Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)
Comments
flexagoon
SpaceL10n
For a hot second there I was really excited to learn about historical telegram "data centers".
It's a capital T.
Terr_
As a tangential niche-tourism shoutout: https://www.telcomhistory.org/ConnectionsSeattle.html
Granted, most of it is a bit newer than the heyday of telegrams, but there's a little bit of overlap.
sophacles
You may have already read it, but portions of this sprawling (and very very good) essay by Neal Stephenson get into the topic: Mother Earth Mother Board - https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
AntronX
DC in Miami, explains why Telegram app is snappy fast for me. I notice similar speed improvement with Meta and other big tech apps when I'm on the west coast. I guess latency matters when your app is making tons of requests.
Anon1096
Most of big tech's major data centers are in Loudoun County, VA on the east coast not the west coast. It's centrally located to be great latency for the east coast and OK latency for west coast and Europe. Plus a friendly regulatory environment and lots of existing DCs (AWS us-east-1, Azure East US 1/2)
If you're feeling any better latency on the west coast it's more likely to be placebo than real.
tobinfekkes
On the contrary, Big tech famously has plenty of data centers on the west coast:
• Quincy, WA (Microsoft)
• The Dalles, Oregon (Google)
• Prineville, Oregon (Facebook, Apple)
• Hillsboro, Oregon (Cloudflare, others)
• Boardman, Oregon (AWS)
Anon1096
By traffic load east coast datacenters dwarfs these.
tobinfekkes
The parent comment wasn't regarding traffic loads; it was regarding latency.
Anon1096
Your experienced latency will be heavily influenced by which DC you hit, in which case we care about the relative traffic loads because you aren't just hitting your closest one all the time.
glaslong
The DC3 gap is interesting. I wonder whether they deprecated it because the other EU server had plenty of capacity, or still keep it but only for... "special" account data flow.
Also, it looks like it's easy enough to ID your DC on their API, though I haven't tried it yet (more of a Matrix Stan personally): https://core.telegram.org/method/help.getConfig
londons_explore
This strikes me as a huge amount of custom code and technical debt. Every new software dev probably has to learn this.
Why not a sticky master election per user, and have no special data centers?
codedokode
It makes sense: European users are assigned to EU data center, and Chinese to the one closer to them. The "custom code" should not be complicated, just a map of country to DC.
You are suggesting to develop a compicated solution (spend money) when current simple one is working ok without any elections.
inigyou
If you've ever actually tried to implement server clustering you quickly find there's no magic cloud, except in specific cases like blockchains. A privately operated cluster system is mostly about directing requests to the correct server out of a finite set of servers.
fullstop
From what I have read, they only have ~30 employees. They're not exactly onboarding a lot of new people here.
nurumaik
Learn what? How to count to 5?
ilikeitdark13
So data centers are kind of organised like street gangs.
strebz
DC2 is the first connection point of all MTProto clients.
Any DC may refuse a request and force the client to switch DC.
Profile URL doesn't show where messages/chats/channels are stored, as telegram has two dedicated DCs mostly for media. The rest DCs allow media with bandwidth being throttled.
_ink_
They claim that they store user data on different servers in different jurisdictions so it becomes more difficult for authorities to gain access [1]. Maybe that's true and it has something to do with these DCs that seem to be unused.
amima
They do not claim that. They do claim that they store specifically encryption keys in several data centers in different jurisdictions. Here is the exact quote: "All data is stored heavily encrypted and the encryption keys in each case are stored in several other data centers in different jurisdictions". So only keys are distributed.
hkpack
What does heavily encrypted even mean? Fully encrypted? Slightly encrypted? Encrypted enough to call it “heavily encrypted” but not enough to be protected from whoever is interested?
dakolli
telegram is the safest encrypted messaging app. Period, full stop.
maqp
>telegram is the safest encrypted messaging app. Period, full stop.
Yes, let's see
* Not end-to-end encrypted by default
* No end-to-end encrypted groups
* No end-to-end encryption on any desktop client by the vendor, forcing cross-platform users to drop secret chats. This includes 81% of working age people who sit on their computer during work day, and 100% of college students and IT workers.
* No post-quantum key exchange
* No future secrecy
* No per-message forward secrecy
* Bullshit claims about distributed keys https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/238562/how-does...
