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I use it for something like 90% of all my social interactions with real-life friends. IMO, Telegram has by far the best UI/UX of any internet chat app. In terms
by ufmace 4y ago
I use it for something like 90% of all my social interactions with real-life friends. IMO, Telegram has by far the best UI/UX of any internet chat app. In terms of stuff like group management, working perfectly on any type of device with any OS, including maintaining accounts on multiple devices and keeping everything synced between them, organizing large numbers of chats in the UI, managing notifications, etc. Video and voice messages that just work on all platforms.
It has a lot of good security features too, including support of account passwords, requiring verification of new logins on another device, letting you see all of your login sessions on any device and log out any of them, private groups with detailed controls for join links, etc. A lot of crypto people get mad that it doesn't have E2E encryption outside of opt-in "secret chats", but I don't think that's all that important.
It's also completely free of most of the dark patterns that plague most social media sites. No reshuffling of message order, optimizing for outrage and engagement, or pushing new content to keep you scrolling. No randomly banning or locking accounts for no apparent reason.
I view this paid account thing as an excellent sign that their future plans for the app are for optimizing user satisfaction instead of trying to appeal more to advertisers. I plan to sign up as soon as I can, and hope it goes well and helps us move towards a future where our social platforms see the users as customers to be served, not products to optimize the sale of to advertisers who become their actual customers.
- tootie 4y agoFor me, the value of messaging comes 99.99% from availability of people I'm messaging. For work, it's all Slack. For personal it's SMS. I haven't seen a compelling feature in a chat app since 1997.
- Mandatum 4y agoHow do you do groups texts?
- d0mine 4y agoSometimes you want to talk to people without giving them your phone number. Imagine IRC but much more convenient.
- ufmace 4y agoIt's true that if nobody you want to talk to is on it or willing to install it, then it's not of much use. It's also a bit harder to find really compelling features for direct messages. Though even for DMs, outside of Apple's walled iMessage garden, it's hard to get stuff like high quality photos, videos, and audio messages, reactions, stickers, etc that work correctly for everyone on all device types. Group handling is where all of the apps really shine though. Doing groups in SMS is basically garbage compared to pretty much any chat app ever made.
- tootie 4y agoEveryone keeps saying group. I've never had trouble sending group texts. Both my kids have had their whole classes in a group text for a year. SMS is the one and only "open" messaging platform left so your experience will depend on if you're using iMessage or Samsung or VZ or whatever other ones are out there. But as far as I can tell they're all perfectly fine and nearly indistinguishable.
- tcfhgj 4y agoI am not crypto people, and still get mad because of E2EE.