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I'm an early adopter for telegram, and I'd be glad to give them some money. I signed up in 2014, basically the first or second time it hit HN, and over time, I

by Aloha 6y ago

I'm an early adopter for telegram, and I'd be glad to give them some money. I signed up in 2014, basically the first or second time it hit HN, and over time, I've built out a pretty decent social network on there, and run a dozen or so specialty community chats. I'd be glad to pay them something, 25 a year or so, even if I don't get anything special from it (though, if I did want something, it'd be better access to support if I should need it), just as part of making the service sustainable. It'd made coordination in my life so much easier, and I legitimately cannot fathom going thru the pandemic without it, it's been my social lifeline. Mostly I love it because its a desktop has parity environment, I literally sit in front of a computer 12+ hours a day, why do I want to limit myself to a phone-only service.

Aachen 6y ago
Same. I've started moving away since a few months, though, because the revenue model was not happening and I can see how well it works compared to even a big commercial undertaking like Facebook messenger or Slack. The software development alone must cost many millions, not to mention the movies people are sharing actively. It is (was?) getting super super fishy, given that everything is plain text (they have some tricks to claim it's not, but the bottom line is that they can read all your chats except that experimental "secret" chat or two you might have). If I can start to pay for the service, perhaps it's worth considering, though the lack of encryption is almost equally worrying. The branding is privacy, but the reality is the exact opposite, and while there used to be hope that they would eventually implement it, I've given up on any encryption being forthcoming by now.
- Aloha 6y ago
  The fact is, a majority of what I'm talking about, I have zero care if the service can see it. There is some stuff that I do want privacy, for that I have secret chats, with the limits inherent to it. Perhaps I'm alone, but I never really wanted a secret chat service, I merely wanted a modern AIM, with first class mobile and desktop support.
- golergka 6y ago
  Quickly searching your chat history, going through all your contacts and group chats, 8 years back, without the need to downloading all that history to your device and building a search index first is a killer feature. Wouldn't it be impossible to implement without trusting the server with plaintext?
  - Aachen 6y ago
    I wouldn't mind not having that feature of searching so far back instantly on a new device. How often do you login to a new device and want to immediately instantly search back to the beginning of time? I get that it's nice but... is that necessary? There are various solutions to the problem of storing and searching history with different trade-offs. One of them is having the server store and be able to read everything since the dawn of time. I'm not a big fan of this one.
    - socksy 6y ago
      Communicating with the majority of my friends through telegram, and having access to the records of all of our conversations, has revolutionised my usage with computing. I use the "saved messages" (previously messaging yourself) to act as an append only log of info I need to search, and unlike emailing myself the UX is actually good. Search is extremely fast, and the fact I can see all the photos I ever sent someone has come in handy a huge number of times For this reason alone, I can't really see myself switching to an amnesiac client... not unless something else came along that has the ease of use of making all this accessible for me.
      - Aachen 6y ago
        That's not what I'm saying at all? (Edit: ah maybe I understand the confusion. I meant "to a new device and want to immediately instantly search back to the beginning of time" literally the way I wrote it, so if you give it a little while to download history and decrypt it upon first use then it can work the way you want from then on. /edit) Look at Wire, I can instantly search for arbitrary parts of words (no indexing going on as far as I can tell) and it returns results somewhere between instantly and a second or two depending on how far down the thousands upon thousands of messages the result is. It's end to end encrypted and doesn't use any homomorpic encryption magic (not sure if that's production-ready yet, but if it is, they don't use it here). It's all local and in a browser at that, no need for some special optimized C code either. There are definitely solutions here that support exactly what you want without requiring plaintext server access. We just need to use them.
chrisjarvis 6y ago
Would you be willing to describe more about how you engage with this service? I like the service but haven't found many opportunities to use it. Did you move the "specialty community chats" over from another site like Reddit? Do you talk with people you know IRL on it? Mainly just wondering how you built out a social network for yourself on Telegram. just wondering thanks!
- Aloha 6y ago
  They were communities that formed organically on the service from people with otherwise shared interests. While we recruited users by word of mouth and from other services, we've formed our own community on the service. I do indeed talk with many people on it that I otherwise know in real life, often it goes the other way, I meet people via the service, then we eventually meet in real life. Most, but not all, are furry fandom oriented, and telegram really fills a hole left by the closure of other instant messaging services. To give you an idea, I run about a dozen chats on there, with around 1400 unique users. If telegram were to go away, many of us would move to discord, IRC, or a mix of both. The community has the ability to host its own services, and I've given thought what to do if a shutdown looks likely. Had the telegram server side code been open sourced, we'd likely spin up our own service. While we do have the skills internally to reimplement the server side components it'd be a pretty large amount if work to do so. My hope is that if TG did shut down, they'd open source their service side implementation.
jyrkesh 6y ago
Yeah, I also admin a few topical groups of 10-40 people with a few friends, and the level of engagement I've gotten is insane. I've never had a long-term group chat with so much content sharing, long-form opinions, etc, and I credit Telegram's UX and desktop clients for most of that engagement. In many ways, it reminds me of the Web 0.x days on which the HN crowd so frequently reminisces.
- Aloha 6y ago
  It reminds me of how IRC used to be, in many ways Telegram is the idealized lovechild of IRC and AIM, it has the best of both worlds.
solarkraft 6y ago
I 100% agree. I've gotten so much out of this service and wouldn't at all mind giving back.