* Lacks ALL metadata protection from server like phone number, IP-address and thus geolocation, contact list, group memberships, quantity and schedule of communication, data types. In fact --
* Secret chats leak additional metadata about intent to hide content from TG as the vendor.
Also,
History of poor encryption implementation
* 2013: A cracking contest https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6932648
* 2013: Telegram, AKA "Stand back, we have Math PhDs!" http://unhandledexpression.com:8081/crypto/general/security/...
* 2015: IND-CCA issues https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf,
* 2015 64-bit complexity MITM attack https://web.archive.org/web/20160425091011/http://www.alexra...
* 2021 Valsorda "The Most Backdoor-Looking Bug I've Ever Seen" https://words.filippo.io/telegram-ecdh/,
* 2021 https://mtpsym.github.io/ and https://mtpsym.github.io/paper.pdf
Some analysis:
* 2025 Matthew Green analysis https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram...
* 2025 "Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot" https://rys.io/en/179.html
Also,
They employ volunteering sockpuppets https://tsf.telegram.org/
Durov who supposedly lives in exile has visited Russia over 50 times https://eutoday.net/pavel-durovs-secret-visits-to-russia/
I can't scream "drop & run" loud enough.
dakolli
Telegram has nothing to do with Russia, other than having a Russian founder, and the Ukrainian military has literally relied upon it in the past, along with many Ukrainian civic services. You people are just racist towards Russians and need help.
Based on the analysis of packet captures above, I believe it is clear that anyone who has sufficient visibility into Telegram’s traffic would be able to identify and track traffic of specific user devices. Including when perfect forward secrecy protocol feature is in use.
This would also allow, through some additional analysis based on timing and packet sizes, to potentially identify who is communicating with whom using Telegram.
I love how the author of your honeypot blog post has nothing concrete other than potential attack vectors and is like "Well this is obviously a Russian honeypot" with no evidence what so ever other than a claim that there are plain text device identifiers, which is something the FSB would do. [insert clown emoji]. You can do similar attacks on signal and whatsapp.. Why is it that the Russian one bothers you so much?
maqp
>Ukrainian military has literally relied upon it in the past
Well they realized their mistake and banned Telegram's use on state issued devices in 2024 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c78dwepw95do
I'm not going to speak for the author of that article. But I agree with his conclusion. Telegram is indistinguishable from a honeypot.
In the world of infosec, stuff isn't secure until someone proves you wrong (which you reject assuming racism). Stuff is secure when you prove it's secure.
Practically every major secure messaging app vendor has proven they can not be a honeypot, by end-to-end encrypting their communications, offering open source clients with public key fingerprints to verify that end-to-end encryption is working correctly.
Telegram hasn't done that. Telegram's lack of end-to-end encryption, paired with zero effort for metadata protection (not even stuff like sealed sender) shows they don't give a damn about actual security.
But what they do is also what an FSB op would do.
* It would advertise "heavily encrypted" and bash WhatsApp day after day convincing average Janes and Joes about it being really really secure, and confuse readers who take a closer look, with claims of all chats using MTProto but also calling both client-server and end-to-end encryption protocols MTProto.
* It would construct a narrative that the face of the app is a rebel dissident in exile.
* It would be banned temporarily or poorly
* It's role would be obfuscated by releasing an obviously backdoored app like Max, to make Telegram seem safe compared to it. Like Russian intelligence really believed they could use Max to monitor Russian dissidents. FSB isn't dumb. Russian military deception is world famous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_military_deception
The backdoor sits in the fact nothing is end-to-end encrypted, groups can't be E2EE, but troll army can still defend it, claiming it does have 1:1 E2EE if you want. Yes, it does, if you really want the highest friction UX possible. People try and drop secret chats when they want to be able to alt-tab into the conversation instead of digging into their phones 100 times a day. This backdoor is ingenious because the users can only blame themselves when their 1:1 messages end up to the server.
A good messaging app creator knows this, so they make E2EE default so that users don't encounter such friction. E.g. Signal allows you to have E2EE 1:1 and group chats between all of your devices. That's what proper privacy by design looks like. Would Telegram do that, they would've proven they stand for their users, and I'd actually recommend them.
Data is a toxic asset. Even if Telegram isn't a honeypot, it's a massive data collecting apparatus, that has all that data sit on its servers, from which the hacking team of any major intelligence agency can access it en mass. That's the life of 1B users worldwide. So ultimately, it doesn't even matter if Telegram is a honeypot, it's equally usable to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fancy_Bear or NSA TAO or whoever.
