the truth?

Back in the day, when I used to play pokemon go, there was a small local community and we would struggle to decide where to meet up for the daily raids because people would basically not respond (so as t not commit), or not know which gym each other meant exactly, nor give live updates when people moved around, etc. etc.

Then I joined a group from a bigger city where I commuted for work. They had a telegram group chat with two "channels", one for talking, one for bot posts. The telegram bot could be sent a single screenshot of a raid, and it would use OCR to automatically generate an interactive UI for that raid for everyone to see, with all the relevant info, and it would also clear itself up when the raid is no longer relevant. You could press buttons to say you were going, that you MAYBE were going, if you were late, and if you already started/done it, all in single clicks. Tons of options, tons of information, all live updated.

I was bedazzled. That feature singlehandedly removed all attrition from urban social gaming. And it was entirely grassroots. It made me try out making my own telegram bots, and yeah, you basically have the power to make a little app in chat form, even some that feel like CLI commands.

It's been OVER HALF A DECADE and I have yet to see a single other chat application have that degree of freedom where it comes to applications and bots. Some like discord even did whole ass 100% reworks of their bot AP to support the likes of slash commands, and still fall short. And there's none worse than Teams. Teams hates you. Teams spent the prior 2 years before this one basically pointing a gun to our heads telling us they were removing webhooks and pushing back on it whenever they repeatedly get told that's the most insane and dogshit idea ever. And they still did it. There's just no spark in Teams UX. No self-respect. It's a soulless product made entirely as a dumping place of "synergy" with other M$ products. It's reciprocal, I hate it too.

Oh and my local group never go into telegram because they didn't want a new app. It died, but I still kept playing after work without problem. It makes me wonder how fast Teams would die if it wasn't proped up by 365 and Azure subscriptions.

I’ve been using Telegram for about 10 years, and it’s one of the few products that has consistently felt great the entire time. It’s fast everywhere: backend, mobile app, desktop app, all of it. Everything just works. Its sync is out of this world—fluid, fast, and seamless across devices. You can use it on your phone, then move to your PC or laptop and continue instantly without friction. Unlimited message history and file storage are fantastic, and the bot platform is absurdly powerful. It’s boring in the best way, which is exactly what you want from a channel for interacting with your agents everywhere.

Odious is one of the most reserved words you could use to describe Telegram, which is primarily a host for scams that the influencers and other bottom feeders aren't allowed to monetize on the big social networks.

Can't say I have had literally anyone ever message me on telegram. And I have been a daily user for years.

You're telling me that Anthropic, one of the hottest companies on the planet right now couldn't field four teams of developers to integrate with Discord, Slack, Telegram, and Teams? AI being such a productivity multiplier, seems like they could just choose to do it all. I mean, mythical man month and all that, but do it three times and have a retrospective and use Claude to refactor the pain points and centralize the learnings.

no they definitely did not have fewer users than Perplexity xD

Interesting. I set up a bunch of slack webhooks for server events that's been working decently well but maybe I'll look at telegram.

WhatsApp is actually more popular than Slack, isn’t it? In my country, almost everyone uses Slack, and I’ve hardly ever heard of any companies using WhatsApp, so that was surprising to me.

south america and africa are both heavily invested in whatsapp in the business space.

Heartbeat should be set to be a cheaper model.

Anthropic previously shared that they make ~60% margin on API access. So they're losing money on plan whales.

It doesn't matter if they are unprofitable at full usage, as long as there are enough users (like me!) who barely ever max out but still pay the $100/month. The people who love Claude Code enough to max out the 20x plan every day, that's probably the best influencer marketing campaign you could ever buy anyways.

Anything to do with Code. Not on Mac or iOS, and not with local sessions or cloud sessions. Normal Claude chats send notifications fine.

I’ve tried everything. Regular Claude chats notify me fine, but nothing from Code - neither a cloud session or remote control.

Not for me