redefining how a tech company should operate.
curiousgal 6y ago
I used to mainly use Telegram but their broken notifications on Android turned me off. If a chat app can't get notifications right, it's not worth using.
- vezycash 6y ago
  Whatsapp, facebook, messenger, twitter enjoy unfair advantage from device manufacturers. They whitelist the above apps from their battery management systems and indiscriminately terminate everything else. Summary - figure out how to whitelist telegram on ur phone and you should be fine.
  - Vinnl 6y ago
    See also: this long page in Signal's documentation with device-specific instructions on how to avoid it being throttled [1]. [1] https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318711-Troubleshooting-Notifications https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318711-Tr...
  - ninkendo 6y ago
    Huh? That sounds wrong to me. Do you have a source for this?
    - zinekeller 6y ago
      There is literally a website for this specifically (https://dontkillmyapp.com/ https://dontkillmyapp.com/) created by the Urbandroid team (creators of Sleep as Android). Rather annongingly, the team started out due to problems encountered on HMD/Nokia phones, since acknowledged and partially fixed (https://sleep.urbandroid.org/documentation/faq/alarms-sleep-tracking-dont-work/#nokia-2 https://sleep.urbandroid.org/documentation/faq/alarms-sleep-...). Personal anecdote: even Google have been wishy-washy between different versions of Android when it comes from battery optimizations (Android 6/Marshmallow is the most hardest on this front), but at least it was documented. Imagine the pain of managing other brands (and it seems that all Android manufacturers engage on it one way or another). Edit: in 2018, VideoLAN/VLC complained that Huawei agressively kills apps outside of its whitelist (https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1022033608670961665 https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1022033608670961665). There is no update on this one unfortunately, but I've heard that it was fixed in subsequent EmUI versions but there is no verification of that from VideoLAN or Huawei. Edit edit: Unrelated to the notfications issue, benchmark scores are allegedly being tricked out by a certain chip manufacturer running the chips out-of-spec in a whitelist (https://www.techarp.com/mobile/mediatek-benchmark-cheating-2/ https://www.techarp.com/mobile/mediatek-benchmark-cheating-2...).
tmakks 6y ago
Unpopular opinion & OT: Synchronous communication (eg. calls, video calls, real meetings) with more than two people rarely add value. Edit: Dear Downvoters, it's ok that you downvoted as it was expected but please share why you think different and give examples what value a 2+ meeting adds
- sebow 6y ago
  I don't think it's about the value but rather what people actually want. Lots of people use the group call 'feature' of WhatsApp, or even discord though obviously discord is way less popular.The strong advantage of Telegram over WhatsApp and really other IM so far: no notification bugs, clients are actually not that shitty across >all< platforms(windows,android/IOS,linux,mac[haven't personally tried]).
- ecmascript 6y ago
  I disagree, but I upvoted since I hate the kind of downvote you're describing and I am regularly downvoted for the same reasons. I think it adds a great amount of value, I can have a group discussion and plan things in real time instead of a slow async discussion. Especially for online games, a async communication would be terrible. ;)
- ajconway 6y ago
  You're thinking business, but this is more like Teamspeak (or Discord).
  - joshxyz 6y ago
    This this this, i primarily used tg for professional purposes but discovered the communities there lol it's indeed a little like discord.
  - smabie 6y ago
    Telegram is also used for business. In fact, my firm uses it as the primary method of communication
    - 6y ago
MatthiasP 6y ago
No mention of any kind of encryption?
- escalt 6y ago
  Telegram keeps talking about how private and secure it is, but all group and private chats are not encrypted by default. Its end to end encrypted chats are very limited (only direct messages and only on one device) and rely on self-baked crypto. Their voice chat is also almost definitely not end to end encrypted, as I'm not aware of a way to do e2ee voice chat with many participants without linearly increasing bandwidth requirements for users
  - karlmcguire 6y ago
    I found it interesting that direct calls (just calling one of your contacts) can be peer-to-peer if you enable it in the settings. They even have a unique code at the top of the screen (like 5 emojis) that you can verify match on the other participant's phone.