Also, https://dfrlab.org/2018/02/15/putinatwar-how-russia-weaponiz... shows Russian troll army is using russophobia as a narrative online.
This isn't about hating on Russians. This is about Durov not passing the minimum bar of what modern secure communication is about.
You've so far claimed telegram is the best with nothing to back that claim, ignored every counter argument, attacked argument of someone other than me, and you're now replaying Russian government shill tactics to try to rally people behind you for emotional reasons, when I'm explicitly giving technical critique.
Krasnol
The ban is just there so every village cop may have something against you if they need it.
Besides that, they know and, as it seems, to be happy about it's wide availability and information.
Having their own app, they obviously also use for their causes, is just a cookie for the patriots.
psychoslave
>You people are just racist towards Russians and need help.
That doesn’t exclude the statements about Telegram to be correct though. That is, if some hater against whatever group say 1+1=2 or water is wet, what’s the conclusion?
>You can do similar attacks on signal and whatsapp.
Well yes. Don’t trust devices, they are not humans, they don’t qualify. They can at most have some degree of reliance for some purpose. But assuming that all devices out there are powned by some external parties is a rather sound security baseline approach.
>Why is it that the Russian one bothers you so much?
One don’t need to bother more on any specific oligarchy really, they all use their fellow humans like disposable pawns.
tryauuum
> You people are just racist towards Russians and need help.
>> That doesn’t exclude the statements about Telegram to be correct though.
just attack the telegram from the technical standpoint, then no complains about "racist towards russians" will be given. Like, mentioning the lack of user-friendly E2EE is great already. Saying things like "Durov who supposedly lives in exile has visited Russia over 50 times" is meh. How can one intepret it in any other way is "Russia is evil and visiting Russia is thus evil"?
and regarding the cracking contests — one of the telegram bugs was actually uncovered this way, see https://habr.com/ru/articles/206900/
dgroshev
> How can one intepret it in any other way is "Russia is evil and visiting Russia is thus evil"?
Simple: Durov has no problem with constructing a narrative that has little to do with reality.
psychoslave
> How can one intepret it in any other way
As noise. The fact it's xenophobic or some other kind of noise is just implementation details at that level.
Perz1val
Heavily means the key is large so it takes longer to crack, but also longer to encrypt/decrypt, so the service is more costly to run and slower. At least I've seen it used that way
maqp
There's nothing slow about AES.
In this context "heavily" means "we can't legally claim it's end-to-end encrypted because it's not".
Also it's not even post quantum, so it's not heavy. Telegram's Diffie-Hellman breaks instantly with a quantum computer large enough to run Shor against it.
Also, the keys sit on the servers' RAM, no matter what they lie. There is no global distributed RAM system, especially one that encrypts data in distributed fashion and works at the negligible latencies that Telegram boasts.
Aachen
It's not slow though so that's clearly not it. It's just a marketing intensifier here
bflesch
It's more about the fact that five eyes intelligence services prefer to officially spy on each other's countries so they don't have to answer to their respective bureaucrats. They prefer plausible deniability.
Something like this:
DC1 politically belongs to UK which "spies" on CA/US but physical servers are located in US so US ultimately retains control.
DC2 politically belongs to France which "spies" on RUS/UKR/DE but physical servers are located in NL (e.g. in UK because one wouldn't be able to spot difference in ping). Maybe it's politically owned by UK/NZ or UK/AUS because France can't be publicly caught spying on Germany. But France wouldn't risk public arrest of Telegram CEO and the spectacle with russia if there is nothing to gain.
DC4 politically belongs to USA which "spies" on UK/Israel but physical servers are in NL/UK
DC5 politically belongs to UK/USA which "spies" on AUS/China/India but physical servers are in Singapore (e.g. former UK colony)
Really cool to see realpolitik mapped out like this. It also highlights the problem of metadata with these kind of topics.
orbital-decay
The reason it's in Singapore is that Telegram can't operate in China, and Singapore-washing is the closest thing to doing it. A ton of VPNs and other services targeting mainland users but not allowed in the mainland are hosted there, it's a huge hub for companies and networks.
hocuspocus
I'm on DC5 since I lived in Korea when signing up, but I cannot say I've noticed many outages.
