Help! I’m Drowning (in Telegram Messages)

We need a better official messenger for Web3

Somehow along the way of growing the Web3 ecosystem, we collectively settled on Telegram as our unofficially official messenger. And this was a huge mistake. 

I’ve discussed this with friends, colleagues and teammates. We’re all drowning in Telegram messages and if we are ever so lucky to clear our chats and answer every important message, this bliss would only last for a few minutes. 

My personal Telegram inbox causes me existential dread and makes me dream of ditching this life to become a tomato farmer in Italy. Do they really grow tomatoes in Italy? I don’t know - but I’ll figure it out. The one thing I’ll never figure out is how to keep my Telegram organized and up to date. 

Here are the things that Telegram should improve in order to become usable. 

Unifying the desktop and mobile apps 

Currently, the desktop and mobile Telegram apps have the same look and feel… but they’re not the same. There’s a bunch of things that you can’t do on desktop, or do differently on mobile, and frankly, this drives me crazy. 

While the mobile app is superior to the desktop one, I find it a nuisance to switch between my phone and my laptop when I’m at work.

Organizing unread messages 

Unlike Slack, Discord or other messengers, Telegram does not prioritize unread messages. This means that it leaves unread threads mixed with the read ones, and sometimes you need to scroll for hours to find the chat you need. 

This is making my life hell and I hate it with passion. 

I recently discovered the option to automatically put all unread messages into an “Unread” folder, which is making things a bit better but it’s still bad to open your home feed and see a mix of read and unread chats. 

Generally, Telegram is really bad for managing important conversations and letting users group them separately - and if they fix this, it would be a game changer for the app. They’ve added a “Pin” option but it doesn’t really work too well for me. Slack has spoiled me. 

Organizing conversations into folders 

There is the option to organize conversations into folders and that’s definitely handy. However, once you have folders activated on mobile, you lose the possibility to swipe left on chats and delete them. 

How many messages a day do I delete, you may ask? With the amount of spam going on on Telegram, hundreds of chats daily. 

Group administration

Managing a group on Telegram is the opposite of intuitive. Again, there are multiple differences in doing that on desktop and on mobile.

Then there’s group admins, and a group owner. An admin can have full rights over the group but only the owner can assign and kick out admins. Ownership can be transferred but it takes 7 days if you’ve never set a password on the app. 

Now imagine the following situation. Person A creates a group chat. A few weeks later, Person A leaves the company, burns his Telegram account and moves on with their life. In the meantime, Person B is fired from the company and needs to be removed from that group chat. Only Person A can do that but we all know they can’t any more. The only option is to create a new chat, move the conversation there and lose the history from the initial group. Argh! 

Channels vs. private groups

To this day, I can’t explain why we need public groups and channels. At this point I’ve figured out that channels are essentially read-only groups but we could just as easily use group-groups to achieve the same. 

So far in my 6+ years as a blockchain marketer, I fail to see the benefit of channels. 

Community management options 

I find that the community management options Telegram offers are lacking. Compare Telegram to Discord for example, and you will see that Discord offers much more granular community management. It makes it much easier for admins and chat moderators to set rules for community members, to screen for bots, to avoid unwanted language, etc. 

Installing and managing bots for your community on platforms like Discord is also much easier than on Telegram. 

Preserving privacy 

I’m being added to at least two scammy Telegram groups a day, every day. This means that at least once a day I need to go in, leave these groups and report them as spam. 

Yes, I could limit who can add me to such groups but that would mean that people I know but are not in my contacts cannot add me to group chats. And I use these group chats for intros and important work conversations. 

General performance

Telegram, and the desktop app for MacOS in particular, is buggy as fuck. I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve had to restart the app in order to use it. 

Quite often the app stops refreshing and doesn’t show notifications for new messages. Only after you restart, it starts updating. The thing is, I’m not used to restarting the apps I use because, you know, it’s not 1998. 

Typing emojis 

I know, I’m being petty and this is really unimportant in the grand scheme of things. But I hate it that typing emojis doesn’t convert them into actual emojis! 

I’m a millennial. I need my emojis to make sure I’m conveying the right tone of voice. I don’t want to open a separate window, choose whether I want an emoji or a sticker, then click it to do so. 

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I think it’s time that all of us in the blockchain space said “Enough is enough!” and demanded that the Telegram team worked on improving the app’s UX for all of our sakes. Are you with me?