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    I wonder if it’s possible to do in the same way WhatsApp does for media uploads. When you send a video to a contact on WhatsApp, it takes some time to upload the video. When you then forward the video a few minutes later, it’s near instant. This set off red flags for me, as that can’t be E2EE if so. Someone explained that the media is encrypted using one key, which is stored locally. The key is then encrypted and transmitted to the recipient using the clients public key. When you forward the media, you only need to send the second recipient the encrypted key using their pubkey (along with the identifier for the media that is still present in WhatsApp server side cache). This in itself raises some more red flags relating to the encryption of the media being transmitted and cached in the first place, but if that’s all done sensibly, then this isn’t the worst solution to reduce bandwidth utilisation by end users. A similar approach could be used for E2EE group calls. Encrypt the payload using one key, send the payload to all participants via a central server (which generally has to happen anyway due to NAT traversal issues, especially with mobile internet), and send each participant the keys individually. Voila, group call with 3 people or 30 people doesn’t result in having to retransmit the same audio payload multiple times. Obviously this is a simplistic overview of how this could work. I am not a cryptographer, I have no expertise in this area, everything above could be total baloney. Anyone with expertise should absolutely correct me please and thank you. All that said, hope this helps. EDIT: changed the above to reflect that forwarding media is “near instant” rather than “instant”
solarkraft 6y ago
Wonderful! I kept the beta installed just for this; of course you can have a separate Mumble/Discord/whatever channel, but this definitely removes some friction. It works remarkably well!
IshKebab 6y ago
TL;DR: It's like Discord's voice channels, instead of WhatsApp's group voice calls. You can join and leave at any point.
- lucb1e 6y ago
  Or like Mumble or like TeamSpeak or like Wire or... this isn't unique to any specific brand, not sure if there is a reason to specifically refer to a walled network service.
zerop 6y ago
What stops zoom from doing it?
timwis 6y ago
This reminds me of how I used to use Teamspeak with a gaming organisation I used to be part of. It was a completely different dynamic than a video call. You could "hang out" in a room, chime in when you wanted, say nothing when you wanted. It was a lot more like working separately but with physical proximity to one another. I'm optimistic that, applied to a work context and with the same norms, this could go a long way to recreating the social connection of workspaces.
- tsjq 6y ago
  that's interesting, indeed. is it like everyone puts their mic on mute except when they want to speak ?
  - timwis 6y ago
    Yep it’s push to talk, so you’re muted except when pressing the talk key
    - tsjq 6y ago
      Superb
- selykg 6y ago
  one of the teams I was on at my previous employer was like this. code review was done in groups on this call as well. Got stuck on something and need another set of eyeballs? Share your screen and pair program on it. It made working from home a little less solo. You could come and go on the call as you wished it wasn't really required unless it was a team call where certain topics were being discussed that should have everyone (or nearly everyone).
- pensatoio 6y ago
  I convinced my coworkers to start a discord, and we now have most of our department in there. Having the (totally optional) PTT voice channels to hang out in makes these long weeks of WFH much less solitary.
fortran77 6y ago
We love PTT Voice Chat here, been using it with Virtual Airwaves platform (https://cb.virtualairwaves.com https://cb.virtualairwaves.com)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
SergeAx 6y ago
Telegram is amazing messaging app. It is so fast! When I travel by boat and my phone barely sees one notch of GSM service (not 3G, not even Edge) from the island on the horizon - Telegram is able to send and receive messages. Whatsapp and Slack can't even connect for hours after that. Another amazing thing is when I type a message on my phone - I see it on my PC the moment I press Send button. There's no visible delay, a perfect Google search effect from 2000-s.
- adonese 6y ago
  >I type a message on my phone - I see it on my PC the moment I press Send button I use some telegram groups and sometimes i'd start typing in phone before the message gets too long and i'd prefer to carry on the message in my laptop instead. It is so useful to have this feature.
  - SergeAx 6y ago
    Yes, Slack copied that about two weeks ago, with glitches between versions. Hope they will copy other features someday.
hexo 6y ago
I'd totally appreciate ability to turn all those silly animations off. Is it possible already?
lostmsu 6y ago
The whole page has no mention of encryption.