Peanuts99
The more I learn about telegram, the sketchier it seems.
wronex
Agreed. I don’t see the appeal compared to Signal. Although, Signal is also sketchy with an operating cost in the tens of millions of dollars per year. Where does the money come from?
isatty
- Telegram has exemplary fast, native clients on most platforms I’ve used it on
- Cat stickers
- Did I mention it has the best native clients out of all the messaging apps? It boggles the mind why other companies can’t get this done.
mdasen
I'll add:
- Telegram had usernames in 2014 before Signal added them a decade later, allowing people to chat without sharing their phone number
- Telegram has unencrypted chats which allow for giant chat rooms of 200,000+ and channels with millions of subscribers. Signal warns about performance issues when you have more than 150 people in a group. Telegram isn't just a messenger - it's often used as a social publishing platform like Instagram.
I don't use Telegram and use Signal a lot, but I also understand why other people use Telegram: the same reason they use Instagram.
darksim905
I can't say that I've ever seen genuine uses like this that you mention unless it's a 'community' for adult content or sketchy content. Is this that common?
siffin
Not a regular telegram user here but I follow a Ukranian guy who hand builds led bulbs/products by hand. He has a telegram group chat where he enthusiastically posts pictures of everything he's doing, it's great.
ivm
AvaloniaUI has their community in Telegram, and there are other tech ones. Endless meme channels in different languages too. Also, most of Russian-speaking emigrant groups & news channels are in Telegram, some of them with tens of thousands of participants.
KomoD
I'm in groups/channels about stuff like memes, news, hosting providers, software/OSS, or niche/hobby topics, and some of those groups are massive (100k+). I don't think any of those are sketchy or adult.
konart
Uses for what? Here is Russia many companies have (or had) groups (not Slack or something else but Telegram), most communities exists solely in Telegram, most news channes are also there.
Not to mention you create ANY kind of bot without any trouble.
I guess we just live in two different worlds. Like with China where WeChat is the default. (except we now have fucking Max instead).
tapland
It's usually where i get news about custom LineageOS builds for various devices
hbn
Unfortunately the upselling has got kind of annoying and in-your-face the past few years
But indeed their native clients are great, especially on iOS. It legitimately feels more native and intuitive than Apple's own Messages app. Animations run at a smooth, stable framerate. Never hitches jumping between conversations. One of the greatest apps ever made.
SXX
Durov was smart enough to let community build open source clients and use them. And to make internally built clients open source.
tiagod
That's not it. I believe all the clients were built by employees. What he did was give each client to a very small, experienced team.
petu
Most people use official clients and AFAIK they don't really accept any external contributions? All clients were fully developed by employees.
Valodim
Simple to do when you don't care about e2e and clients can just show data they receive to the user with little logic of their own. It is a world of difference in complexity.
Those nice things are what you get when you're fine having all your data (messages, images, files) forever in plaintext on servers owned by some Russian rich guy.
Pray there will never be a telegram.zip torrent.
josephg
I’ve never used the telegram app. What do you like about it compared to signal / WhatsApp?
tjohns
- Messages send quickly and reliably, even under poor and sometimes hostile network conditions. Telegram just seems to work even when other chat apps struggle.
- Telegram uses usernames instead of phone numbers by default, which is good if you're using it as an IRC replacement instead of an SMS replacement.
- You can have the client open on essentially unlimited devices simultaneously, including a web app if you need it.
- Messages can be edited at any point after sending with no expiry.
- You can schedule messages to send later, or send a message silently so it doesn't wake people up.
- Different group types - announcement channels, Discord-style groups with sub-channels, flexible moderator roles, etc. (I believe WhatsApp has some of this.)
- Support for bots, which is also very helpful for managing large communities.
- Community-created, sharable stickers. Seriously, people underestimate how nice these are.
The downside is that a lot of this requires state to be stored on the Telegram servers, so most chat's aren't E2E encrypted. (They do have an option for E2E encrypted private 1:1 chats, but you lose most of the polish by using that.)
Also, the official apps are open source, so you can modify them if needed.
opem
I'll add a few more:
- insanely fast search, chat history browsing and in app navigation - unlimited unencrypted cloud storage, your chats and docs always stays available - ability to send very large files - ability to host large video and voice chats - chat automation - auto translation and transcription - mini apps - open source client, with lots of customization - phone number less sign up (you can purchase a burner number from them and sign up with that, I guess it costs their crypto (ton) tho) - sending gifts
sharpshadow
WhatsApp will have usernames too in the near future and one will be able to reach out to a WhatsApp user solely by username hiding the phone number. One can create a username already reverse it. Sounds very similar to the Telegram username approach but we will see.
darksim905
- Telegram uses usernames instead of phone numbers by default, which is good if you're using it as an IRC replacement instead of an SMS replacement.
