I don’t know why Telegram users keep making excuses for that platform.
Honestly? Because the others are just so bad.
Element has an extremely clunky UX and uses Electron. The other Matrix app implementations are incomplete buggy messes.
Signal can’t sync old messages to the desktop, uses a messy Electron interface, and lacks a bunch of features/polish I’ve come to expect.
Discord doesn’t even pay lip service to privacy and uses a similarly doesn’t invest in native apps.
Threema has been saying that cross-platform/multi-device connectivity is coming for like 2+ years and has had nothing but the most minor of unexciting features added.
WhatsApp is run by Meta, has a crappy desktop experience, and has had several serious security vulnerabilities.
Jami is … extremely glitchy.
Session is basically Signal backed by a Crypto platform.
If someone took Telegram’s UX and feature set and paired that with Signal’s approach of “everything is encrypted”, that would be a winner. I kinda hope someday Telegram just does that and moves everything to E2EE. When Telegram was launched E2EE for group chats/at scale wasn’t really a thing … now it’s not nearly as novel but nobody has deployed E2EE with a feature set like Telegram’s.
It’s not nothing if Telegram makes people believe they only share their location in a limited manner, but instead broadcast it to the whole world.
That’s not even what happens by the way. It’s just that you can spoof a device into random locations and eventually figure out where someone is.