Just like DC5 is often down to the discontent of Chinese users, DC2 is the one serving all Russian and Ukrainian users, so in the more technical Russian-speaking communities &quot;dc2 down&quot; is also a pretty common saying

wait ... when was it not sketchy? Did people not know the intentions behind it? Damn, wild. I get that there are some people that may use it as a communication medium for benign purposes, but it&#x27;s filth all the way down.

- Telegram has exemplary fast, native clients on most platforms I’ve used it on- Cat stickers- Did I mention it has the best native clients out of all the messaging apps? It boggles the mind why other companies can’t get this done.

The appeal of Telegram over Signal or WhatsApp is that it is not an American or BigTech service. (And, ofcourse, it&#x27;s really good). Signal is funded by 2 rich American entrepreneurs who made their fortune when their services were acquired by Twitter (TextSecure &#x2F; RedPhone) and Meta (WhatsApp), respectively. Whether it is indeed altruism behind this, you&#x27;ll have to judge for yourself ...

I’ve always been under the impression that Signal is for secure, private chats and group chats amongst friends and small groups. While telegram is often used more like discord or irc, with “secure” and “private” group chats that are extremely large and semi-public. “Invite only” but invites are handed out easily. Those chats are pretty obviously not as secure, as basically anybody can join them and decrypt the chat. On the surface its somewhat more secure than discord, where discord will be scanning all chat content.

Apparently it&#x27;s funded by your friendly neighbor.I&#x27;ve used and promoted Signal for years and I&#x27;ve recently become suspicious of them and their funding as well after looking into starting my own encrypted communications app.It&#x27;s not cheap sending dozens or hundreds of megabytes of video files or whatever ... whenever the user feels like it, mind you ... with a monetization strategy that&#x27;s literally simply hoping that donations will cover it?That&#x27;s insane.

Signal users who want to use it with their agents are running an unofficial extracted-and-patched `signal-cli` off GitHub. It&#x27;s based on an archived official Signal repo and then patched for years by some random accounts. It looks incredibly untrustworthy.Meanwhile Telegram has bot support and added features specifically for interacting w&#x2F;agents. It&#x27;s incredibly easy to write clients and work with it. No one should use it, and I never would, but you can see why it&#x27;s winning.Signal&#x27;s lack of features (like an official Signal CLI) and bots (even attached to existing phone numbers and limited to the owner) is making people less secure than they could be. And unfortunately there are no great alternatives.

Telegram is important if you get your news from sources outside of the &#x27;Anglo American empire&#x27;. People all over the planet use Telegram to curate their own news feeds and cultivate their own communities. This is generally done with a view to promote understanding rather than to spread misinformation. Telegram is great if you want the perspective of &#x27;the other side&#x27; or &#x27;both sides&#x27; if you &#x27;trust but verify&#x27;.Some people can get the Telegram app and never get to find any of these communities to never understand what Telegram is really about. Usually though, channel owners repost from other channels and promote channels they like. If you follow one channel then it should not be hard to find other channels in the way. You can also see what other people are subscribed to, depending on their privacy settings.Importantly, there is no algorithm on a home page, urging you to sign up for promoted content.As for &#x27;where does the money come from&#x27;, there are ways to subscribe to get a few more bells and whistles, with many that cultivate a community choosing to do so, in order to manage their channel(s). Few normal users pay up, and the app isn&#x27;t paywalled or &#x27;pay to post&#x27;.There is a whole parallel universe of drug dealers and women that sell their bodies, all of which is a search away. I doubt these people are paying for premium accounts either.IMHO only a modest amount of money is needed, sure, bandwidth has to be paid for, however, the app is already written and it is very good. I have no idea why the likes of Meta need tens of thousands of &#x27;engineers&#x27; for optimising doom scrolling &#x27;with AI&#x27;.With Telegram, you could have 1% of 1M users paying $10 a year, meaning revenue of $100k a year. That would be okay if it was Pavel and his bro in his mum&#x27;s basement with one server to pay for.Scale this up to a billion and now you are talking. Since the app scales, are more staff needed? A few devs, but not that many managers since the founders are technical and therefore don&#x27;t need the useless hordes of non-technical managers. Yet the money is now 1% of a billion. Multiply that by $10 a year, every year, and Pavel ends up asking finding his Bugatti on the moon.This sounds manageable to me, no need to run in debt, have shareholders or be beholden to vested interests.At Meta et al., there is a need to feed the greed of the stock market, pay billions in debt, do billions in share buybacks, do the AI nonsense, keep the advertisers happy, keep America&#x27;s Greatest Ally happy, sign a secret deal with Five Eyes and the list goes on.I have never met Pavel or the Meta guy, whatever his name is, but I suspect the former is getting more out of life than the latter.