---
What? When you register, I'm pretty sure it requires putting in a phone number that preferably isn't a VoIP line and not a username. It's been that way any time I've tried to use the service on mobile.
Scheduled messages have been a thing for a long time on Signal, but they seem to be only on mobile, which is wild to me.
I would posit that Signal is more for individual to individual. I'm seeing in these comments that telegram is clearly a lot more community centric, ala Discord lite than I realized.
tjohns
Yes, you need to register with a phone number, but publicly you'll show up as your @username and that's how most people will interact with you.
And I agree, I think yours is an accurate assessment. Telegram is indeed much more community centric.
stavros
That's almost the same as Signal, though on Signal you don't show up as anything. People need to get a username from you to share your contact.
MC995
Signing up for an account requires a phone number, but you can keep that hidden from other uses and use the username for everything.
It lets you keep your number private from everyone else you're chatting with.
isatty
Signal and WhatsApp are bloated and slow in comparison.
Krasnol
What is slow?
I don't understand what there is to accelerate.
0x457
In Telegram, I can open a chat, find a sticker, send a sticker, post a circle story, and shitpost in another group chat. All while WhatsApp loads my chat history. That is on any platform and any network condition, except for fully offline.
Their desktop apps are just Qt and not WebView inside a Qt. Mobile apps are native and not React.
forgotmypw17
The main things that are slow are loading the app and opening the app, loading the messages, and receiving the messages. On my phone, this is much slower than Telegram, and on my computer, the WhatsApp program doesn't even work have the time -- it just gets stuck in the loading process.
Signal is not as bad, but can still take a minute or two to update everything on my computer. The phone app is better.
Krasnol
Sounds more like your personal problem.
I live in Germany and use both. None do that and as I'm "the IT guy" for many people at work an din private, I'd have heard about it. Hell, the whole continent would have heard about it as whatsapp is widely used.
My Signal also doesn't do that.
econ
Since the whatsapp cliënt on desktop was replaced by a web wrapper it's even worse.
I don't even remember how the previous cliënt did it but my spelling suggestions are in English (as is the OS) but my chats are all in Dutch. Most words have a red underline.
It recently gave up downloading images. Turned out it was no longer allowed to write to its own folder. Not sure if this should be blamed on MS but from the (many) user perspective it just stopped working.
It keeps limited chat history which makes it inferior to IRC.
It badly wants you to use ai.
It has a spam channel where it promotes it self.
The phone app is decent tho
opem
Exactly, signal is decent on all the platforms, while mobile clients for whatsapp is somewhat tolerable if you ignore the constant AI push. But the web/desktop client is a pain in the ass to use.
Krasnol
I agree on all the content related things but your argument was about speed.
I use whatsapp web every day at work. The page. In my Firefox browser. It's almost constantly open. Never had any issues with that. The phone app just does what it's supposed to do and even on my Pixel6, it's just fast. I mean there is always faster but it's not even a second.
I use Whatsapp only because I have to. Privately, I prefer Signal. Works also great. Same with the windows app. Been using both since day 1. On a Pixel7Pro....
Paracompact
There are three people in this thread with this "personal" problem.
econ
It's the gold standard for bad support: pretend the user has a problem.
There once was this thread on a blog for a windows XP pirated edition. Someone commented that something small didn't work. They replied in less than a minute, that's terrible! 10 minutes later the version was incremented and a new reply said: Try the new version! After 30 minutes the bug fix was confirmed.
They weren't trying to be funny but it still makes me laugh how it compares to Microsoft, the 3 trillion software company.
opem
Not at all, telegram clients in every platform are much much faster than whatsapp, signal etc. on the same platform. Although, this is more visible on older devices and on poor network conditions, I clearly see a difference in my newer devices too.
Krasnol
Could you give me one for Android which is really fast? I'd try that out on a phone with whatsapp and signal.
