Telegram starts to look like a super app, echoing WeChat
(techcrunch.com)
from narwhal@lemmy.ml to technology@lemmy.ml on 26 Sep 2023 10:51
https://lemmy.ml/post/5534641
from narwhal@lemmy.ml to technology@lemmy.ml on 26 Sep 2023 10:51
https://lemmy.ml/post/5534641
#technology
threaded - newest
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Telegram, the popular messenger with 800 million monthly active users worldwide, is inching closer to adopting an ecosystem strategy that is reminiscent of WeChat’s super app approach.
To build out this super app platform, Telegram relies on a network of infrastructure partners both from the established tech world and the crypto space.
WeChat has pioneered the mini app model in China and now powers millions of them serving functions from payments, food delivery, e-commerce, ride-hailing, to driver’s license renewal, just to name a few.
The developers would also need to learn the programming languages of blockchain apps, which might actually be an easier barrier to overcome than the process of understanding the economic incentives that facilitate decentralized applications.
Importantly, payment functionality played a critical role in WeChat’s early rise as it instilled a habit among users to make daily transactions through the chat app.
It will be fascinating to witness what lessons Telegram and TON take from WeChat and how a mini app platform with a decentralized twist unfolds.
The original article contains 678 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Lmao meanwhile X…
Yeah, Musk bought the wrong company.
I don’t trust anything that needs a phone number
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.
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
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
Using any unofficial client like Nekogram
I use Telegram for the random chatter but it’s getting bloated ever since they added premium features. I understand they have to make money, but some features like stories can’t be disabled at all, and they’re selling group names with crypto. Matrix is looking a lot better moving forward.
Especially that their clients are becoming usable even without limiting yourself in how many rooms have you joined.
That’s worrying. Hopefully the FOSS fork will add a toggle for it, or a new fork will appear
These “super-app” fantasies always ignore the fact that WeChat is ubiquitous in China because the Chinese government practically requires everyone to have it. How exactly is that supposed to be replicated in a non-authoritarian society?
You are not wrong, but I feel that the way that so many users have stayed active on Twitter despite all the controversies under Musk proves that a non-authoritarian audience can potentially sleepwalk itself into a super-app with a mixture of user complacency, shortsightedness, and unwillingness to deal with even a bit of inconvenience to support a competitor.
It's a really small chance, but I think that it is there.
Good point. Sleepwalking into authoritarianism doesn’t seem difficult these days.
As long as I can use Telegram with open source third party apps I give a shit about their bullshit.
What 3rd party app would you recommend to use telegram? I’m getting really annoyed by the stories thing at the top.
I’m a nekogram user but also heard a lot of good things about forkgram
do they remove stories and other bloat?
To be honest, I didn’t know about this nonsense before that post. So no, atleast Nekogram focuses on being a messenger.
Thanks for the heads up! Already installed Nekogram and uninstalled the default app. No stories bs anymore.
Life’s good again! 🤓
I’m using TelegramFOSS right off F-droid and until I read this thread I didn’t even know there was a stories feature
Heeeeere we go, get ready to buy your Verification Label for $2/month or some whit
One marketing executive’s “super” is another man’s “crammed full of crufty garbage that nobody wants.”
I use and love Telegram. I use almost all of its features. All of its clients are open source. It has an incredible API for writing bots (which I also do). Their desktop Linux app is native! When I’m traveling I use Stories to share the experience with friends and family. I love the new topics to separate group discussions. It’s the one app I’ve been able to onboard absolutely everyone to. I was never able to do the same when I tried to with Matrix and you only get so many chances before people stop moving.
What is crufty garbage to you?
Stories. Why they are in a messenger? Especially in such a pesky way.
They’re pesky? It’s the only messenger that has them but has them tucked away completely unintrusively. I‘m not a fan of stories but in Telegram I‘ve barely noticed them…
Sounds like a bunch of crap I don’t want, and they’re adding more crap according to this article. And if they are indeed going the way of WeChat, becoming a “super app” and partnering with Chinese and crypto companies, that makes me very nervous about privacy.
Not sure if you’ve used WeChat or any of the telegram app-platform features … it’s just web code that gets loaded in on demand. It’s not like the app is built with all this shit by default, it just loads customised HTML-like code when you activate an app.
…and then everything you do and say gets monitored by the CCP…
Heavy user of telegram myself. It is by a country mile the slickest, leanest, most UI guideline-adhering, quickest app to use, on all of its platforms.
i’ve never understood why people like telegram, it’s not some bastion of virtues, it’s just a shit app like any other that realized that there’s a market for the appearance of privacy.
My colleague likes it and use it all the time. He doesn’t really care about privacy and he often brings up cool features telegram has, like simple photo/video editor, shrink tool for media, newsfeed, etc. Which all seems quite polished and very usable. If only it wasn’t such a mess in its core.
It’s a good chat app overall. You just have to treat it like sms and assume there’s no real privacy.
Also, they’re very generous with file transfer size. It makes shifting things between people so much easier.
In other words, it’s the features rather than the supposed privacy. If I want privacy, there’s way better options, same for security. But those options suck with some of the more useful things at times.
Mind you, if they keep going with this shit, it’ll be so bloated that it’ll cease to be a good pick for the stuff I use it for, but there are actually plenty of users that are hyped about the shit whatsapp is doing, and the same goes for telegram.
It treats desktop clients as first-class citizens. That’s a huge, huge advantage over Whatsapp, for me.
WhatsApp desktop isn't so bad nowadays, ever since they made it so you can use it without running through your phone. But I agree that Telegram's desktop client is much better.