I’ve been using Telegram for about 10 years, and it’s one of the few products that has consistently felt great the entire time. It’s fast everywhere: backend, mobile app, desktop app, all of it. Everything just works. Its sync is out of this world—fluid, fast, and seamless across devices. You can use it on your phone, then move to your PC or laptop and continue instantly without friction. Unlimited message history and file storage are fantastic, and the bot platform is absurdly powerful. It’s boring in the best way, which is exactly what you want from a channel for interacting with your agents everywhere.

Back in the day, when I used to play pokemon go, there was a small local community and we would struggle to decide where to meet up for the daily raids because people would basically not respond (so as t not commit), or not know which gym each other meant exactly, nor give live updates when people moved around, etc. etc.

Then I joined a group from a bigger city where I commuted for work. They had a telegram group chat with two "channels", one for talking, one for bot posts. The telegram bot could be sent a single screenshot of a raid, and it would use OCR to automatically generate an interactive UI for that raid for everyone to see, with all the relevant info, and it would also clear itself up when the raid is no longer relevant. You could press buttons to say you were going, that you MAYBE were going, if you were late, and if you already started/done it, all in single clicks. Tons of options, tons of information, all live updated.

I was bedazzled. That feature singlehandedly removed all attrition from urban social gaming. And it was entirely grassroots. It made me try out making my own telegram bots, and yeah, you basically have the power to make a little app in chat form, even some that feel like CLI commands.

It's been OVER HALF A DECADE and I have yet to see a single other chat application have that degree of freedom where it comes to applications and bots. Some like discord even did whole ass 100% reworks of their bot AP to support the likes of slash commands, and still fall short. And there's none worse than Teams. Teams hates you. Teams spent the prior 2 years before this one basically pointing a gun to our heads telling us they were removing webhooks and pushing back on it whenever they repeatedly get told that's the most insane and dogshit idea ever. And they still did it. There's just no spark in Teams UX. No self-respect. It's a soulless product made entirely as a dumping place of "synergy" with other M$ products. It's reciprocal, I hate it too.

Oh and my local group never go into telegram because they didn't want a new app. It died, but I still kept playing after work without problem. It makes me wonder how fast Teams would die if it wasn't proped up by 365 and Azure subscriptions.

I feel the opposite. I'm on Teams all day at work and have reluctantly opened Telegram recently to try a Claw despite having an account for years.

I've been surprised how little support there has been for Teams in the whole AI ecosystem. It seems all developers assume that the whole world is at startups working on Slack when most businesses are on Microsoft 365.

My employer keeps Slack so locked down it is not really possible to use anything useful with it anyway…

Odious is one of the most reserved words you could use to describe Telegram, which is primarily a host for scams that the influencers and other bottom feeders aren't allowed to monetize on the big social networks.