by Aloha 6y ago

Aachen 6y ago

Same. I've started moving away since a few months, though, because the revenue model was not happening and I can see how well it works compared to even a big commercial undertaking like Facebook messenger or Slack. The software development alone must cost many millions, not to mention the movies people are sharing actively. It is (was?) getting super super fishy, given that everything is plain text (they have some tricks to claim it's not, but the bottom line is that they can read all your chats except that experimental "secret" chat or two you might have). If I can start to pay for the service, perhaps it's worth considering, though the lack of encryption is almost equally worrying. The branding is privacy, but the reality is the exact opposite, and while there used to be hope that they would eventually implement it, I've given up on any encryption being forthcoming by now.

Aloha 6y ago
The fact is, a majority of what I'm talking about, I have zero care if the service can see it. There is some stuff that I do want privacy, for that I have secret chats, with the limits inherent to it. Perhaps I'm alone, but I never really wanted a secret chat service, I merely wanted a modern AIM, with first class mobile and desktop support.
golergka 6y ago
Quickly searching your chat history, going through all your contacts and group chats, 8 years back, without the need to downloading all that history to your device and building a search index first is a killer feature. Wouldn't it be impossible to implement without trusting the server with plaintext?
- Aachen 6y ago
  I wouldn't mind not having that feature of searching so far back instantly on a new device. How often do you login to a new device and want to immediately instantly search back to the beginning of time? I get that it's nice but... is that necessary? There are various solutions to the problem of storing and searching history with different trade-offs. One of them is having the server store and be able to read everything since the dawn of time. I'm not a big fan of this one.
  - socksy 6y ago
    Communicating with the majority of my friends through telegram, and having access to the records of all of our conversations, has revolutionised my usage with computing. I use the "saved messages" (previously messaging yourself) to act as an append only log of info I need to search, and unlike emailing myself the UX is actually good. Search is extremely fast, and the fact I can see all the photos I ever sent someone has come in handy a huge number of times For this reason alone, I can't really see myself switching to an amnesiac client... not unless something else came along that has the ease of use of making all this accessible for me.
    - Aachen 6y ago
      That's not what I'm saying at all? (Edit: ah maybe I understand the confusion. I meant "to a new device and want to immediately instantly search back to the beginning of time" literally the way I wrote it, so if you give it a little while to download history and decrypt it upon first use then it can work the way you want from then on. /edit) Look at Wire, I can instantly search for arbitrary parts of words (no indexing going on as far as I can tell) and it returns results somewhere between instantly and a second or two depending on how far down the thousands upon thousands of messages the result is. It's end to end encrypted and doesn't use any homomorpic encryption magic (not sure if that's production-ready yet, but if it is, they don't use it here). It's all local and in a browser at that, no need for some special optimized C code either. There are definitely solutions here that support exactly what you want without requiring plaintext server access. We just need to use them.

chrisjarvis 6y ago

Would you be willing to describe more about how you engage with this service? I like the service but haven't found many opportunities to use it. Did you move the "specialty community chats" over from another site like Reddit? Do you talk with people you know IRL on it? Mainly just wondering how you built out a social network for yourself on Telegram. just wondering thanks!

Aloha 6y ago
They were communities that formed organically on the service from people with otherwise shared interests. While we recruited users by word of mouth and from other services, we've formed our own community on the service. I do indeed talk with many people on it that I otherwise know in real life, often it goes the other way, I meet people via the service, then we eventually meet in real life. Most, but not all, are furry fandom oriented, and telegram really fills a hole left by the closure of other instant messaging services. To give you an idea, I run about a dozen chats on there, with around 1400 unique users. If telegram were to go away, many of us would move to discord, IRC, or a mix of both. The community has the ability to host its own services, and I've given thought what to do if a shutdown looks likely. Had the telegram server side code been open sourced, we'd likely spin up our own service. While we do have the skills internally to reimplement the server side components it'd be a pretty large amount if work to do so. My hope is that if TG did shut down, they'd open source their service side implementation.

jyrkesh 6y ago

Yeah, I also admin a few topical groups of 10-40 people with a few friends, and the level of engagement I've gotten is insane. I've never had a long-term group chat with so much content sharing, long-form opinions, etc, and I credit Telegram's UX and desktop clients for most of that engagement. In many ways, it reminds me of the Web 0.x days on which the HN crowd so frequently reminisces.

Aloha 6y ago
It reminds me of how IRC used to be, in many ways Telegram is the idealized lovechild of IRC and AIM, it has the best of both worlds.

solarkraft 6y ago

I 100% agree. I've gotten so much out of this service and wouldn't at all mind giving back.