189 points by ffpip 6y ago

Telegram, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Hangouts/Voice/Talk/Meet/Allo/Whatever -- who will win? And without ads deeply ingrained (or highly addictive paid features like Discord has), does it matter? With the recent scrutiny of the DOJ, I wonder if Google and Facebook's business models are really all that sustainable or desirable. Discord seems to have the healthiest setup here.

f311a 6y ago
Will win in terms of what? A lot of things in Telegram are done right, but that does not mean it will win the audience. Discord is a very good solution too, but I doubt people want to use it on their smartphones as a messenger.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  The problem with Discord is that every single thing has their own server with 42 highly nuanced channels, intricate permissions and multiple utility bots. Then you have like 15 active users, all typing on #general Multiply this by 20 or so communities and it's an UX clusterfuck of epic proportions.
  - ffpip 6y ago
    Yeah. Even I felt the same. It feels incredibly spammy, admin, roles, plus cluttered interface.
    - dorchadas 6y ago
      That's exactly why I prefer Telegram to Discord in most cases. Everything just feels so cluttered. Yeah, it's nice to have the multiple channels in one server (though forums would be nicer, as then things would be easily searchable in the future for everyone and not behind Discord's wall, where who knows what could happen), but Telegram is just so much sleeker in my opinion, and that's why I use it as my primary chat app (and keep trying to get more of my friends and family on it)
  - maeln 6y ago
    When you look at what it was supposed to compete with (good old mumble and teamspeak). The UX and UI make a lot of sense. You where supposed to have a lot of channel since you where usually creating one per game / per team. I remember having channel lol-1, lol-2, cs-1, cs-2, etc, so that multiple team could play the same game at the same time without speaking over each other. Then you had a main channel where you where hanging out when not playing anything. But discord became so popular, it stopped being used just has a "game voip" service and has a general messaging service. A lot of streamer/youtuber use discord to host their community. I even know some company who switched to it when the pandemic started. And the fact and the matter is that discord was never designed for this.
  - WanderPanda 6y ago
    And still not as bad of an UX as the process of joining a Zoom Meeting / Webinar
  - thefz 6y ago
    At the other end of the spectrum, I manage a 20-user private channel in which users coordinate to play together and chat about games in a single channel, voice chat in about 2-3 channels and the quality of life is various degrees of magnitude better than the old skype/teamspeak days.
  - markshepard 6y ago
    Totally Agree. We have quite a few smaller professional communities switching to our airsend (https://www.airsend.io/ https://www.airsend.io/) exactly for the same reason. What we hear often from these users is that managing discord (tool) takes more time than the actual communication. It is ideal for large communities but if you want something simple discord is not the way to go.
- echelon 6y ago
  > Will win in terms of what? Penetration, profitability, etc. More broadly, what does the landscape look like in 5 years? 10 years? I'm also skeptical that chat is worth as much as I'd once thought. If it's not paired with an enterprise solution (Slack, Teams, Hangouts/Allo/Meet/Whatever), it has to make money on ads or premium features (emotes, stickers, "server boosts"). Google and Facebook are about to get reamed by the DOJ for anti-competitive practices, and I'll wager that privacy is one of the talking points. If you can't use chat to enhance your advertising moat, what then? Sticker sales can't amount to that much, and ads without purchase intent or social graph knowledge are pretty low value. I'm curious what people's thoughts are.
theshrike79 6y ago
Slack/Zoom/Teams/Whatever Google is running now is mostly dictated by what the company uses for their email. Pretty much no-one uses any of those for personal stuff, Slack does have some open-source project stuff in there. FB Messenger seems to be highly siloed, I never use it and I know only one person who uses it as their main communication platform. Whatsapp has reached critical mass in many countries outside of the US. People use it because everyone uses it - not because it's especially good in any way. Signal, Matrix etc are for idealists, who have a future vision of what the platform will develop into in mind. My personal favourite is Telegram. It has a good mix of bots, API, native clients and channel management tools.
- OJFord 6y ago
  I don't actually use it yet myself, but my hope is that Matrix will eventually be the end of having to care about which app someone else uses. That an incumbent or two will switch, and no new app would gain significant market share with a non-Matrix silo. I may just be dreaming though. Perhaps better bridges are the best we can realistically hope for.
  - minot 6y ago
    I have almost no hope for matrix at least in the short term given that I recently tried joining Mozilla’s server and ended giving up and creating a new account with Mozilla login.
  - theshrike79 6y ago
    Matrix-the-technology is a really good idea, no complaints there. But Matrix the ecosystem is a mess. Everything is almost there, but not quite. Pretty much anything you want to do is just a little bit too difficult compared to the amount of work you're willing to put in to adopt a new messaging system. The worst part is, that it's been in this state for a few years now. It's not that much easier to run your own server, clients are just a bit too clunky, bridges are flaky and hard to use. It'll get there someday, I hope.
- mminer237 6y ago
  I assume you're not American. Here everyone uses SMS by default. Failing that, everyone uses FB Messenger. Discord is used for gaming. That's about all the breadth you'll get outside of work. I guess I know three people who use Hangouts sometimes. Marco Polo and Snapchat are moderately popular things, though a bit different. Still, I have never met a single person who has used Whatsapp, Signal, Matrix, or Telegram. I doubt more than a handful have ever heard of any of them.
upofadown 6y ago
No one will win. That's not how this works. Things will continue to be an ongoing example of XKCD-927 until the world as a whole cares enough to fix things. The train wreck that is instant messaging makes me realize how incredibly lucky we are to have email.
- ValentineC 6y ago
  > The train wreck that is instant messaging makes me realize how incredibly lucky we are to have email. Isn't the opposite of xkcd 927 a monopoly? If we're talking about a federated standard, we had XMPP [1], but nobody who can create user-friendly apps seems to want to adopt it. [1] https://xmpp.org/ https://xmpp.org/
  - mminer237 6y ago
    The advantage of XMPP is that you don't have to use the official site/app. It's not surprising that Facebook and Google removed support when they both rely on ads on their sites to fund their businesses.
  - _flux 6y ago
    Email or the phone networks aren't global monopolies, are they? They even got text messages working globally—no idea about MMS though. So maybe there's a way to make a globally non-island IM that works in the Internet as well; or maybe with islands that can work with each other if that's how it must be. Sadly I doubt this will not happen without regulation; it worked for the telephone network, though email happened without.
  - MattJ100 6y ago
    Snikket[1] is an attempt at creating (maybe better "curating", as we're not starting from scratch) a suite of well-integrated user-friendly XMPP software (a server, and a single app for each platform). The server is available as a Docker image, though we're still working on things like a web admin. Android app is available, the iOS app is due to enter beta in a month or two. This is a personal thing for me. This year I migrated my family to XMPP from WhatsApp (at least for communicating with each other), and I want others to be able to do the same. Trying to make it a sustainable project (it's 100% open-source). [1]: https://snikket.org/ https://snikket.org/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

