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.
> Since the official Telegram clients are open source
They're not really all that open.
This statement is factually wrong. The server code is not open source but the clients are fully open.
The clients aren’t “fully open”, since their source doesn’t match the binaries that Telegram distributes.
That’s not true at all.
All clients are fully open source, they believe it to be a core requirement for formal verification.
You could make the argument about the play store distributed binary being “unverified”, but that applies to any program that’s distributed in binary form. You never know what additions are made.
FWIW the f-droid version is compiled entirely from source with no binary blobs at all and is still the same client.
You’re not helping anyone by spreading FUD.
> All clients are fully open source
They’re literally not. The distributed apps update every couple of weeks or even more often while the source they push lags months behind, if it’s even what’s being used to build those binaries.
I wrote the peertube client Throium which is also available on f-droid [3]. When I Tag a new release on github, f-droid will build the package automatically and publish it the next day. I do not build the packages for f-droid.
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.telegram.messenger/