Collaborating with Xitter is not the most distasteful thing Telegram has done. Its marketing model has been to consistently lie to people about being encrypted when that's only true in very limited cases. It has also catered to criminals by attempting to make it difficult to comply with legal demands for information, while holding that information for its own purposes.

Signal, on the other hand is always encrypted and does its best to hold as little information about users as possible.

Also I don’t think it’s worth the effort to teach my parents yet another messaging app, like signal.

What is there to learn? Every popular messaging app has pretty much the same UI.

Switch to Signal. It's not like there's anything to learn, the UI isn't all that different from WhatsApp

there's no learning curve with Signal, it's almost exactly like whatsapp.

Here’s another comment endorsing Signal.

https://signal.org/

Telegram was developed by Russians and HQ is in United Arab Emirates. They have always been sketchy af.

I personally avoid telegram for anything sensitive or personal. Because there is no end to end encryption. You should move to Signal.

I really distrust telegram. There are some many dark patterns around it and the server is closed source so I'd say the distrust is very well deserved.

Also I don’t think it’s worth the effort to teach my parents yet another messaging app, like signal.

My friend, just set up Signal on their phones, put it in place of the Telegram app and watch them not even notice anything changed.

If you get rid of Telegran, at least you'd only have one shitty messenger instead of two.

Threema. And don’t forget, real privacy and security, with centralized services, is never free. The app is tested by third party and is open source. And, you don’t have to share your phone number, unlike with Signal.

I downloaded telegram about a year ago when I first heard about it. There is a feature to find and talk to people in the same area as me. It was all just escorts with nudes as their profile pics. I'm honestly surprised Google and Apple allowed it on their stores.

If you're familiar in any capacity with self hosted tech. Id suggest checking out matrix servers. I setup one for family and friends a few months back. Currently it's only running on a 2 core 8 gig ram vps with around 15 regular users, and ticks over fine. It's routinely used as a phone chat client like WhatsApp, as well as for voice channels instead of discord.

You can utilise multiple different clients; but I would suggest element, as they're the closest to WhatsApp, and therefore the easiest for people to adopt. (Afaik, it's the only matrix client with voice & video call support too).

Matrix servers run on the concept of decentralised federated servers, with the idea that as the technology expands, admins can federate with other matrix servers and allow cross communication (in much the same way the fediverse works).

You could use Delta Chat if you wanted...