I used to not think it was sheer stupidity, but when he's literally challenging his chief rival to measure up penises on a public forum, I think it is, indeed, sheer stupidity.

I am very similar and did not realize before you said it, that I'm essentially just replacing the early days of educational TV when TLC, History Channel, Discovery, etc. were all showing educational/interesting content.

I disagree on telegram. It’s never been more relevant. Both Russian and Ukrainians post on them real time involving the war. You could follow the failed coup on Wagner via telegram.

That's because of the user base, no other reason. And you could follow not that much.

Conceptually, I think there’s a huge need for a telegram like service that’s more or less free for all parties to broadcast via channels. Obviously there are downsides, but I’d argue the ability to broadcast revolutions real time is worth it.

We are on one of such services now, FFS.

The problem is telegram itself isn’t really trustworthy given the Russia connection

You don't have to think that far to say it's not trustworthy. Just read about its protocol and how its creators are as people.

I haven’t used Telegram in ages. Now I think they may have reset my username. And I can’t reset it because it insists it’s taken.

Oh well. It’s just another service full of crazy.

Living in Russia, I had some idea who Durov is from his interviews and reputation and actions, before Telegram when he was in control of VKontakte too, so I never was a Telegram advocate.

Also that mtproto is a load of hacky crap is something people were writing whole articles about from the very beginning, and their arguments that their IM is "secure" were also quite typical for frauds.

But, still, at some point it was usable. EDIT: And there was hope for alternative clients pleasant to use.

I thoguht it was more like WhatsApp with extra security?

About the opposite, WhatsApp is Telegram with extra security. Telegram is not secure at all. It's not even E2E for anything but "secure chats" which its desktop client doesn't have.

So not social media at all - just a messenger client.

In channels and group chats it has reactions similar to social media and used as such. Channels are like blogs - they consist of posts by the channel's authors with a link to comments. Channels and group chats can be private or public. Private ones you can't search for and can join if somebody adds you.

You don't have any kind of news feed, yes. But in general it's pretty close to social media in experience.

Creating a channel and posting something there is similar to your page in Facebook, just optional. You can add the link to it in your profile description so that people could go there after clicking at your avatar pic in a group chat, for example.

In fact it is being used like social media. Just no news feed and no friends (contacts are rather similar to that anyway).

EDIT: Describing it made me realize that I'm probably unfair to Durov. If from VK the most important things he'd remove were friends and news feeds, then he might actually be not such a bad person. It's just that I want a p2p messenger\social network with user directory, like old Skype, but completely p2p. It wouldn't become worse if it had Telegram-like channels functionality, just first things first.