If you’ve read my old posts you might already know that I really, really, really hate WhatsApp for a lot of reasons and also because Meta has such a big monopoly in the messaging scene. So I’ve started searching for the best alternative I could find without bothering people to register to another platform and discovered RCS, I’ve already talked about it in many blog posts and I liked it for it’s “standard” nature and also because Google Messages, the most used default messaging app on Android, enables it by default, so I didn’t even need to tell people to enable it. But then Google decided to ruin it with its “security” bullshit and I stopped using it until some time ago.
Another alternative that I used and still use is Telegram: when I subscribed to the platform years ago I thought that it was the best IM app to exist but, while I still prefer it to WhatsApp, even Telegram is a shitty IM service, and I think that people should know about this, so here’s some several problems of Telegram.
Many people say that they prefer Telegram because it is more private, but in reality it probably has more privacy flaws than WhatsApp, because there’s…:
Remember when Telegram said that it was going to be always free with no subscriptions and no ads? Meet Telegram Premium, a subscription plan to add on your already expensive monthly fee. While it was inevitable that users eventually would have to pay for all the complex infrastructure that Telegram has, Premium is probably one of the worst subscription business models to ever exist.
Why should story uploads be limited to 3 for free users? And why can’t they set the expiry date they want on a story even with shorter timings that would cost next to nothing to Telegram? Why can’t free users pin more of 5 chats? What would cost Telegram to cover a feature that is client-side? Why do free users have a stricter limit in bio characters? An UTF-8 character occupies 4 bytes max, if you multiply that for all the other characters premium users can use and all of the Telegram’s userbase you get ~250GB of bio info, that seems like a lot, but not everyone uses bios of such length, and Telegram already has petabytes of gore videos so why can’t they keep some gigs of user info?
Premium users can choose who can send them voice messages, they can choose to limit DMs to contacts (which is fine if this was also a free feature) and Premium Users (which is not fine under any circumstances), Telegram managed to add a paywall to messaging (literally). Premium users can see other people’s stories without leaving the viewed status, their stories appear first on the list, they can use more than one reaction on a message, they can see the other people’s “last seen” status even when they have disabled theirs and they can also download other people’s stories even if they’re screenshot protected (how is this legal?).
If you don’t want to subscribe to premium you also need to stand the fact that at the bottom part of some channels there are ads completely unrelated to your interests with most of them being TON crypto shit and channel owners do not earn anything from those ads and everything is going to Durov’s wallet.
Durov developed a crypto network called TON: it offers mainly a cryptowallet for their own cryptocurrency by the same name but also Fragment, a platform to buy Telegram usernames. A long time ago Telegram decided to revoke the usernames of thousands of inactive channels, which by itself is kinda bad but not totally unrelatable, then Durov announced the introduction of Fragment and sold those usernames for crypto. Think about it: you have a channel with lots of content and that is inactive, at a certain point without you even noticing the username of that channel gets taken away from you and sold to other people for profit; that’s what happened to me with my redirect channel and I was mad, and the unethicality of this practice is very high, and I’m not even talking about the dislike reaction drama and other bad practices that Durov applied after.
My concern also comes from the fact that Telegram is becoming a Web3 platform and a super-app which for the purpose the platform was made for it doesn’t make sense. It was supposed to be a messaging app, why do you need to make a super-app like WeChat by adding Wallets and Mini Apps and Stars and many other bloatware? Many people tried to do it and failed so why should Telegram work as a super-app too.
Telegram is a messaging service with many problems and whose CEO tried to ruin the platform multiple times. My general recommendation is that if you want to leave WhatsApp, you should choose an open platform which is not backed by a for-profit company, and that unfortunaly applies to any IM service like Telegram and to some extent Google Messages too. While Telegram and other IM services may seem better technically, your messaging experience should not be affected by how the company wants you to use their service in any case. The users of any IM app should have the freedom to choose what client, protocol and features to use without losing much on user experience, and Telegram has been proven to be bad at this multiple times. Use more open protocols like RCS, XMPP or Matrix, even SMS if you can’t use any of those.