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Telegram surpassed 500M active users. 25 mil new users in the last 3days
- cblconfederate 6y agoWow. Now all the need is to add a feed
- jsilence 6y agoAre those Trumps Twitter followers? Or are they coming from Parlor? Serious questions. Not trying to troll.
- Throwawayjedi 6y agolook at the tweet 89% from outside US
- AlfeG 6y agoI guess this is a wave of WhatsUp-privacy-gate
- josefresco 6y agoNo, the second half of the headline is "38% came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 21% from Latin America and 8% from MENA."
- fernandotakai 6y agotons of people in LA/SA are moving to telegram from whatsapp due to the whole facebook debacle.
- danielrpa 6y agoThat's what I'm also observing. I'm having to actively raise awareness of Signal to my LA friends, because they are largely going to Telegram by default.
- jandrese 6y agoSo what's going on in the world that's driving the surge in signups? Hopefully not US political nonsense. I also really hope it's not intelligence agencies rushing to make new accounts to move their disinformation campaigns to new platforms.
- tw04 6y agoFacebook ruining whatsapp: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/06/whatsapp-privacy-policy-data-sharing-facebook/ https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/06/whatsapp-privacy-policy...
- ayewo 6y agoLooks like you missed the massive discussion regarding Whatsapp’s ultimatum to everyone if they want to continue using their service for free: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25662215
- jandrese 6y agoYep that will do it. If I used Whatsapp that would make me want to switch too. Jan 6 was not a good day to announce such a policy shift. It got drowned out by world (well, US) events.
- fsociety 6y agoSome for sure, there have been rumors of Telegram groups starting up in the aftermath of Parler.
- chrissnell 6y agoAlmost none of my conservative friends used Parler. It really was a ghost town until Twitter banned President Trump and many signed up, hoping they could read posts from him there, but he was never on Parler. As for the surge in encrypted messaging, yes, a lot of this is conservatives no longer willing to use Facebook and Twitter out of anger or fear. Of my conservative friends, I would say that at least half have moved to platforms like Wickr and Signal in the last week. They are using it to replace private Facebook Messenger chats.
- skinkestek 6y ago> It really was a ghost town until Twitter banned President Trump and many signed up, hoping they could read posts from him there, but he was never on Parler. All of my family and most of my in-laws as well as most of my friends here in Norway from outside work uses it since long time ago, but just the last few days two more Norwegians and one Pakistani friend of mine joined.
- blisterpeanuts 6y agoParler's user base really started growing in mid-late 2020 as FB, Twitter etc. became stricter about political content, and started censoring the President and other conservatives much more frequently.
- matchbok 6y agoThe don't censor conservatives, they censor hate speech. Just turns our the right does a lot more of that. Reality is hard, sometimes.
- paxys 6y agoI imagine Signal is seeing a bump as well.
- randomsearch 6y agoUnsure if you’re a signal user and/or joking but I’ve had a steady stream of “X is on signal” messages the last week
- ffpip 6y agoThe number of my contacts on signal has increased from 3 to 35 in 2 days.
- malux85 6y agoYeah me too, +15 or so contacts
- randomsearch 6y agofor you and sibling - from the FT today: > Signal was downloaded 8.8m times worldwide in the week after the WhatsApp changes were first announced on January 4, versus 246,000 times the week before
- newscracker 6y agoYes, Signal has also seen a large influx, so much so that the registration OTPs failed to deliver and Signal was working on that (with carriers) to sort it out. This was in the news a few days ago.
- nikhizzle 6y agoOn thing I love about Telegram is how easy the bot API is. Anytime I need a quick personal CLI to a service that works on mobile, I can get it running in no time. For example, I wrote a script to check flight prices and send me a telegram message when it hit a certain threshold.
- eznzt 6y agoTelegram does not have end-to-end encryption by default and group chats cannot be end-to-end encrypted at all.
- skinkestek 6y agoFirst off: Correct. Off all the people trying to say this you are the first I've seen who has nailed it! That said: Neither is mail. Mail is still useful for a lot of things. See also tptaceks take: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22371316
- eznzt 6y agoI am not comparing it to mail, I am comparing it to whatsapp.
- skinkestek 6y agoNo, you are not comparing to anything, which is totally fine :-) I'm comparing it to mail. And if you want a more secure alternative, please go with Signal. WhatsApp leaks metadata east and west, and if you or any of the people you talk to enable backups all your chats end up in the cloud with a different company. So much for bulletproof encryption in that case.
