Also, not a single one of those 300m Teams users wants to spend another minute there. Whereas people find Telegram useful and not odious.

I think it might because telegram integration it's just easy to do, I don't use telegram for actually messaging, I use it just to deploy my bots, it's a simple way to build simple tools, in a few lines you can get something working, you can have commands that work like buttons, accept images, respond with images and don't need anything else than your telegram account

Telegram's bot API is literally one of the friendliest APIs (of any kind) I've ever seen. It's the first thing I reach for when server-to-mobile notifications are concerned.

It's just as easy to set up as ntfy.sh, except that it doesn't break every other week on iOS.

Spend 5 minutes looking up how to make a chat bot and be amazed how Telegram is really the only option. I was dumbfounded when rolling my own agent.

iMessage is proprietary. WhatsApp charges you. Unofficial APIs exist, sure, but not my cup of tea.

Then you have Discord or Slack, which are pretty heavyweight when all you want is a simple chat interface.

Telegram makes it SO easy. Bots are first class resources on Telegram and they make them so easy to use.

It's not even funny how a multibillion-dollar company with thousands of employees having unlimited access to the "world's best coding models" lags behind a small one-man [1] open source project that already had multiple plugins for the same feature [2] for months.

Pi already has 700+ third-party packages [2] for various purposes of various quality. But it doesn't matter, since creating a new working Pi extension to suit your needs is just a prompt away, and you don't even have to restart your coding session.

[1] Pi Coding Agent https://pi.dev [2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@e9n/pi-channels [3] https://pi.dev/packages

Apples and oranges comparison, one is a messaging app, the other two are used for communication and collaboration across teams in a workspace. I have worked in 5+ companies who used either Slack and Teams, none used Telegram for any comms.

Telegram is 'bot friendly' since the beginning, gaining a lot of users with crypto boom a decade ago with coin drops and things like that, so it is very good to develop for, but I have your initial sentiment first - shame this hasn't launched with tools people actually use for work.

And no, Discord is not used for that either.

Surprisingly large number of businesses run on whatsapp, as a consultant in Asia it's prob around half the businesses I've worked with prefer it over teams/slack. If Meta had been sensible about API access Telegram wouldn't have even got a foothold.

Telegram has the best programmatic integration. Trivial to get working. You can be up and running in minutes. I use it to talk to a claw-style agent and it's truly unbelievable what you get for free.

Twitter is shockingly irrelevant given how much it gets mentioned.

One issue is that 95% of the integrations will be fine with the default configuration. The others including some with high profit potential will have weird configs that will frustrate your customers the first time they try if not well tested/documented. It's better to take time and get it right. Enterprise customers love piloting and spending time, so best to approach that the right way too. Going with less complex options, that arguably have better APIs, makes it easier to develop your core product too and get real feedback from users.

Telegram is more popular among "normal people", and it also has a laissez-faire attitude towards bots and bot development. Making a bot that you, or even other people, could add to their contact list and use is pretty easy.

It's wild, but "people who want to build and run their own one-off bot for something like home automation" are almost treated by Telegram like first class citizens.

A lot of such cases. Claude itself had (has?) fewer users than Perplexity, let alone Meta AI, Gemini or ChatGPT

Maybe most of users of anthropic are individual developers over employee in tech company.

I'm really happy that they choose telegram and discord.

Telegram has a major issue with bots and bad actors though. They paywalled privacy features making it truly a terrible experience for users. 3-10 per day random messaging you.