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this post was submitted on 28 May 2025
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I think Telegram is more of a social media than a messenger.
What, like Instagram kind of thing?
Not really. It just group chats and some are used as news feeds.
Its one of those terrible UX where people force a tool to do something it's not supposed to like Discord for forums etc.
Its basically used for piracy and drug markets for tech illiterate but somehow caught on.
One can say terrible, one can say ingenious.
A news feed with comments and a group chat are projections of the same object, thus you have all the events in one "community" in one place, seeing them always (more or less, because going to comments of a post you only see that post's children and their children and so on).
Personally I think it's much more convenient than Discord.
And the public opinion seems to be in TG's favor for usability (except it exhausts me to see that many groups and checking them, so authors' FB clone background definitely shows).
I think the market has decided that this UX is good. But technically TG is, 1) proprietary in fact despite open client source, 2) insecure, 3) starts getting overloaded with features by now.
I'd want a federated FOSS alternative. I'm actually thinking how one can do that (especially the part about sharing files, the TG way means they'll have to be stored for long somewhere ; maybe one can have each user issue a fixed amount of tokens on registration, those tokens be passed by uploading user to the one providing storage, and somehow thus using local storage of users as a currency, for file storage only ; the thought is inspired by Redis and probably sucks, especially since in Redis tokens are for hash partitions ; it's also inspired by BitTorrent reputation and tracker ratings, where you have to upload something to be able to download yadda-yadda) without making running a server a very expensive task. Probably should read something on how XMPP and IRC and other server-server connections work, but lazy.
Interesting even, can a FOSS federated TG alternative be just another Lemmy frontend. Again, the attached files part should be solved in some smarter way than storing them all on servers, people upload huge things to TG. A builtin bittorrent client is not a solution, cause one person sharing a file and going offline means that nobody can download it. So the previous idea with tokens may be not too bad.
Lol
Maybe you should start with real existing technologies when you do your analysis: rss, federation, graphql. Group chat is the most primitive of feed types and is incredibly outdated UX in 2025. Even RSS - technology from 1999 - has solved the issues telegram is still trying to solve now 26 years later.
RSS is a general standard, for everyone to use, TG is not. Yet it's likely that more people use TG than RSS. That's what I meant by market.
That's like saying that wheel is outdated when we have jet engines. What would you propose instead?
Which specific issues and in which regard?
I would like TG to have a tree view representation of discussions, a bit like what web forums have available. Or a view separated into pages, like the same thing, with n posts on one page and page numbers and visible post ids.
I don't like its actual client or its UX in the sense of appearance and widgets. What I meant is that I like what it presents to the user in the sense of entities.
In particular, again, that a community is essentially one thing, where posts with comments and a group chat are projections of the same data. You can see new posts and comments in the group chat, all in one place.
You're using appeal to popularity to claim that Telegram has good UX because more users use it which makes no sense unless you have A|B test that you can execute right now to prove your point.
Just because it's popular does not mean it's good especially when the market in this scenario has no choice or vote how the UX is implemented.
The one you mentioned for starters - following multiple channels in a single feed.
Telegram has a terrible UX for social networking and feed following - it's a private messaging app that has been hacked together into use case it was never made for in the first place and it really shows.
I don't claim it has good UX. I claim it has good semantics.
I didn't mention that.
But I also think having everything in a single feed from all places would really suck, like it does in FB.
What social networking is has many different meanings, easily creating groups (communities) and posting\commenting there, like in LJ, seems more important for me.
It's not.
Factually wrong - it was from the beginning intended to be what it is now. Channels and chats.
And, of course, I don't think your ideas for that use case are better than Telegram's. I don't think social networks with feeds and following are something good.
Pretty much yes. It has channels so there are news channels, personal channels etc. At some point when I discovered Twitter for myself I hated it so much for not being able to simply read subscribed accounts just like telegram does it. It's too convenient as a feeds app.
Nah, more like a better WhatsApp but with haters even worse than the WhatsApp haters.
Like a light version of Discord
So, a messenger?
No it would be best to compare it to discord, except the UI is cleaner and much better.
In my experience, telegram is one of those "if someone asks you to go on this app, they're trying to scam you" platforms. Flatly avoid.
Why did you delete your previous comment that has the exact same content?
Because I'm stupid (I convinced myself I wanted to say something slightly different, deleted the original, then while writing it differently decided it was better off as is. Yes I know I can edit)