I believe that Telegram is largely underestimated. At least I underestimated it. The growth, the use, the impact it is having. For me until recently it was just another messaging app, an alternative to WhatsApp but much less usable.
Instead is an alternative to Facebook. A real social network, with channels and groups, but different. Completely different. It has no advertising profiled on users. It has no algorithms that try to make us read one content rather than another. It places almost no limits on freedom of expression, which has made it one of the favorite tools of conspiracy theorists and fake news pushers, of course, but stopping at them to define the platform would be a mistake. Even because 8 months ago Telegram announced that it had passed the milestone of one billion downloads (only about ten apps are in that club) and it has over half a billion active users every month. To make it more interesting is the founder, a mysterious young Russian, Pavel Durov, who at one point moved to Dubai precisely in order not to incur Putin’s censorship (“I defended my users’ data at the cost of losing everything ”He once said); and that in the space of 9 years he has built a strange, but very solid bulwark of freedom of expression which, for example, is proving to be indispensable for first-hand information on the war in Ukraine.
Unlike other social networks, Telegram makes news only when someone uses it for some malicious purpose: from distributing free newspapers or TV series to organizing the No Vax riots with death threats to those who govern. But I repeat: Telegram is much moreis a powerful tool that appears to follow a definite plan.
And for our future Pavel Durov may have more importance than Mark Zuckerberg.