Andromxda

The company is based in the UAE, not a great country either

Ok, I see. Telegram tries to combine Discord, WhatsApp and WeChat, but it isn't a great replacement for either of them.

Discord has groups, chanels, threaded conversations, allows you to mute people, great support for bots, folders, etc. Signal is much better for private chats though, it has a very secure encryption protocol and enables E2EE by default and is very focused on privacy in general. Btw Signal also allows scheduling messages. I tried Telegram for both groups/chanels and private chats and I found it really annoying to have my groups and channels in the same app as my normal conversations. Just use Signal and Discord/Matrix/Revolt.

We don't need a RuSSian version of WeChat.

All the VPN providers I know either require payment information or don't even have a free trial

Absolutely not.

So are Signal, Element, Revolt and many other apps. What's to special about Telegram?

I don't understand why people like it so much, I tried it and found the experience pretty bad. Signal is a million times better and easier to use, and Matrix isn't that hard to figure out either.

Can you name a feature that other apps are missing?

The official version of Telegram isn't available on F-Droid either, and it doesn't use end-to-end encryption by default, so it's much more likely that it is a honeypot

But RusSSian/UAE-based Telegram is fine? 😂

Also, it really doesn't matter where Signal is based, as long as it's client code is open source and it uses E2EE by default. Telegram doesn't encrypt chats by default, and even if you enable 'secret chats' it uses a pretty weak encryption protocol.

Btw the official version of Telegram isn't available on F-Droid either, only a fork called Telegram-FOSS. You can get the exact same thing for Signal from a 3rd-party repo: https://www.twinhelix.com/apps/signal-foss/, or use Molly.

Honestly, Telegram sucks. Use Signal for private communications and Matrix for groups/communities.

I'm glad Suyu wants to carry on the legacy of Yuzu. Many forks are just reuploads of yuzu with no new commits.