> Unfortunately, Telegram cannot financially sustain third-party apps that do not display sponsored messages and they will have to be disconnected. The whole p

> Unfortunately, Telegram cannot financially sustain third-party apps that do not display sponsored messages and they will have to be disconnected. The whole post could have been summarized to these few words: "Telegram has now joined the club of the apps that have grown of age and need to figure out a way to actually make money". Which is perfectly understandable. I just think that slamming unsolicited ads in front of people's eyeballs is a very bad and uninspired way of making money - and collecting their data so you can target better ads is even worse. I'd be happy to pay up to $5 a month for a decent messaging app with relatively high adoption, modern features and a well-supported API to build integrations. And many HN users would probably prefer to pay too. Unfortunately, we are not the majority of the users. Any fee for a widely adopted app that used to be free would cause a bleeding of users. And, on the long run, Telegram is likely to make more money from advertisers rather a $5 fee. I'm getting quite sick of this cycle. We keep seeking for products that respect our privacy and do not show us ads. We may find them, we may stick around with them for a while, then at some point they are also like "sorry, now we also need to make money, therefore we'll also add ads/trackers", and then the cycle repeats. Nobody's infrastructure is free. And while it's understandable, I also don't want to rent somebody else's servers in exchange of ads I didn't ask for. I'd be happier to just pay for the rent, but nobody is providing me with that option. Everyone finds the ads/trackers model more profitable than the subscription model. I'll try and convince as many friends as I can to switch to NextCloud Talk (if I'm hosting the service then I know that I won't get surprises), but in the meantime we really need to talk about federated apps. A centralized infrastructure to store messages for millions isn't cheap, and eventually anybody who maintains that infrastructure will have to find a way to make a profit (or at least not make a loss) out of it. We need to have smaller and more maintainable "clouds" to connect users to one another. It's insane that we're in 2021, we can deploy services anywhere within seconds, and yet most of the messaging traffic generated by billions still goes through the gateways of 4-5 apps. p.s. btw, client-line commands like Bitlbee (and any libpurple-based integration) should unaffected, unless they display ads as _actual_ messages (which would be a horrible decision).