Telegram Premium Tops 1 Million Subscribers

Telegram Premium has amassed over 1 million subscribers, less than six months after the popular instant messaging app launched the paid offering and began a serious effort to monetize the business. From a report: Pavel Durov shared the update on his Telegram channel Tuesday, calling the milestone "one of the most successful examples of a social media subscription plan ever launched." The subscription, however, still "represents just a fraction of Telegram's overall revenue," he shared in the same update, optimistically hoping that one day Premium will rake in just as much money as ads.

What is "Telegram Premium"?

[fbobraga]

I don't use their client, but Forkgram [f-droid.org]

Re: What is "Telegram Premium"?

[fbobraga]

Found:

Telegram Premium enables users to send files as large as 4 GB (up from 2 GB) and supports faster downloads, for instance, Telegram said.

Re: What is "Telegram Premium"?

[fbobraga]

More: Paying customers will also be able to follow up to 1,000 channels, up from 500 offered to free users, and create up to 20 chat folders with as many as 200 chats in each. Telegram Premium users will also be able to add up to four accounts in the app and pin up to 10 chats.

...all useless features, to me

Ok Why Telegram?

[cayenne8]

Please understand, I don't really know what Telegram is....

If it is just a messaging app, why would anyone use it and PAY...when texting (SMS or iMessage) is free?

Or, is there some sort of social media aspect of Telegram too?

(In which case I'd avoid it like any other sm like the plague).

Re:

[dpidcoe]

Please understand, I don't really know what Telegram is....

If it is just a messaging app, why would anyone use it and PAY...when texting (SMS or iMessage) is free?

At its absolute simplest I guess you could kind of compare its direct message capabilities to SMS, except that it actually works between apple and android devices and the feature set is much richer. It's probably more accurate to think of it functionally as a much more modern IRC designed around being used on a phone. You can do group chats with hundreds of users, pin messages, have bots to help moderate the big chats, announcement channels (basically only the channel owner can post and everybody else is su

Re:

[Darkling-MHCN]

It just provides a better user experience than most of chat apps i've tried which include, Whatsapp, Line, Teams, Messenger and Slack, i.e. media sharing / libraries, search facilities and client support for macOS, linux, windows, android, ios and a web client.

So far its offered unlimited cloud storage of millions of users photos, videos and chats for free. There really isn't that much you get with Premium version that you don't get for free. The Premium version increases some of the limits. I use it a lo

call quality

[roman_mir]

I would pay the 5USD a month for Telegram if this guaranteed excellent call quality, but I hear that it does not. Telegram is a wonderful app, I have some issues with it (cannot take snapshots of the screen from the app without rooting the phone for example) but there is this call problem that appeared about a year ago and it never got better. What is going on with it, will the team be able to solve this issue if we purchase subscriptions or what?

Telegram is not the bastion against the courts ..

[NZheretic]

Telegram is not the bastion against the courts that some people think it is.

Telegram shares users data in copyright violation lawsuit [techcrunch.com]

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Are there any better, widely used systems though?

You need an IP address to connect to the server. Companies have to abide by legal judgements in countries where they operate. If they asked Signal for the same thing and ruled they had to provide it, then Signal would have to hand over the IP address you connected to their server with. Even if it's only stored in RAM, your IP address right now is available to them.

The only systems that get around that are ones like Cwtch that use Tor, and also murder your bat

Telegram is NOT secure & Russia IS spying on i

[Khopesh]

Telegram is not secure and its continued use in Ukraine may lead to users' deaths.

A recent security-focused review looking at a Nov 11 Washington Post story [washingtonpost.com] on Russian "stay behind" operations in Kherson has concluded that Russia is spying on Telegram chats in occupied Ukrainian regions [pwnallthethings.com]. A tidbit for you:

Telegram’s security has long been called into question by the information security community. There’s lots of aspects of how it is built that don’t make sense from a security perspective. But so far, there’s never been any good evidence that it’s been exploited by the Russian security services in practice.

Until now.

Ihor’s story is particularly amazing because it doesn’t just reveal that Russian forces are surveilling Telegram chats. It also gives us a good hint as to how.

It even tells us what Russia wasn’t doing--at least in the narrow case of Ihor. And it reveals how at least one other major and well-known security defect in Telegram--ones that have been left open on purpose by Telegram--would very likely have led to Ihor’s death if Russian occupation forces had been only slightly more competent and successfully exploited them.

Re:

[pete6677]

People should use something secure and free of foreign interference, like TikTok.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

It's worth understanding how Telegram works.

By default, chats are not encrypted. You can optionally encrypt 1 to 1 chats, but not group chats. Encryption uses the Signal protocol.

One of the nice things about Telegram is that they don't block 3rd party clients. Some of the 3rd party clients default to encrypted when it is available.

Unfortunately Telegram doesn't make this very clear, and people don't really think about it much. Encryption has to be the default and universal to be useful, it seems. Signal is

Telegram does NOT use the Signal protocol

[Khopesh]

By default, chats are not encrypted. You can optionally encrypt 1 to 1 chats, but not group chats. Encryption uses the Signal protocol.

Yes, Telegram supports encrypted chats, but Telegram users overwhelmingly ignore that feature. As you noted, it has limited applicability (no encryption for group chats). IIRC, it also feels less usable (even beyond the fact that the option is buried in the UI).

According to Telegram's own website, they have implemented their own protocol called MTProto [telegram.org]. This is not Signal.