[mattnguyen]

A growing number of people and organizations are starting to choose Telegram over Slack. This became prevalent in the blockchain space where pretty much everyone prefers Telegram to other messaging apps. OTC brokers, quant funds, and the largest exchanges use Telegram in some capacity, some almost exclusively.

Since the official Telegram clients are open source and the org encourages open competition between third party clients, it's now possible to build a Slack-like experience with workspaces, folders, integrations, and hot keys. Telefuel.com is one example.

As Telegram launches their $1.7bn blockchain by eoy, it'll be interesting to see how they develop their crypto-economy. There seems to be a bit of development activity in various Telegram groups, but there's still a cloud of secrecy about the whole thing.

Disclosure - I cofounded Telefuel.

[ngrilly]

This is very interesting! I'd be happy to try.

My main pain points with Telegram are:

- No way to structure a group into sub-groups

- No way to comment on a specific post without polluting the whole timeline (the new DiscussionBot is the beginning of a solution to this problem)

- No way to "like" a specific comment without adding another message to the group (some discussions are mostly a stream of yes and +1)

- No way to bookmark/star messages and easily find them later (apart the save mechanism which is a bit different)

It looks like Telefuel aims to solve them?

[AVTizzle]

Hi Nick! Received your invite request! Looking forward to speaking with you this week :)

- Yes, we're bringing workspaces & chat folders to Telegram (https://cl.ly/9d0ac52b55cf) - Not something we're addressing yet - Not something we're addressing yet - Something we can address :)

Will talk more next week!

[genroku]

Would be interesting if Telegram can merge with Keybase for organizations and teams platform to compete with Slack.

[saagarjha]

> Since the official Telegram clients are open source

They're not really all that open.

[emptysongglass]

This statement is factually wrong. The server code is not open source but the clients are fully open.

[dillondoyle]

How can finance firms use telegram? aren't there strict compliance laws which require logging of messages - e.g. why Bloomberg chat is popular?

Or maybe that's the point... but seems short sighted

[doomrobo]

Couldn't a bot do logging?

[karlmcguire]

Do you have a source for their blockchain being launched EOY?

I've been following their blockchain project since the whitepaper, and they've been quietly missing their launch goals by many quarters...

I think Telegram has a unique position to combat Facebook's Libra.

[mattnguyen]

Good question. I don't have any sources on hand, but I've heard whispers that they should launch by end of Oct. We'll see where they land then.

I haven't looked into it too deeply except what they've released here: https://test.ton.org/download.html