For years, our users have been asking us to implement Stories in Telegram. More than half of all feature requests that we receive are related to Stories.
Initially, we were against this since Stories are already everywhere. However, Telegram wouldn't be Telegram if we didn't listen to our users and...
It looks like they are going to focus on privacy and more granular ephemerality.
I wish they added polls to chats (just for the lulz), but Stories could be a nice addition.