I don't know why people stuck with it. I've used it; I get that a lot of the initial success/hype was:

• It's not owned by Meta
• "Putin hates Durov!"
• "Unlimited" storage (lots of people using it as free cloud storage, which is dumb if you value your files)

But your messages are not E2EE by default (only "Secret Chats", which aren't synced across devices)...Telegram (the organization) could always read your messages. I said this so many times and got called everything under the sun.

"Why would they care about my messages though?" ------> Because $300 Million.

Whelp. Same thought :(

integrate into it's apps

They're getting paid for training data.

I'm guessing the money flows in this direction because telegram actually has users.

Having xAI accessing a billion of users conversations? They are going to have the most "educated" LLM. Also isn't xAI getting subsidies from the government? Literalły workers of America are paying to spy, again

Or is xAI paying for access to Telegram conversations to train Grok?

Federal government threatened Telegram and demanded a backdoor a while back, iirc.

You misunderstand. Elon is retired from US politics now, obviously, and will return to being a force of good!

Honestly, Telegramm always seemed to me a bit shifty since I learnt E2EE for chats was opt-in.

Long overdue :)

If only any of my friends would have it.. I have a lot of contacts on telegram, and on signal there's like 1. Even my furry friends are not on there

There are some active chats on matrix, but I don't know why on signal

I tried to switch to Signal but it feels so damn barren compared to Telegram :(

I want to love it but they make it hard

If you want something more like the fediverse itself, then Matrix. If you want something closer to Telegram out of the box without setup, then Signal or SimpleX.

Your secret chats are already being read. Hell, secret chats are probably the first to be read.

A secret chat is only for local privacy, meaning if someone got access to your device they can't find them, nor will you get notifications (in case your partner is watching your screen).

Back when we just had SMS and MMS, they had secret chats, too. They were blatantly marketed as tools to cheat on your partner. GO SMS was one of the first to use them. Its not so blatant anymore, but its still the primary use for "secret" chats.

I remember reading an article that someone figured out everyone's GO SMS images (even secret ones) were uploaded online without any security whatsoever. You could put in the url and some random numbers and get any pictures and voice clips ever sent. And they never fixed it even after it was leaked.

So yeah, not so secret. You want secure.

Edit: Context: Sorry, my ADHD gets the better of me. I mean that there's more likely than not a government backdoor. Other users are unlikely reading your messages, but your messages are more than likely being scanned. Just be careful if you use TG.