Also, what does "fast" mean? Fast on start?
forgotmypw17
I'm confused about how it is that because it hasn't happened to you or anyone you know, it's my personal problem that closed-source software that I have no capability to modify is working slowly or failing to work at all?
cardiffspaceman
From USA, one mainly needs WhatsApp to chat with Latin Americans. Judging from the billboards I have seen in Argentina and Uruguay, there are a lot of Latin Americans getting WA free. So of course, why pay more?
maximilianthe1
>> why pay
Both WhatsUp & Telegram are completely free to use.
Telegram has premium features, but they are tangential to chatting & average use.
asdff
Probably still doesn't beat ripcord
thisislife2
The appeal of Telegram over Signal or WhatsApp is that it is not an American or BigTech service. (And, ofcourse, it's really good). Signal is funded by 2 rich American entrepreneurs who made their fortune when their services were acquired by Twitter (TextSecure / RedPhone) and Meta (WhatsApp), respectively. Whether it is indeed altruism behind this, you'll have to judge for yourself ...
KomoD
> Signal is funded by 2 rich American entrepreneurs who made their fortune when their services were acquired by Twitter (TextSecure / RedPhone) and Meta (WhatsApp), respectively. Whether it is indeed altruism behind this, you'll have to judge for yourself ...
To be fair, Telegram is funded by billionaire Pavel Durov, co-founder of VK, the most popular social network in Russia and one of the most visited websites in the world.
snailmailman
I’ve always been under the impression that Signal is for secure, private chats and group chats amongst friends and small groups. While telegram is often used more like discord or irc, with “secure” and “private” group chats that are extremely large and semi-public. “Invite only” but invites are handed out easily. Those chats are pretty obviously not as secure, as basically anybody can join them and decrypt the chat. On the surface its somewhat more secure than discord, where discord will be scanning all chat content.
jacobgold
Signal users who want to use it with their agents are running an unofficial extracted-and-patched `signal-cli` off GitHub. It's based on an archived official Signal repo and then patched for years by some random accounts. It looks incredibly untrustworthy.
Meanwhile Telegram has bot support and added features specifically for interacting w/agents. It's incredibly easy to write clients and work with it. No one should use it, and I never would, but you can see why it's winning.
Signal's lack of features (like an official Signal CLI) and bots (even attached to existing phone numbers and limited to the owner) is making people less secure than they could be. And unfortunately there are no great alternatives.
stavros
Wait, the open source cli of an E2E encrypted messenger seems untrustworthy, but the official API of a completely unencrypted messenger seems trustworthy?
I guess "we can definitely spy on your messages" is a lot more honest than "we are very unlikely to spy on your messages", if it turns out spying takes place.
johnnyApplePRNG
Apparently it's funded by your friendly neighbor.
I've used and promoted Signal for years and I've recently become suspicious of them and their funding as well after looking into starting my own encrypted communications app.
It's not cheap sending dozens or hundreds of megabytes of video files or whatever ... whenever the user feels like it, mind you ... with a monetization strategy that's literally simply hoping that donations will cover it?
That's insane.
darksim905
I was always under the impression Moxie who created Signal was well accepted in Information Security circles. But you bring up a good posit that running a service probably isn't cheap behind the scenes. Given that Signal is a unique identifier for anyone who uses it, maybe they have funding behind the scenes from Governments.
konart
Does Signal also have channels, groups etc?
victorbjorklund
1) more users 2) bots
Theodores
Telegram is important if you get your news from sources outside of the 'Anglo American empire'. People all over the planet use Telegram to curate their own news feeds and cultivate their own communities. This is generally done with a view to promote understanding rather than to spread misinformation. Telegram is great if you want the perspective of 'the other side' or 'both sides' if you 'trust but verify'.
Some people can get the Telegram app and never get to find any of these communities to never understand what Telegram is really about. Usually though, channel owners repost from other channels and promote channels they like. If you follow one channel then it should not be hard to find other channels in the way. You can also see what other people are subscribed to, depending on their privacy settings.
Importantly, there is no algorithm on a home page, urging you to sign up for promoted content.
As for 'where does the money come from', there are ways to subscribe to get a few more bells and whistles, with many that cultivate a community choosing to do so, in order to manage their channel(s). Few normal users pay up, and the app isn't paywalled or 'pay to post'.
There is a whole parallel universe of drug dealers and women that sell their bodies, all of which is a search away. I doubt these people are paying for premium accounts either.
