Telegram starts to look like a super app, echoing WeChat

narwhal@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.ml – 86 points –
Telegram starts to look like a super app, echoing WeChat | TechCrunch
techcrunch.com
42

You are viewing a single comment

The bloat is starting to annoy me. Who asked for stories? How do I get rid of the annoying prompt at the top of the app?

Its basic-ness was one of the original reasons I liked it.

They add loads of bullshit but they still won't add the option to disable read-receipts.

Signal has Stories too, tbh. All apps are beginning to integrate them. Still, they suck.
The worst thing about Telegram was and still is that End to End encryption is a special add on feature and not the default. Group chats aren't secure either. The only reason why Telegram is used as more secure for illegal activities is that it does not cooperate with law enforcement well and has its HQ in Dubai. That does not prevent any hacks or leaks tho.

Signal has Stories too

not sure about Telegram but you can very easily disable Stories on Signal

I quite like them though as, to my knowledge, it's the only form of private social media in existence at this point

you can very easily disable Stories on Signal

Which is yet another point for Signal overall :)

100% agree. Plus the random cryptocurrency thing.

Plus the bugginess of the new features. Create a group with topics? You'll have a great time...

And a lot of quality of life improvements are still missing. Use more than one client? You don't expect proper sync, do you? True E2EE (secret chats)? Well, no more than one client to begin with. Plus you lose a lot of features. Auto-delte messages? Well, you can, but others can just turn it off. Plus you can't enable or disable it for all chats at once.

What really weirds me out tho is how aggressively they try to make you sync your contacts...

I've never experienced any bugs with the new topics feature.

Lucky you, for me they basically ruined group chats completely. I get notifications for the wrong topic. Reply to a notification, you might end up posting in a couple ones. The client will sometimes jump to the very beginning of the chat history. Sometimes I don't get notifications for a topic, sometimes old messages appear as new ones.

It has become next to unusable for me.

Sounds like it’s time for me to start investigating a move to a different cross-platform chat app. The enshitification continues.

Matrix would be the perfect solution if it was more widely adopted.

Matrix is fine but it collects a large amount of metadata