Agreed. I don’t see the appeal compared to Signal. Although, Signal is also sketchy with an operating cost in the tens of millions of dollars per year. Where does the money come from?

A fee based service without site redundancy for one?

There&#x27;s a lot of sketchy things about telegram but I&#x27;m confused, what exactly in this article seems sketchy to you?

The more I learn about telegram, the sketchier it seems.

As a tangential niche-tourism shoutout: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.telcomhistory.org&#x2F;ConnectionsSeattle.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.telcomhistory.org&#x2F;ConnectionsSeattle.html</a>Granted, most of it is a bit newer than the heyday of telegrams, but there&#x27;s a little bit of overlap.

You may have already read it, but portions of this sprawling (and very very good) essay by Neal Stephenson get into the topic: 
Mother Earth Mother Board - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;1996&#x2F;12&#x2F;ffglass&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;1996&#x2F;12&#x2F;ffglass&#x2F;</a>

For a hot second there I was really excited to learn about historical telegram &quot;data centers&quot;.It&#x27;s a capital T.

The DC3 gap is interesting. I wonder whether they deprecated it because the other EU server had plenty of capacity, or still keep it but only for... &quot;special&quot; account data flow.Also, it looks like it&#x27;s easy enough to ID your DC on their API, though I haven&#x27;t tried it yet (more of a Matrix Stan personally):
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;core.telegram.org&#x2F;method&#x2F;help.getConfig" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;core.telegram.org&#x2F;method&#x2F;help.getConfig</a>

On the contrary, Big tech famously has plenty of data centers on the west coast:• Quincy, WA (Microsoft)• The Dalles, Oregon (Google)• Prineville, Oregon (Facebook, Apple)• Hillsboro, Oregon (Cloudflare, others)• Boardman, Oregon (AWS)

Most of big tech&#x27;s major data centers are in Loudoun County, VA on the east coast not the west coast. It&#x27;s centrally located to be great latency for the east coast and OK latency for west coast and Europe. Plus a friendly regulatory environment and lots of existing DCs (AWS us-east-1, Azure East US 1&#x2F;2)If you&#x27;re feeling any better latency on the west coast it&#x27;s more likely to be placebo than real.

DC in Miami, explains why Telegram app is snappy fast for me. I notice similar speed improvement with Meta and other big tech apps when I&#x27;m on the west coast. I guess latency matters when your app is making tons of requests.

DC2 is the first connection point of all MTProto clients.Any DC may refuse a request and force the client to switch DC.Profile URL doesn&#x27;t show where messages&#x2F;chats&#x2F;channels are stored, as telegram has two dedicated DCs mostly for media. The rest DCs allow media with bandwidth being throttled.

Calling&#x2F;ringing works reliably. My gf usually calls via Telegram to notify me and then we call via Signal<pre><code> Code formatting was the first thing my friend ran into after switching last week
</code></pre>
In general, formatting on Telegram is a lot more versatile with &gt;quote blocks that show up formatted as quotes and inline links without needing to have a giant message because of the giant URLMany more image features, like you can do yellow highlighting and not only ugly shades of olive, you can put a message above an image instead of below, you can mark an image as spoiler, you can send it uncompressed, etc.Jumping to a date was one of the first things I ran intoWeb client lets you temporarily use someone else&#x27;s computer without needing to install softwareMaking a Telegram bot takes 10 minutes if you just want a simple http callback and know roughly how it works. Signal has no support at all. Some third parties have made libraries but we keep having issues at work with our internal Signal bot to the point where I think we just gave up altogether nowMany people use Telegram to check if internet works because when opening the app it does a lightning quick check and it&#x27;s very robust (I think it has no problem if DNS is down, for example)
Much faster than trying to do a random web searchYou can have memorable&#x2F;pretty group URLs like telegram.me&#x2F;OpenStreetMapOrgLarge files can be sentScheduled messages send at the right time when you&#x27;re not online &amp; the desktop app supports scheduled messagesChats take a lot less space. The Signal authors probably don&#x27;t have many contacts that they use Signal with because you can view the message markers of 4 chats before having to scroll down. In Telegram 9 fit in view. Similar on desktop but both numbers are bigger. Messages are also more space efficient in TelegramTelegram so so so much faster than Signal&#x27;s web, ahem, electron clientLiterally the only advantage of Signal is the intangible property of privacy. I&#x27;m nevertheless switching everything over to Signal but it&#x27;s often very hard to explain to people why they should give all this up for encryption. My family doesn&#x27;t use all the advanced features but some techy friends do