- unicornfinder 6y agoWhich is why, as crazy as it may sound, telegram is genuinely less secure than WhatsApp for most people
- ffpip 6y agoTelegram has not given any private data to any government. They have been banned (that didn't stop them tho) for this. Whatsapp backsups are strongly encouraged by the app on a frequent basis. You cannot control the backup settings for your contacts. Therefore almost every group is backed up to google drive. Google has allegedly given this data to the authorities because these chats have leaked in a popular case here in India. https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/how-ncb-retrieved-whatsapp-chats-allegedly-between-deepika-padukone-and-her-manager-133783 https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/how-ncb-retrieved-what... https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/bollywood-whatsapp-chats-are-leaking-how-and-is-whatsapp-safe-1724977-2020-09-24 https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/bollywood-wh...
- TheChaplain 6y agoBeen using Telegram for years along with WhatsApp, Signal and Line. Can without doubt say that Telegram nails it when it comes to user interface, features and userfriendliness. Girlfriend loves their animated stickers. Their bot-api is easy to use as well, created a echo-bot in no time. Only thing that annoys me is the lack of encrypted groups, but no one is really concerned about it.
- skrowl 6y agoTelegram advantages over Signal: - The ability to message someone with just your username / without revealing your phone number - Easy to use from multiple devices (with full history the minute you install it on a new device) - Great bot api - Channels (like an rss feed, people may join to get info, but only the admins can post) - Much larger groups - Much larger per-file size limit when sending files - Message scheduling - Multiple accounts in the official client - Polls / quizes - Hashtags / stickers / animated stickers / etc - Uses an encryption protocol (now in it's 2nd revision as of 3 years ago) that's been independently audited. (For comparison: Signal's encryption protocol was sponsored / paid for by the US Govt and is used by Facebook's WhatsApp. Telegram has been banned in multiple countries for refusing to turn over data to the govt as well) Signal advantages over Telegram: - E2E chats are the only type of chats offered. TLDR - If you use mostly 1:1 chats and E2E is important to you, use Signal. If you use mostly group chats or want ease of use to get your friends / family on board, use Telegram. Both are open source and have had independent security audits, which is better than WhatsApp!
- gher-shyu3i 6y agoSignal is open source, Telegram isn't.
- dirtnugget 6y agoStill don't trust them at all.
- 7v3x3n3sem9vv 6y agoAnd you would be smart not to. It's like people haven't learned from history and what happened to Facebook and WhatsApp. Moving to Telegram is simply moving to a new Facebook and hoping that they don't sell out or get compromised. All your data is stored by default on their servers and out of your control. Switching to Signal is the only real viable option going into 2021.
- kaba0 6y agoWhile it is not truly private, it is absurd to compare it to a company that lives from tracking people and selling their data..
- yumraj 6y agoCan someone comment on the Russian angle/ownership of Telegram. Please, not trying to start a flame war but as a US person I’m trying to gauge if I should consider using it or not. I don’t care about features, mostly care about security and privacy.
- newscracker 6y agoYou can find it on Wikipedia as a start and read the founder’s (Pavel Durov’s) posts. The founder is in exile and is a citizen of St. Kitts & Nevis. The Telegram team is currently in Dubai, but has been in other locations before. Telegram was attempted to be banned in Russia a few years ago, but that failed terribly. As a U.S. person, you have a lot more to worry about the three letter agencies there than about Telegram. And theoretically, you’d also have to worry about Signal being based out of the U.S.
- superasn 6y agoBig pros of telegram compared to wa: 1. So easy to migrate. Wa restore can take up to an hour from gdrive, telegram is ready as soon as it is installed 2. It's always on everywhere, i.e. when i open web.telegram.org or desktop qpp it just connects instantly, web.whatsapp otoh requires my phone to be connected, takes forever to start and fails half the time. 3. I can restore year old file on tg while wa fails unless i have it in a backup. 4. The api. So easy to implement and such amazing bots. Just search skeddy for an example. 5. Huge groups. Our housing group has 1100 members, don't think its possible on wa Biggest con compared to wa: 1. An amazingly bonehead feature that fills up my inbox: it has tell me x or y has joined telegram with a red badge. Seriously and i would care why? I add hundreds of people to my contact list. I can't even turn off this feature.
- newscracker 6y agoYou can turn off notifications for your contacts joining Telegram in settings, but what’s annoying is that it will still create a new empty chat for the both of you and that cannot be disabled. It’s annoying to have to delete that chat manually for contacts I’d never even chat with (but are there for non-Telegram purposes). The other solution for this is more of a nuclear approach where you disable contact sync and manage contacts in Telegram manually.
- superasn 6y agoMaybe I can write a bot that crawls web.telegram.org ever 5 minutes and delete all such chats.
- newscracker 6y agoTelegram develops and launches new features the fastest among the popular messaging apps. It’s kinda unbelievable how fast it moves the needle and leaves the rest far behind. Look at the newly launched Telegram Tips channel to see all the features it has, explained with animations and text.
- wscott 6y agoa FAQ from telegram's author from a couple days ago: https://t.me/durov/146 https://t.me/durov/146