I’ve been using Telegram for about 10 years, and it’s one of the few products that has consistently felt great the entire time. It’s fast everywhere: backend, mobile app, desktop app, all of it. Everything just works. Its sync is out of this world—fluid, fast, and seamless across devices. You can use it on your phone, then move to your PC or laptop and continue instantly without friction. Unlimited message history and file storage are fantastic, and the bot platform is absurdly powerful. It’s boring in the best way, which is exactly what you want from a channel for interacting with your agents everywhere.
Instead of Telegram, go self-hosted for company related communication activity. See Gamers Nexus recent video on self-hosted discord alternatives https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpjcmXbmMVM
For encrypted group conversation over third-party networks use Signal, or Matrix which try to keep your conversations private.
The fact that Telegram has their support playbooks online, is interesting. Though I would call the following claim a stretch
> As a result, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments, to this day.
Telegram had always impressed me for the same reasons. They have constantly gotten worse since about 2022/2023 though. Dark patterns, pay gate, they lost chat history for some of my closest contacts including 15k+ lost photos, no support at all. Something changed in their product direction and I started moving all my chats to Signal.
They need to stop cramming in useless features like Stories and NFT's and they recently redesigned the Android app to be like iOS but it broke my muscle memory, moved ALL items around (like "Saved" being in 1st spot when sharing, after the update it was buried, then it was at the top again and now it's under "Create a Story") and trashed the performance with the chat list not even loading at start (switching the tabs at the bottom "fixes" this, speaking of tabs, who even needs these there? The hamburger menu was fine). At least the desktop program is good AND native and not web slop.
Since we are apparently giving messaging platform reviews here, I feel exactly the same way about Microsoft Teams. It works great. It does everything I want. It doesn’t get in my way. 10 out of 10 keep up the great work guys!
> Since we are apparently giving messaging platform reviews here, I feel exactly the same way about Microsoft Teams. It works great. It does everything I want. It doesn’t get in my way. 10 out of 10 keep up the great work guys!
It looks like we found a high executive using company money to buy a product no one wants to use.
It's easy to promote Teams if your secretary is handling it for you and you don't need to suffer yourself.
The other possibility: Microsoft started an astroturfing campaign on HN.
Teams network connectivity is a plain joke. If you use suspend, or frequently change network, the thing will just never reconnect, even though you have VPN alive and all network applications perfectly running.
And the thing is just absurbdly sluggish, only display blurred grey lines instead of text in a meager attempt to look snappy.
I only use Teams for meetings and the calendar, and the occasional chat during a meeting. I find it totally fine and I don't really think about it much one way or the other. For reference I have a 2021 M1 Max with 64 GB.
Probably all managers and engineers working on Teams have similar copious amounts of memory and powerful CPUs on their devices and hardly use their own product. That would explain a lot
It honestly wasn't much different on my 2018 i5 Mini with 32 GB.
Maybe what sucks here is the experience of running it on Windows. Or maybe it sucks for large meetings? But I never have Teams meetings with > 40 people at this company.
When it is online, I agree with things asides from the "fast" part, actually. But many companies have a secondary service for async comms/chat when being Teams cannot be online, and compared to Slack.
Honestly can't tell if this is not sarcasm/rage bait.
Teams that has 3 different UI frameworks on every platform (but your best bet is the web)? With the Microsoft login that tends to loop forever redirecting to God knows where?
Back in the day, when I used to play pokemon go, there was a small local community and we would struggle to decide where to meet up for the daily raids because people would basically not respond (so as t not commit), or not know which gym each other meant exactly, nor give live updates when people moved around, etc. etc.
Then I joined a group from a bigger city where I commuted for work. They had a telegram group chat with two "channels", one for talking, one for bot posts. The telegram bot could be sent a single screenshot of a raid, and it would use OCR to automatically generate an interactive UI for that raid for everyone to see, with all the relevant info, and it would also clear itself up when the raid is no longer relevant. You could press buttons to say you were going, that you MAYBE were going, if you were late, and if you already started/done it, all in single clicks. Tons of options, tons of information, all live updated.
I was bedazzled. That feature singlehandedly removed all attrition from urban social gaming. And it was entirely grassroots. It made me try out making my own telegram bots, and yeah, you basically have the power to make a little app in chat form, even some that feel like CLI commands.
It's been OVER HALF A DECADE and I have yet to see a single other chat application have that degree of freedom where it comes to applications and bots. Some like discord even did whole ass 100% reworks of their bot AP to support the likes of slash commands, and still fall short. And there's none worse than Teams. Teams hates you. Teams spent the prior 2 years before this one basically pointing a gun to our heads telling us they were removing webhooks and pushing back on it whenever they repeatedly get told that's the most insane and dogshit idea ever. And they still did it. There's just no spark in Teams UX. No self-respect. It's a soulless product made entirely as a dumping place of "synergy" with other M$ products. It's reciprocal, I hate it too.
Oh and my local group never go into telegram because they didn't want a new app. It died, but I still kept playing after work without problem. It makes me wonder how fast Teams would die if it wasn't proped up by 365 and Azure subscriptions.
> we would struggle to decide where to meet up for the daily raids because people would basically not respond (so as t not commit), or not know which gym each other meant exactly, nor give live updates when people moved around, etc. etc.
This kind of thing is so common in groups of people, it's one of my pet peeves. My own family does this in our group messages when trying to make big decisions like who should host thanksgiving or where we should go for a family vacation.
I make it a point to just take charge and tell people that we're doing XYZ now. It usually either results in a decision, or gets the discussion going enough that I can do it again with new information.
That has roughly been my MO as well and it works great for groups where identities have settled.
But one has to keep in mind that, in our currwnt "more woke" times, if you go this way in a new group you run the risk of being labeled an array of things. So tread carefully there.
I wonder if Teams hates you, because they are doing the bidding of their actual customers (corporate decisions makers and purse holders), and those people's interests are not exactly aligned with the users'.
The problem is that these people holding the actual purse don't care enough about their subordinates' experience. They care about the price tag, and about compliance. Apparently the makers of Teams think about the same. None of them thinks in terms of lost productivity.
Yes, compliance is a big one. And it's not so much that they are actively hostile to user productivity (and quality of life), they just don't care enough.
Odious is one of the most reserved words you could use to describe Telegram, which is primarily a host for scams that the influencers and other bottom feeders aren't allowed to monetize on the big social networks.
I feel the opposite. I'm on Teams all day at work and have reluctantly opened Telegram recently to try a Claw despite having an account for years.
I've been surprised how little support there has been for Teams in the whole AI ecosystem. It seems all developers assume that the whole world is at startups working on Slack when most businesses are on Microsoft 365.
Compared to operating on text files (which is relatively very simple and something Claude Code is great for), I have a feeling it's kind of a disaster dealing with Microsoft integrations and the different file formats
Just the fact how much Microsoft lies when you click the "keep me logged in" button should tell you why nobody bothers with Teams integration with anything.
The main reason is just how hard it is to actually create anything that integrates with Teams. You have to jump through so meany hoops, wade through so many deprecated APIs, guess through so many half-way-wrong-by-now documentation pages.
After building a proof of concept, we decided that we will only continue Teams integration if anyone is going to pay serious money for it.