Sounds a lot like we might as well use Discord?

Good ux, pleasant to use. A large community and lots of channels with all kind of content. Api is also great for spinning a bot for whatever purpose. I have for example a critical error bot for a production server running. If a critical error occurs, I get an immediate telegram message.

If you’re ok with abandoning all security and privacy, then Telegram has some nice extra features that can come in handy.

Are people still using Telegram? What is the upside compared to Signal?

It makes sense: European users are assigned to EU data center, and Chinese to the one closer to them. The &quot;custom code&quot; should not be complicated, just a map of country to DC.You are suggesting to develop a compicated solution (spend money) when current simple one is working ok without any elections.

If you&#x27;ve ever actually tried to implement server clustering you quickly find there&#x27;s no magic cloud, except in specific cases like blockchains. A privately operated cluster system is mostly about directing requests to the correct server out of a finite set of servers.

From what I have read, they only have ~30 employees. They&#x27;re not exactly onboarding a lot of new people here.

This strikes me as a huge amount of custom code and technical debt. Every new software dev probably has to learn this.Why not a sticky master election per user, and have no special data centers?

What does heavily encrypted even mean? Fully encrypted? Slightly encrypted? Encrypted enough to call it “heavily encrypted” but not enough to be protected from whoever is interested?

They do not claim that. They do claim that they store specifically encryption keys in several data centers in different jurisdictions. Here is the exact quote: &quot;All data is stored heavily encrypted and the encryption keys in each case are stored in several other data centers in different jurisdictions&quot;. So only keys are distributed.

The reason it&#x27;s in Singapore is that Telegram can&#x27;t operate in China, and Singapore-washing is the closest thing to doing it. A ton of VPNs and other services targeting mainland users but not allowed in the mainland are hosted there, it&#x27;s a huge hub for companies and networks.

It&#x27;s more about the fact that five eyes intelligence services prefer to officially spy on each other&#x27;s countries so they don&#x27;t have to answer to their respective bureaucrats. They prefer plausible deniability.Something like this:<pre><code> DC1 politically belongs to UK which &quot;spies&quot; on CA&#x2F;US but physical servers are located in US so US ultimately retains control.

 DC2 politically belongs to France which &quot;spies&quot; on RUS&#x2F;UKR&#x2F;DE but physical servers are located in NL (e.g. in UK because one wouldn&#x27;t be able to spot difference in ping). Maybe it&#x27;s politically owned by UK&#x2F;NZ or UK&#x2F;AUS because France can&#x27;t be publicly caught spying on Germany. But France wouldn&#x27;t risk public arrest of Telegram CEO and the spectacle with russia if there is nothing to gain.

 DC4 politically belongs to USA which &quot;spies&quot; on UK&#x2F;Israel but physical servers are in NL&#x2F;UK

 DC5 politically belongs to UK&#x2F;USA which &quot;spies&quot; on AUS&#x2F;China&#x2F;India but physical servers are in Singapore (e.g. former UK colony)

</code></pre>
I love mentioning the UK in these kind of discussions because the pushback is biggest every time the Crown is mentioned, and ultimately US&#x2F;CA&#x2F;NZ&#x2F;AUS are all colonies under the King.Really cool to see realpolitik mapped out like this. It also highlights the problem of metadata with these kind of topics.