nikivi 6y ago

I found Durov's plans to monetize Telegram most interesting. https://t.me/durov/142 https://t.me/durov/142 Team features (competing with Slack/Discord?), ad tools for telegram channels and premium stickers. Whilst keeping all the existing Telegram features.

forgotmypw17 6y ago
here is a copy for those not using tgram -- As Telegram approaches 500 million active users, many of you are asking the question – who is going to pay to support this growth? After all, more users mean more expenses for traffic and servers. A project of our size needs at least a few hundred million dollars per year to keep going. For most of Telegram’s history, I paid for the expenses of the company from my personal savings. However, with its current growth Telegram is on track to reach billions of users and to require appropriate funding. When a tech project reaches this scale, typically there are two options – start earning money to cover the costs, or sell the company. Hence the question – which path will Telegram take? I’d like to make a few points to clarify our plan: 1. We are not going to sell the company like the founders of Whatsapp. The world needs Telegram to stay independent as a place where users are respected and high-quality service is ensured. Telegram must continue to serve the world as an example of a tech company that strives for perfection and integrity. And, as the sad examples of our predecessors show, that is impossible if you become part of a corporation. 2. Telegram is here to stay for a long time. We began developing our apps for our personal use over 8 years ago and have come a long way since then. In the process, Telegram changed the way people communicate in several aspects – encryption, functionality, simplicity, design, speed. This journey has just started. There’s much more we can – and will – bring to the world. 3. In order to make points 1 and 2 possible, Telegram will begin to generate revenue, starting next year. We will do it in accordance with our values and the pledges we have made over the last 7 years. Thanks to our current scale, we will be able to do it in a non-intrusive way. Most users will hardly notice any change. 4. All the features that are currently free will stay free. We will add some new features for business teams or power users. Some of these features will require more resources and will be paid for by these premium users. Regular users will be able to keep enjoying Telegram – for free, forever. 5. All parts of Telegram devoted to messaging will remain ad-free. We think that displaying ads in private 1-to-1 chats or group chats is a bad idea. Communication between people should be free of advertising of any sort. 6. In addition to its messaging component, Telegram has a social networking dimension. Our massive public one-to-many channels can have millions of subscribers each and are more like Twitter feeds. In many markets the owners of such channels display ads to earn money, sometimes using third-party ad platforms. The ads they post look like regular messages, and are often intrusive. We will fix this by introducing our own Ad Platform for public one-to-many channels – one that is user-friendly, respects privacy and allows us to cover the costs of servers and traffic. 7. If Telegram starts earning money, the community should also benefit. For example, If we monetize large public one-to-many channels via the Ad Platform, the owners of these channels will receive free traffic in proportion to their size. Or, if Telegram introduces premium stickers with additional expressive features, the artists who make stickers of this new type will also get a part of the profit. We want millions of Telegram-based creators and small businesses to thrive, enriching the experience of all our users. This is the Telegram way. It will allow us to keep innovating and keep growing for decades to come. We will be able to launch countless new features and welcome billions of new users. While doing that, we will remain independent and stay true to our values, redefining how a tech company should operate.

