In the last few years I started to use Telegram as my main messenger, beside good old SMS/e-mail.
I never used WhatsApp as I try to stay away from the Facebook/Meta/… ecosystem.
Telegram seemed like a good choice as a lot of people I know are there and we e.g. mirror our KDE channels often to Telegram for better outreach, too. And all old messengers like ICQ more or less were abandoned by everybody I know including myself ;=)
Unfortunately, during the current pandemic, I met more and more people that went down into the rabbit hole thanks to totally uncontrolled Telegram groups.
Yes, you can say: this is free speech.
It is.
But on the other side, I think it can’t really be tolerated that people start to live in some parallel universe that completely ignores any science/laws/facts of the real world.
Telegram isn’t interested in even deleting the most obvious lies or hate speech that is spread in masses there. Most other platforms at least try to do so. At least this is the impression I came to in the last few months.
I talked with people in person that live in such state of denial and I can’t any longer use some application/network/service that encourages the spreading of such stuff.
Therefore I abandoned my Telegram account this week.
If you want to stay in touch with me via some messenger and not plain good e-mail, I use Signal now, at least this seems to be not as awful as Telegram looks for me now.
My Signal account is: +49 176 235 467 98
I will participate in the KDE & Kate related channels via Matrix, e.g. thanks to NeoChat and other free clients ;=) Should have started to use that since long anyways, after I somehow went away from IRC years ago.
Therefore, if you fail to contact me via Telegram, that is no accident, that is intended, sorry if that might be inconvenient.