They claim that they store user data on different servers in different jurisdictions so it becomes more difficult for authorities to gain access [1]. Maybe that&#x27;s true and it has something to do with these DCs that seem to be unused.[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;telegram.org&#x2F;privacy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;telegram.org&#x2F;privacy</a>

Beautiful analysis. It really looks like the country distribution [1] follows the geographical split between five eyes intelligence services, and maybe a small slice for France after they imprisoned the Telegram CEO [2] in order to take over data ownership from russia.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.moe&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;05&#x2F;image-14.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.moe&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2022&#x2F;05&#x2F;image-14.png</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel_Durov" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Arrest_and_indictment_of_Pavel...</a>

I&#x27;ve never listened about that but also im not a big telegram user... but that completely explains why mine is so slow.... I&#x27;m on latam and my account is on singapur..

idk, they probably tried to get people on DC&#x27;s as close to their location as possible. Using your phone number&#x27;s country code might seem like a good way to do this at first, and they probably didn&#x27;t give it much more thought before building the whole thing on this idea.

i&#x27;m far from an authority on content delivery or whatever, but the first thing I thought of was what a bizarre way to setup your infrastructure!

I&#x27;m on DC5 since I lived in Korea when signing up, but I cannot say I&#x27;ve noticed many outages.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;VHlJH" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;VHlJH</a>

That has &quot;military grade encryption&quot; vibes.

The Lex Fridman podcast episode with Pavel Durov is worth listening to. Their servers are built to be very secure — of course, it would be different for others, and they use some clever tricks

something smells suspicious about this kind of data routing

Of course he would say that. Even besides the fallaciousness of this argument (there is no equivalence between an aggressor and a victim), Pavel Durov is completely untrustworthy.There is product stuff, like misleading claims about Telegram&#x27;s encryption and comparisons to Signal. In reality, for the vast majority of chats they have plaintext, unlike Signal.There are more subtle positioning claims. Durov made a huge deal of his &quot;exile&quot;, but I saw Telegram&#x27;s office in St Petersburg with my own two eyes a year after Durov &quot;fled the country&quot;. It definitely wasn&#x27;t shut. There were even local news of Pavel assaulting a guy in St Petersburg for trying to make a photo of him a couple years later.And then there are just completely unnecessary lifestyle claims. He said multiple times how he doesn&#x27;t take any &quot;pills&quot; or medications. It only takes a minute to find his old photos. Male pattern baldness doesn&#x27;t stop progressing without DHT suppression, and last time I checked, finasteride comes in pills. I don&#x27;t understand why would he make misleading statements about something so visible, but it doesn&#x27;t make him any more trustworthy.

Good story, I yet believe the guy is trying to do the right thing. In the lex Friedman podcast he talks about banning extremist channels in both sides always, the story focus more on the Nalvani&#x27;s block, but accordingly him he also bans other sides depending on the content.
I do follow a number of Telegram channels about the Ukraine war, and the pro Ukraine channels are there together with pro Russian channels.

It&#x27;s a great an telling investigation. Dropped in to share it as well. Telegram deserves no trust from us.

More mysteries of Telegram Data Centres: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;istories.media&#x2F;en&#x2F;stories&#x2F;2025&#x2F;06&#x2F;10&#x2F;telegram-fsb&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;istories.media&#x2F;en&#x2F;stories&#x2F;2025&#x2F;06&#x2F;10&#x2F;telegram-fsb&#x2F;</a>(and a follow-up: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;istories.media&#x2F;en&#x2F;news&#x2F;2025&#x2F;06&#x2F;10&#x2F;telegram-responds-to-istories-investigation-on-messenger-servers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;istories.media&#x2F;en&#x2F;news&#x2F;2025&#x2F;06&#x2F;10&#x2F;telegram-responds-...</a> )

I think it was reposted today because <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;core.telegram.org&#x2F;bots&#x2F;serverless" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;core.telegram.org&#x2F;bots&#x2F;serverless</a> was just announced, which prompted some curiosity on HN about Telegram&#x27;s architecture (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48918534">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=48918534</a>). But yes, the title should be updated to indicate this.

The article is from May 2022, just fyi.

Mysteries of Telegram Data Centers (2022)