curiousgal 6y ago

I used to mainly use Telegram but their broken notifications on Android turned me off. If a chat app can't get notifications right, it's not worth using.

vezycash 6y ago
Whatsapp, facebook, messenger, twitter enjoy unfair advantage from device manufacturers. They whitelist the above apps from their battery management systems and indiscriminately terminate everything else. Summary - figure out how to whitelist telegram on ur phone and you should be fine.
- Vinnl 6y ago
  See also: this long page in Signal's documentation with device-specific instructions on how to avoid it being throttled [1]. [1] https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318711-Troubleshooting-Notifications https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007318711-Tr...
- ninkendo 6y ago
  Huh? That sounds wrong to me. Do you have a source for this?
  - zinekeller 6y ago
    There is literally a website for this specifically (https://dontkillmyapp.com/ https://dontkillmyapp.com/) created by the Urbandroid team (creators of Sleep as Android). Rather annongingly, the team started out due to problems encountered on HMD/Nokia phones, since acknowledged and partially fixed (https://sleep.urbandroid.org/documentation/faq/alarms-sleep-tracking-dont-work/#nokia-2 https://sleep.urbandroid.org/documentation/faq/alarms-sleep-...). Personal anecdote: even Google have been wishy-washy between different versions of Android when it comes from battery optimizations (Android 6/Marshmallow is the most hardest on this front), but at least it was documented. Imagine the pain of managing other brands (and it seems that all Android manufacturers engage on it one way or another). Edit: in 2018, VideoLAN/VLC complained that Huawei agressively kills apps outside of its whitelist (https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1022033608670961665 https://twitter.com/videolan/status/1022033608670961665). There is no update on this one unfortunately, but I've heard that it was fixed in subsequent EmUI versions but there is no verification of that from VideoLAN or Huawei. Edit edit: Unrelated to the notfications issue, benchmark scores are allegedly being tricked out by a certain chip manufacturer running the chips out-of-spec in a whitelist (https://www.techarp.com/mobile/mediatek-benchmark-cheating-2/ https://www.techarp.com/mobile/mediatek-benchmark-cheating-2...).

tmakks 6y ago

Unpopular opinion & OT: Synchronous communication (eg. calls, video calls, real meetings) with more than two people rarely add value. Edit: Dear Downvoters, it's ok that you downvoted as it was expected but please share why you think different and give examples what value a 2+ meeting adds

sebow 6y ago
I don't think it's about the value but rather what people actually want. Lots of people use the group call 'feature' of WhatsApp, or even discord though obviously discord is way less popular.The strong advantage of Telegram over WhatsApp and really other IM so far: no notification bugs, clients are actually not that shitty across >all< platforms(windows,android/IOS,linux,mac[haven't personally tried]).
ecmascript 6y ago
I disagree, but I upvoted since I hate the kind of downvote you're describing and I am regularly downvoted for the same reasons. I think it adds a great amount of value, I can have a group discussion and plan things in real time instead of a slow async discussion. Especially for online games, a async communication would be terrible. ;)
ajconway 6y ago
You're thinking business, but this is more like Teamspeak (or Discord).
- joshxyz 6y ago
  This this this, i primarily used tg for professional purposes but discovered the communities there lol it's indeed a little like discord.
- smabie 6y ago
  Telegram is also used for business. In fact, my firm uses it as the primary method of communication
  - 6y ago

MatthiasP 6y ago

No mention of any kind of encryption?

