Telegram is to messengers what Emacs is to text editors. - Unlimited storage that doesn't expire - Complete API access. There are many alternative Telegram cl

Telegram is to messengers what Emacs is to text editors. - Unlimited storage that doesn't expire - Complete API access. There are many alternative Telegram clients because of this, and the official clients are opensource, too. - Native clients for all the major platforms (macOS even has two official native clients), including a web client. All clients work without needing to link up with a phone. There are unofficial clients for the terminal and Emacs, as well. - Excellent bot API that gives you the ability to easily write your own bots, and has enabled a rich ecosystem of bots. E.g., https://t.me/InLaTeXbot https://t.me/InLaTeXbot, https://t.me/MusicsHunterbot https://t.me/MusicsHunterbot, https://t.me/GmailBot https://t.me/GmailBot, https://t.me/libsan_bot https://t.me/libsan_bot, https://t.me/scihubot https://t.me/scihubot, https://t.me/to_kindle_bot https://t.me/to_kindle_bot, https://t.me/music https://t.me/music, https://t.me/youtube https://t.me/youtube, https://t.me/imdb https://t.me/imdb, https://t.me/minroobot https://t.me/minroobot, ... . Check out https://github.com/SpEcHiDe/UniBorg https://github.com/SpEcHiDe/UniBorg for a self-hostable bot that is just superb. - Good support (best I've seen) for sending text, images, audio, links, etc. - The above combined with support for one-to-many "channels" has enabled a very rich ecosystem of personal microblogs (ala Tumblr) alongside official news channels. (As this needs networks effects, the ecosystem might not be strong in English. I only follow https://t.me/techmemenews https://t.me/techmemenews and https://t.me/tldrnewsletter https://t.me/tldrnewsletter in English, which are bridges to some non-Telegram newsletters I have built myself.) There are also a lot of channels that "liberate" "information", such as https://t.me/HeadSpaceChannel https://t.me/HeadSpaceChannel . - Those channels are also great for private note-taking. - Ability to selectively export data to HTML (good for human viewing) or JSON. There once was an unofficial terminal app that exported to sqlite, but the maintainer gave up after this feature was added to the official clients. Nonetheless, exporting data via the API is still an option. - Multiaccount support - An open and free-as-in-beer ecosystem for (potentially animated) stickers, which has resulted in some really creative stickers, and where one can find stickers for most niche interests. - Multi-device usage (Signal only works on a single phone) - Seamless device switching, courtesy of not having E2E on by default. One also doesn't lose history. - A lot of small quality-of-life features, such as: Video profile avatars; Granular settings for notifications, storage, privacy, ...; Ability to group chats into folders; Ability to group files (including photos and videos) into a single post; Animated emojis; Ability to pin chats to the top; "Instant view" that lets you read a cleaned version of articles in Telegram itself; Rich link previews; Scheduled message posts; ... - E2E chats are available when you want them, and you can even set a self-destruct on your posts. - You can fully use Telegram without revealing your phone number to anyone. - Great support for groups and their administration, and you can always use bots if you want some niche feature. - Group voice chats - Acceptable search through everything in your history. (I am not up to speed on what the competition offers.)