Is there a way to check out insane platforms like Telegram and TruthSocial without using their app?
I sort of want to see what these things are like but I don't want to give them any data or contribute to them in any way haha. I've heard the Queen of Canada uses it which intrigues me
Probably because there is tons of known criminal activity, most chats are not encrypted, the CEO was just arrested, etc.
OP is probably interested in seeing the chaos of the platform without necessarily being part of it. I imagine that’s somehow seeing the illicit activity going on.
I'm interested in the political stuff particularly, I don't really know or hang around any of the people who seem to use it and it would be interesting to be able to see that unfolding.
You always hear about reports of Twitter threads or Telegram communities in the news (like the Queen of Canada) but I sometimes want to actually see things firsthand so I can understand how these people interact. Its like watching a nature documentary almost
Telegram is a messaging app, if you install it you'll be presented with a list of people from your contact list that have it installed as well. You can message these people through the app, and that's about it.
Telegram also supports group chats, and several apps/etc use these group chats for support and discussion. There are also some group chats used for illegal activity, but you can't discover these through the app itself. You would have to get in touch with these groups on another website, and be given an invite link to their telegram chat. The only thing that makes telegram more popular for illegal activity (afaik) is that you can have private group chats without government/telegram oversight.
I totally sympathize with that. As a privacy-conscious person I block the majority of social media domains since they’re used for tracking.
It’s now annoying seeing news articles that embed tweets that I can no longer see, but I shrug it off as part of the cost of privacy. It would be convenient to see the content without necessarily being tracked.
Its one of the few ways to communicate without major privacy issues, so of course it attracts criminal activity in some way. The insane part is that it somehow became normal for governments to spy on their citizens to an extent where the CEO of a communications platform is being arrested for not spying on their users.
Oh I know. I was just exploring why someone might call it “insane.” I installed it long ago but quickly uninstalled it when I realized how insecure it is.
Edit: the next step is to accuse anyone who disagrees with that characterization of being a “Russian” or “Chinese” bot or even a “tankie” if I say anything that wouldn’t belong in Bob Dole’s campaign platform from 40 years ago. It’s so pervasive among lemmy.world users that “programming” is the only word I know of that captures how brainwashed into fighting this tribalist “culture war” they actually are.
It’s like far-left rhetoric (especially the kind that seems to come from people who have never seen how e.g. spoilers work or who have never had to find a compromise) isn’t actually that popular, so you see pushback from the instance that dominates the user population, especially with it having users who aren’t “ideologically aligned” with a specific instance and who may have a perspective outside the bubble. I don’t know, just a theory.