Telegram is giving away FREE Premium subscriptions! All they need from you is to use your cell phone as a relay to text out their OTP codes! And the recipient of the OTP sees your phone number! What could POSSIBLY go wrong with this deal?
PLEASE don't use Telegram! I personally recommend Matrix as it's totally FOSS, you can self host, there are tons of front end clients to choose from. Or even use Signal. I have my own issues with Signal, the fact they don't allow third party clients, you can't self-host, they have a proprietary shim in their stack that only they know what it does, they were pushing crypto, etc, but at least Signal is better than this garbage.
People in the privacy community need to get over the
unrealistic dream that regular people will adopt Matrix when we can't even get them to use Signal. The only way Matrix will have mass adoption is through getting a lot of corporate clients. Then the workers might choose to use it personally too after being familiar with it.
I'm writing a new Matrix client that's focused specifically on being a Discord-like dead simple experience for professional people -- it's under GPLv3 and written in pure Dart
Probably will have the first actual release in one to two months -- please tell me what you would like in terms of features so I can shove it into my already massive backlog
A client that is basically a ripoff of Telegram would be ideal for me, for what it's worth
Main features I like are replies, reactions to messages (also double tap to react with a default emoji), and that view where you can open a chain of replies like it's its own conversation (I'm assuming this is what is meant by "threading"/"threads")
Lastly, maybe the uncompressed and compressed photo/video options if that's not already a thing
If it had the above I would probably like Discord style too
Being able to support threading would be nice, a lot of clients don't have that feature, spaces too would also be nice. Also the E2E encryption is a must since a lot of Matrix communication have it enabled by default.
My entire extended family only has iPhones and my wife and I are the only ones with android, gotten a lot of them on telegram to be able to have large group chats working well for everyone to have a good experience.