Telegram Geeks

2021-03-19 15:52:05 https://telegram.org/blog/voice-chats-on-steroids/ Open / Comment

2021-03-09 16:15:22 Clarification: some user identifiers, but not all will become bigger than 2^31 - 1. Open / Comment

2021-03-09 14:56:45 Bot API 5.1

• Added updates about member status changes in chats: my_chat_member and chat_member
• Support for improved invite links
• Basic info about voice chats
• And more, read the full changelog here:

https://core.telegram.org/bots/api-changelog#march-9-2021

Warning: After one of the upcoming Bot API updates, user identifiers will become bigger than 2^31 - 1 and it will be no longer possible to store them in a signed 32-bit integer type. User identifiers will have up to 52 significant bits, so a 64-bit integer or double-precision float type would still be safe for storing them. Please make sure that your code can correctly handle such user identifiers. Open / Comment

2021-02-24 03:24:40 https://telegram.org/blog/autodelete-inv2 Open / Comment

2021-02-11 16:50:25 Why users shouldn’t worry about ads on Telegram

I read an article that cautioned users from switching to Telegram from other apps, because "Telegram is going to introduce ads". This is misleading for at least 3 reasons:

1. There will be no ads in chats on Telegram. Users who rely on Telegram as a messaging app, not a social network, will never see ads. Private chats and group chats are and will always be ad-free. As I outlined in December, ads are being considered only in large one-to-many channels (like this one), which do not exist in any other messaging app. So users ditching older apps for Telegram won’t increase the number of ads in their lives.

2. User data will not be used to target ads. We believe that collecting private data from users to target ads the way WhatsApp-Facebook do is immoral. We like the approach of privacy-conscious services like DuckDuckGo: monetizing services without collecting information about users. So if we introduce ads in one-to-many-channels, they will be contextual – based on the topic of the channel, not targeted based on any user data.

3. We are fixing ads that are already here. In most markets, content creators on Telegram already monetize their content by selling promotional posts in their channels. This is a chaotic market with multiple third-party ad networks pushing intrusive ads that create a negative user experience. We want to fix this situation by offering a privacy-conscious alternative for channel owners.

Users will be able to opt out of ads, but I do think that privacy-conscious ads are a good way for channel owners to monetize their efforts – as an alternative to donations or subscriptions, which we are also working to offer them.

Our end goal is to establish a new class of content creators – one that is financially sustainable and free to choose the strategy that is best for their subscribers. Traditional social networks have exploited users and publishers for far too long with excessive data collection and manipulative algorithms. It’s time to change this. Open / Comment

2021-02-08 21:38:41 Telegram became the most downloaded mobile app in the world in January 2021.

For the last 7.5 years, Telegram has steadily climbed the rankings for popular apps. Since its launch in 2013, Telegram’s user base has grown over 40% each year.

What’s our secret? Consistency.

For the last 7.5 years we’ve consistently defended the privacy of our users and regularly improved the quality and feature set of our apps.

Anyone who stays true to their values and regularly applies focused effort over a long period of time is bound to succeed in their area. This is true for any human occupation – sport, blogging, art, coding, business or studying. Open / Comment

2021-01-29 13:29:06 Some users wanted a way to move their chat history from WhatsApp over to Telegram. Two weeks ago I realized this should be theoretically possible, and yesterday we made this feature available on both iOS and Android, together with many other improvements. It also supports migrating chats from KakaoTalk and Line – two other Pre-Telegram apps.

Nothing like this has ever been made possible by a major app, and our team had to implement some serious magic to make it work. We are happy with the result: moving messages to Telegram allows people to save disk space and stop worrying about third-party backups or changing devices.

The feature currently imports messages to the end of the target Telegram conversation, but retains the original timestamps of messages. Some folks have been asking whether we can mix the existing messages in a Telegram chat with the imported messages in one unified timeline. This should be possible if the target chat (where you import messages to) has fewer than 100 messages, so we’ve started to work on that.

We’ll also provide free APIs for third-party developers who want to create tools that will allow users to import messages to Telegram from anywhere. Hopefully, such tools will help add support for more apps than this first wave of three – and also allow users to import multiple chats or their entire inbox at once.

The original meaning of the paper plane on the Telegram logo means “freedom”. For us, freedom of choice and data portability are paramount. People should be in complete control over their own data – and their own lives. Open / Comment

2021-01-28 17:54:53 https://telegram.org/blog/move-history Open / Comment

2021-01-16 13:09:20 @stickers bot now accepts .webp files Open / Comment

2021-01-10 20:23:18 I’ve been taking part in the discussion in the comments and answering questions. Here are some of the responses:

On Apple-Google censorship https://t.me/durovschat/518801

On making server-side code open https://t.me/durovschat/515221

On a privacy-conscious ad platform https://t.me/durovschat/527441

On US-based encrypted apps https://t.me/durovschat/519187

On encryption vs. usability when using Secret Chats vs Cloud Chats https://t.me/durovschat/527081

On maximising security of communication https://t.me/durovschat/527134 Open / Comment