escalt 6y ago
Telegram keeps talking about how private and secure it is, but all group and private chats are not encrypted by default. Its end to end encrypted chats are very limited (only direct messages and only on one device) and rely on self-baked crypto. Their voice chat is also almost definitely not end to end encrypted, as I'm not aware of a way to do e2ee voice chat with many participants without linearly increasing bandwidth requirements for users
- karlmcguire 6y ago
  I found it interesting that direct calls (just calling one of your contacts) can be peer-to-peer if you enable it in the settings. They even have a unique code at the top of the screen (like 5 emojis) that you can verify match on the other participant's phone.
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  I wonder if it’s possible to do in the same way WhatsApp does for media uploads. When you send a video to a contact on WhatsApp, it takes some time to upload the video. When you then forward the video a few minutes later, it’s near instant. This set off red flags for me, as that can’t be E2EE if so. Someone explained that the media is encrypted using one key, which is stored locally. The key is then encrypted and transmitted to the recipient using the clients public key. When you forward the media, you only need to send the second recipient the encrypted key using their pubkey (along with the identifier for the media that is still present in WhatsApp server side cache). This in itself raises some more red flags relating to the encryption of the media being transmitted and cached in the first place, but if that’s all done sensibly, then this isn’t the worst solution to reduce bandwidth utilisation by end users. A similar approach could be used for E2EE group calls. Encrypt the payload using one key, send the payload to all participants via a central server (which generally has to happen anyway due to NAT traversal issues, especially with mobile internet), and send each participant the keys individually. Voila, group call with 3 people or 30 people doesn’t result in having to retransmit the same audio payload multiple times. Obviously this is a simplistic overview of how this could work. I am not a cryptographer, I have no expertise in this area, everything above could be total baloney. Anyone with expertise should absolutely correct me please and thank you. All that said, hope this helps. EDIT: changed the above to reflect that forwarding media is “near instant” rather than “instant”

solarkraft 6y ago

Wonderful! I kept the beta installed just for this; of course you can have a separate Mumble/Discord/whatever channel, but this definitely removes some friction. It works remarkably well!

IshKebab 6y ago

TL;DR: It's like Discord's voice channels, instead of WhatsApp's group voice calls. You can join and leave at any point.

lucb1e 6y ago
Or like Mumble or like TeamSpeak or like Wire or... this isn't unique to any specific brand, not sure if there is a reason to specifically refer to a walled network service.

zerop 6y ago

What stops zoom from doing it?

timwis 6y ago

This reminds me of how I used to use Teamspeak with a gaming organisation I used to be part of. It was a completely different dynamic than a video call. You could "hang out" in a room, chime in when you wanted, say nothing when you wanted. It was a lot more like working separately but with physical proximity to one another. I'm optimistic that, applied to a work context and with the same norms, this could go a long way to recreating the social connection of workspaces.

tsjq 6y ago
that's interesting, indeed. is it like everyone puts their mic on mute except when they want to speak ?
- timwis 6y ago
  Yep it’s push to talk, so you’re muted except when pressing the talk key
  - tsjq 6y ago
    Superb
selykg 6y ago
one of the teams I was on at my previous employer was like this. code review was done in groups on this call as well. Got stuck on something and need another set of eyeballs? Share your screen and pair program on it. It made working from home a little less solo. You could come and go on the call as you wished it wasn't really required unless it was a team call where certain topics were being discussed that should have everyone (or nearly everyone).
pensatoio 6y ago
I convinced my coworkers to start a discord, and we now have most of our department in there. Having the (totally optional) PTT voice channels to hang out in makes these long weeks of WFH much less solitary.

fortran77 6y ago

We love PTT Voice Chat here, been using it with Virtual Airwaves platform (https://cb.virtualairwaves.com https://cb.virtualairwaves.com)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

SergeAx 6y ago

Telegram is amazing messaging app. It is so fast! When I travel by boat and my phone barely sees one notch of GSM service (not 3G, not even Edge) from the island on the horizon - Telegram is able to send and receive messages. Whatsapp and Slack can't even connect for hours after that. Another amazing thing is when I type a message on my phone - I see it on my PC the moment I press Send button. There's no visible delay, a perfect Google search effect from 2000-s.

adonese 6y ago
>I type a message on my phone - I see it on my PC the moment I press Send button I use some telegram groups and sometimes i'd start typing in phone before the message gets too long and i'd prefer to carry on the message in my laptop instead. It is so useful to have this feature.
- SergeAx 6y ago
  Yes, Slack copied that about two weeks ago, with glitches between versions. Hope they will copy other features someday.

hexo 6y ago

I'd totally appreciate ability to turn all those silly animations off. Is it possible already?

lostmsu 6y ago

The whole page has no mention of encryption.