IMHO only a modest amount of money is needed, sure, bandwidth has to be paid for, however, the app is already written and it is very good. I have no idea why the likes of Meta need tens of thousands of 'engineers' for optimising doom scrolling 'with AI'.
With Telegram, you could have 1% of 1M users paying $10 a year, meaning revenue of $100k a year. That would be okay if it was Pavel and his bro in his mum's basement with one server to pay for.
Scale this up to a billion and now you are talking. Since the app scales, are more staff needed? A few devs, but not that many managers since the founders are technical and therefore don't need the useless hordes of non-technical managers. Yet the money is now 1% of a billion. Multiply that by $10 a year, every year, and Pavel ends up asking finding his Bugatti on the moon.
This sounds manageable to me, no need to run in debt, have shareholders or be beholden to vested interests.
At Meta et al., there is a need to feed the greed of the stock market, pay billions in debt, do billions in share buybacks, do the AI nonsense, keep the advertisers happy, keep America's Greatest Ally happy, sign a secret deal with Five Eyes and the list goes on.
I have never met Pavel or the Meta guy, whatever his name is, but I suspect the former is getting more out of life than the latter.
cropcirclbureau
There's a lot of sketchy things about telegram but I'm confused, what exactly in this article seems sketchy to you?
LastTrain
A fee based service without site redundancy for one?
darksim905
wait ... when was it not sketchy? Did people not know the intentions behind it? Damn, wild. I get that there are some people that may use it as a communication medium for benign purposes, but it's filth all the way down.
kridsdale1
We aren’t all perpetually online people interested in gossip.
wronex
Are people still using Telegram? What is the upside compared to Signal?
crazybonkersai
Good ux, pleasant to use. A large community and lots of channels with all kind of content. Api is also great for spinning a bot for whatever purpose. I have for example a critical error bot for a production server running. If a critical error occurs, I get an immediate telegram message.
wronex
Sounds a lot like we might as well use Discord?
arkaic
Discord is annoying af to use, slow and bloated like the rest of them. Really it all comes down to UX when anyone asks why use Telegram.
gf000
How is that any better? Still no e2ee, proprietary, arguably worse UX for chat purposes.
MaxMatti
I have yet to find a messenger with a better UX than Telegram. And I have tried lots in countless attempts to get away from this badly encrypted russian App.
gf000
I agree, I personally really dislike discord - I do get that it works better for certain group sizes, but still.
Given that most of the clients are open-source, I wonder why signal or someone else didn't just change the "backend"
stavros
I really don't get the appeal. I mainly use Signal, though I also use Telegram a lot, and Telegram seems a lot more dodgy. I constantly get spam on Telegram even though I never get spam on Signal.
gf000
Well, I'm fairly sure that Telegram has substantially more users, so not getting spam is more likely due to that only.
vlian2088
Discord and every other platform is much more willing to censor speech, even ostensibly legal kind. Telegram's lack of proactive censorship is exactly why authoritarian cunts from Russia to France to American activists have an axe to grind with it.
St0n3d
If you’re ok with abandoning all security and privacy, then Telegram has some nice extra features that can come in handy.
Aachen
Calling/ringing works reliably. My gf usually calls via Telegram to notify me and then we call via Signal
Signal can't do live location sharing
Code blocks (let alone syntax highlighting) was the first thing my friend ran into after switching last week
Many more image features, like you can do yellow highlighting and not only ugly shades of olive, you can put a message above an image instead of below, you can mark an image as spoiler, you can send it uncompressed, much simpler UI for selecting multiple images, etc.
