How and why we migrated off Telegram in our family

Table of Contents

Premise
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As some of you may know, I’ve been a heavy user of Telegram since 2014 till lately, for more than 10 years.

First, I ignored it in 2013, as I ignored VKontakte. My circle was almost entirely on iPhones, so I used iMessage, and it worked very well.

But in the beginning of 2014, we had our office with my team-mates, and there was one guy with Android. It was too much hassle to try to invent some complex solution to include him, so we decided why won’t we use Telegram for all our office communications, instead of iMessage.

Since for us that was never an encrypt-everything super-secret communication, we didn’t care much of what provider to choose. We looked for a convenient way to share some household information among the team, so to easen the management of the premises. So, Telegram it was.

I’ve fallen into this trap of Telegram quite heavily. It was super-convenient, packed with features, yet,relatively quick.

What kept me on the hook is the ‘feature’ that I never understood: the unlimited thing. At the early days of Telegram, you could send any file (there was no limit, or at least it was up to 4 GB per a file), so I’ve been sending unedited 4K videos to my friends. Just because I could, why not?

I’ve kept thinking why would one provide this feature for free for no particular reason? Not for a small group of friends and relatives, but for millions of users? It smelt fishy to me, yet I’ve kept using it out of the convenience.

Over the years, I’ve collected hundreds of gigabytes of information in the messenger. Photographs, videos, documents, texts, long texts, especially long texts. And voice messages. At some point, I’ve discovered how cool is that to have this option of asynchronous communication.

This feature was designed so poorly that I’ve kept thinking of the right way of designing the voice communication platform. Which led to creating of monoolooog (early alpha stage at the time of this writing).

Yet, over obvious red flags, I kept using the messenger till recently, out of the convenience. What kept me bugging is the hook part of it. I’ve kept noticing I’m opening Telegram over and over again, for no real reason.

I have my special system of changing smartphones, laptops and desktops quite frequently, so that I’ll be aware of the habitual stuff. That helps me sifting out things I don’t need. Yet, Telegram kept staying on all of my devices, till recently.

Catalyst
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Following the arrest of Pavel Durov, it was a nice point to jump-off Telegram. But it’s not the arrest that triggered me to change our family primary messenger, but the lesser (to someone) news, that Pavel travelled to Russia more than 60 times, while playing this pseudo-opposition figure.

That was a wake-up call for me.

Over the years, I kept thinking of this image of ‘Paul Du Rove,’ a Russian rebel, the man who opposes the evil empire of injustice. That image was easy to imagine, I’ve ‘escaped’ Belarus and Russia to some degree, at some point of my life. I have close friends who were imprisoned for no real reason, but their stand against autocracy.

That clicked with me. Until it didn’t. Until I realised that a billionaire in Russia isn’t someone who is actually oppressed by its government.

Are there billionaires in Russia, who gained their wealth and status in spite of the authorities?

It was a mistake to treat this situation out of the context, and force this American-dream-ism on Russia. It’s very very wrong. Am I some American half-witted professor, who’s on the edge of his dementia to be that stupid? Or am I someone, who understands the context quite very well, as I’ve spent most of my life living through it?

‘How he, Pavel Durov, has his and his brother’s Nikolai, parents in Russia and be fighting against the regime at the same time?’ was I wondering for so very long. Until the answer occured to me just naturally. As most Russians do! :)

How do they fight against their regime? They do not. That’s the answer. That’s the fucking answer.

The 60 secret flights to Russia put a full-stop on this complicated topic to me. The guy pretends to be someone else he is not, and promotes the values he does not live himself. That’s the answer. It aligns with my understanding of our world perfectly well. It’s an unjust and not fair world, there’s no real justice. It’s that simple. Grow up already.

Solution
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By that point, I’ve been fighting against Telegram. But I was fighting against Telegram addiction, as in ‘addiction to a messenger,’ not in ‘addiction to a russian shill.’

This perspective change helped jump-off Telegram, not the messenger paradigm, but the russian shill one.

For my family, I’ve chosen Matrix as our replacement. It’s been super-easy to do. I installed Element X and Element Desktop for all our devices. Which is basically a laptop + iPhone combination for my wife, and laptop + desktop + iPhone + Android combination for me. Most times it’s our iPhones communicating with each other. Technically, we could just iMessage each other, as in good ol’ days. But I tend to some open-source and cross-platform solutions these days, not the easy-now-think-later ones.

I’ve chosen the default matrix.org server, but I plan to migrate off it for my family, preferring a self-hosted solution. I plan to keep the current @BasilSkrnk:matrix.org as my public point of contact. Adding the private one for family and friends.

I’ll write more thoroughly about Matrix after a while, but I have my feeling that it’ll stick. As I’ve spent some time exploring alternatives in the past. So that solution is not reactive, actually.

I’ve tried

keybase was too geeky to my liking
riot was what I’ve been paing my attention to, but it became matrix before I tried it
jami was my 2nd candidate, but I decided I’d like to participate in the development of [matrix]
Mattermost was too Slack-ish to me, in a bad way
I ignored Jabber for some reason. I’m not aware of it’s current development, but for me it stayed somewhere in my ICQ past.

So, it’s Matrix for us now. Again, I chose it primarily because I saw no big difference with others. It feels better as it’s funded better, I trust the organisations that trust it, I like that it’s a specification standart in the first place, not the client or server (those can be independently developed).

I’ve created a matrix.org account, which was as easy as registering in any other service these days. I’ve downloaded the client, and that was it.

I’ve created a space with many rooms divided by topics, like Kids, Household, Shopping, etc. As for us, the chat is a thing to organise things. Living together, we have no need to chat with each other. That simple move was super easy (just one person to lure out of Telegram), yet the most powerful. My Telegram usage lowered significantly, now I can visit the chat app once a week, not many times a day. All of the critical information is in another place now.

Afterword
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I’m still using Telegram, but to a lesser degree.

On my new iPhone, I still have it installed. But I’ve removed all permissions from it, including background services. Turned out, it’s the slowest messenger I have! When I open it, sometimes it can take minutes for it to catch-up. And it’s never instant to load my new messages, even if there’s just one message from one contact. For the context, usually that’s just a couple of chats, not tens or even hundreds. I literally have a couple of people that I can catch up with (couple of times a week), and just one (not very popular, 40K) channel. My conclusion: Telegram does a lot of background checks in the background. Why is so?

There are many war-related channels now. I follow just one, it posts verified missiles-related info in my region. Those are basically some Air Defense dudes posting about what happens now, the name is @UA_rockets (it’s in Ukrainian). The admin is from L’viv, the city I currently live in, so he writes about L’viv when there’s increased air strike alert.

It helps make critical decisions. I know, it’s not correct to decide on this information, but sitting in the shelter for ever isn’t really an option. I think, it’s safer to act upon the danger, rather than not act at all. As acting upon a hint of danger isn’t really feasible.

I think, its a very unique case, that’s not applicable to most users. So what’s your excuse for using a russian shill?