Telegram
Hard to leave Stage 2
Telegram offers real utility: speed, large groups, bot culture. The surplus side is strong for communities. Lock-in is social—your audience and mods live there—and technical via bots and channel archives. Monetization is still evolving (ads, premium), so extraction is present but uneven. Call it stage 2: sticky, not yet fully optimized against users.
- Since
- 2013
- Function
- Messaging
- VC-backed
- No
- Public
- No
News signals
More in Messaging
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Element
1 Plenty for usersOpen-source Matrix client; messages federate across servers you control, end-to-end encryption is on by default, and no single company can revoke access to your conversations.
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Signal
2 Hard to leaveStill user-respecting by default, but growing reliance on the nonprofit’s roadmap and network effects builds soft lock-in.
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WhatsApp
3 Cashing inDefault chat for much of the world; phone-number identity and network effects make leaving socially costly, while Meta monetizes the ecosystem around it.