Jumping to a date was one of the first things I ran into
Web client lets you temporarily use someone else's computer without needing to install software
Making a Telegram bot takes 10 minutes if you just want a simple http callback and know roughly how it works. Signal has no support at all. Some third parties have made libraries but we keep having issues at work with our internal Signal bot to the point where I think we just gave up altogether now
Many people use Telegram to check if internet works because when opening the app it does a lightning quick check and it's very robust (I think it has no problem if DNS is down, for example) Looking at the title bar confirming that it works is much faster than trying to do a random web search
You can have memorable/pretty group URLs like telegram.me/OpenStreetMapOrg
Large files can be sent (also because of server-side storage not clogging up your phone, which is a double-edged sword of course)
Scheduled messages send at the right time when you're not online & the desktop app supports scheduled messages
As of like next week you can do moderation in groups in Signal. This has of course been a thing in Telegram since 10+ years. I don't know how we'd have run the OpenStreetMap group on Telegram without being able to delete spam messages
Chats take a lot less space. The Signal authors probably don't have many contacts that they use Signal with because you can view the message markers of 4 chats before having to scroll down. In Telegram, 9 fit in view. Similar on desktop but both numbers are bigger. Messages are also more space efficient in Telegram
Telegram so so so much faster than Signal's web, ahem, electron client
The only advantage of Signal that comes to mind is the intangible property of privacy (and maybe local back-ups, so data availability, but then Signal doesn't provide software to view your backup data so is it really a backup if you can't test it and they can lock you out of the app?). I'm nevertheless switching everything over to Signal but it's often very hard to explain to people why they should give all this up for encryption. My family doesn't use all the advanced features but some techy friends do
Aachen
Hah, literally seconds after the edit window ran out, I thought of an advantage of Signal's, edited it in, and HN rejected it due to post age. It is: Signal lets you add any emoji reaction you want without paying for premium
bflesch
Beautiful analysis. It really looks like the country distribution [1] follows the geographical split between five eyes intelligence services, and maybe a small slice for France after they imprisoned the Telegram CEO [2] in order to take over data ownership from russia.
[1] https://dev.moe/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/image-14.png
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...
DOGMATICA
i'm far from an authority on content delivery or whatever, but the first thing I thought of was what a bizarre way to setup your infrastructure!
Ghoelian
idk, they probably tried to get people on DC's as close to their location as possible. Using your phone number's country code might seem like a good way to do this at first, and they probably didn't give it much more thought before building the whole thing on this idea.
bwunkhaus
I've never listened about that but also im not a big telegram user... but that completely explains why mine is so slow.... I'm on latam and my account is on singapur..
dgroshev
More mysteries of Telegram Data Centres: https://istories.media/en/stories/2025/06/10/telegram-fsb/
(and a follow-up: https://istories.media/en/news/2025/06/10/telegram-responds-... )
KomoD
I remember reading about it, but I didn't know they had responded. Thanks.
overallduka
Good story, I yet believe the guy is trying to do the right thing. In the lex Friedman podcast he talks about banning extremist channels in both sides always, the story focus more on the Nalvani's block, but accordingly him he also bans other sides depending on the content. I do follow a number of Telegram channels about the Ukraine war, and the pro Ukraine channels are there together with pro Russian channels.
dgroshev
Of course he would say that. Even besides the fallaciousness of this argument (there is no equivalence between an aggressor and a victim), Pavel Durov is completely untrustworthy.
There is product stuff, like misleading claims about Telegram's encryption and comparisons to Signal. In reality, for the vast majority of chats they have plaintext, unlike Signal.
There are more subtle positioning claims. Durov made a huge deal of his "exile", but I saw Telegram's office in St Petersburg with my own two eyes a year after Durov "fled the country". It definitely wasn't shut. There were even local news of Pavel assaulting a guy in St Petersburg for trying to make a photo of him a couple years later.
And then there are just completely unnecessary lifestyle claims. He said multiple times how he doesn't take any "pills" or medications. It only takes a minute to find his old photos. Male pattern baldness doesn't stop progressing without DHT suppression, and last time I checked, finasteride comes in pills. I don't understand why would he make misleading statements about something so visible, but it doesn't make him any more trustworthy.
vvpan
It's a great an telling investigation. Dropped in to share it as well. Telegram deserves no trust from us.
hhh
something smells suspicious about this kind of data routing
overallduka
The Lex Fridman podcast episode with Pavel Durov is worth listening to. Their servers are built to be very secure — of course, it would be different for others, and they use some clever tricks
Aachen
Very secure but not investing in rolling out this mtproto they went through so much trouble to invent, nor making it usable by implementing device sync or all the other features normal chats have. Why does it smell like fish all of a sudden?
dewey
That has "military grade encryption" vibes.
dubbel
The article is from May 2022, just fyi.
ameliaquining
I think it was reposted today because https://core.telegram.org/bots/serverless was just announced, which prompted some curiosity on HN about Telegram's architecture (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48918534). But yes, the title should be updated to indicate this.
Just like DC5 is often down to the discontent of Chinese users, DC2 is the one serving all Russian and Ukrainian users, so in the more technical Russian-speaking communities "dc2 down" is also a pretty common saying